The kokoro tattoo and other love stories

On riding the river of words towards the sea of everything

Any dreams? he asks, raising the blinds to take in the first shades of morning.

Just the usual, I say, pouring some tea.

But thinking about it, ‘the usual’ is not that usual at all, unless it’s usual to have had a recurring dream since the age of forty, featuring a bald man dressed in robes so dark they must have been fashioned from the fabric of night. Unless it’s usual for the man in that dream to be holding a sphere of intense golden light, illuminating only the moment in front of him, not the dark space behind. Unless it’s usual to sense three shadowy figures at his back, and not know who they are, but not to be afraid.

I pick up my tea and drift towards my writing room. I light a candle, as I do at 5 a.m. most days. And I begin to write the story of the man, and the sphere of light. Of life and death and life again.

A story of discovering the heart’s wisdom. A tale of unravelling time.

[Trigger warning: loss + grief]

So begins my book Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived. It’s a true story, as far as any story can be true, changed as stories are in the remembering of them. It’s a story written in the throes of grief, when the way was illuminated by that which had cast the deep shadow.

Since writing it I have secretly been meaning to get a tattoo. I haven’t gotten round to it yet, stuck as I am trying to decide between a particular image and one particular set of words. It turns out that I have dithered for so long that Mr K, who already has many, has beaten me to it.

Earlier this week he rolled up his right sleeve and carefully removed the cling film to reveal his latest one. I hadn’t seen the design. He had worked out the whole thing with the tattoo artist and had wanted it to be a surprise.

Are you happy with it? I asked, and then thought what a ridiculous question that was, given that it was now permanently inked on his body.

I love it, he said. Look.

Sweeping across his right bicep was a series of circles, the largest of which contained a beautiful black and white sumi-e style image of a lone figure in a boat, reminiscent of the cover art on the Italian edition of my book Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived. The neighbouring circle contained bamboo, reminding me of the private garden in Kyoto, next to a bamboo forest, where we got engaged many years ago. And on the right hand side was one simple, elegant character: 心 (kokoro).

Oh my god. You tattooed my book on your arm. The book that took me five years to write, which I dedicated to my mother, and to a dear friend who died too soon. Kokoro is hard to translate, but the closest I have come is something along the lines of' ‘the intelligent heart’.

The tattoo was for him of course, and yet, and yet… Rendered almost wordless by that one small word, and the gesture behind it, I could only offer Thank you. I love it too.

I was thinking about this as I sat by the river yesterday. Mr K was away and the girls were at school. It was a beautiful autumnal day, yet I felt a shiver, the way we do when time folds in on itself and we slip through the layers to a previous year - same season, same place, different self.

I emerged in 2023, on the eve of submitting the Kokoro manuscript. I had been staying in an Airbnb not far from my home for the past month, going home every couple of days, but essentially spending most of my waking hours working on the book. I knew I was very nearly there with it, but also that something was missing.

It was the night of the Harvest Moon in late September, and I could see the sky darkening, so I shut down my computer, and headed out. In the olden days, the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox was given the name Harvest Moon because it helped the farmers work late into the night to gather their crops. Perhaps I was hoping it might have a similar effect on my writing.

My old boots took me down to that same river. I had a blanket around my shoulders, hot tea in a flask and Xavier Rudd in my ears. He was singing of an ancient moon and all it had been drawing from him.¹ The heartbeat of his unborn son pulsates through the song.

His haunting refrain, ‘Please remember me’, called through the trees like the voices of our ancestors, my grandmother and mother, Lisa and all those we have ever lost. Please remember me. I stood firm on the earth, threw my arms up towards the sky and vowed to never forget them.

By then I was singing too, filling the sky with his song: Please remember me. I was swaying like the water reeds, tears tumbling down my face and I heard my own voice: Please remember me.

It is in remembering all who have gone before that we remember ourselves. Our original face before we were born. Our place in the woven web of everything, here because of everything and everyone who went before. Connected to everything and everyone who ever will be. We belong right here, right now, in the middle of all of it.

‘Go to Eiheiji,’ my friend Kazumi had said a few months back, when I had told her of my Kokoro research trip intentions and the midlife malaise I had been suffering for a while. ‘It’s where I go anytime my kokoro needs quiet.’

Eiheiji is spread over a hillside in rural Fukui, and surrounded by a forest of ancient cedar trees. Many of its buildings are joined by a series of long corridors and covered wooden staircases, open at the sides to take in the weather and the surrounding garden. Climbing the stairs, my whole body hurt around the edges, as if someone had outlined me with a marker pen, such was the intensity of the zazen meditation session I had participated in upon arrival.

According to Zen priest Dainin Katagiri, who trained at Eiheiji in the sixties, ‘Zazen is not a way to escape from life by being mindful of something that is apart from the human world; it is the practice of being present in the real stream of time and looking directly at life itself. Zazen enables you to plunge below the surface and leads you to touch the very core of your life.’²

When the session was over, we were invited to explore the temple complex. I had been wandering from one wooden building to another, trying to shake the discomfort from my limbs, paying more attention to my aches than my surroundings. Until, that is, I stepped into the Butsuden and froze, open-mouthed. In all my years of coming to Japan I had never been to Eiheiji before, yet I had a strange sense of déjà vu on entering the Buddha Hall. It took me a few moments to realise why.

It was the setting for the recurring dream I had been having since turning forty, where a man in robes appears before me balancing a sphere of golden light in his hands. In my dream he was always positioned in front of three statues, at the back of a cavernous, dark room, just like the one I was in.

The signboard by the doorway told me those statues were of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of the past, Shakyamuni Buddha, the Buddha of the present, and Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of the future. Only the statue of the present was fully visible. The others were partially hidden from view, as they are in life, and as they always were in my dream.

It was only then that I realised the man who kept showing up in that dream, carrying a golden sphere, was Zen master Eihei Dōgen, who founded Eiheiji and the Sōtō school of Japanese Zen back in the thirteenth century.

In the dream he always spoke in a low voice, uttering words that I didn’t understand.

As I stood in the Buddha Hall staring, I heard a whisper: All you need to know is right here. The rest is commentary. I didn’t understand that either.

Not understanding is a common response to the teachings of this giant of Japanese Zen. I have been attempting to read his work for quarter of a century, since I first stumbled across him in Japanese Studies way back at university and then met him over and over in the intervening years.

Dōgen’s core message is simple: life is happening here and now, and each moment is an opportunity to wake up. And yet, the intricacies of his teachings are complex, particularly as they relate to the nature of time. Even native speakers struggle with his ideas, and there exist volumes of translations from Dōgen’s original texts into contemporary Japanese, never mind into myriad other languages.

I have read and re-read his notoriously opaque words, and various commentaries on those words. I have taken workshops taught by leading scholars and carried his questions with me on many a walk. On occasion, his voice comes thundering through time to shake me awake when I have been lulled into dullness by the stuff of everyday life. I sit up and listen, and think that I am coming close to an understanding of something I really need to know, but then I try to articulate it and it dissolves. Still, I keep trying, because I know something is there.

Despite this going on for years, it wasn’t until that moment at Eiheiji that I made the connection between the words in the books and the man in my dream, to see that it was Dōgen himself, standing in front of the three statues of time there in his own temple, holding a radiant golden sphere. What could it mean? And what did it have to teach me about making the most of this precious life?

Taking a seat on a bench at the back of the hall, I reached into my backpack and pulled out a commentary on Uji, Dōgen’s major teaching on the nature of time.³ Uji was written in 1240 when Dōgen was forty years old – the same age I was when I started having the recurring dream about him.

Uji can be found in Dōgen’s masterwork Shōbōgenzō, which is said to contain some of the most important teachings in all of Zen. Of all the fascicles of Shōbōgenzō, Uji is the one that has always intrigued me the most. Even the title is curious. It is written 有時, using characters representing the verb ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’ (有) and the noun ‘time’ (時). Under normal circumstances the combination 有時 might be read ‘yūji’ or ‘arutoki’ and can variously mean things such as ‘at a certain time’, ‘sometimes’, ‘once’ or ‘there is a time’, referring to a specific and limited period of time. But the same combination of characters rendered by Dōgen with the reading of ‘uji’ means something else entirely.

Uji has been translated in many ways by many scholars, but the simplest and perhaps most potent translation is ‘being-time’. Another popular version is ‘for the time being’, which, for Dōgen, encompasses all states of existence-time – the entire universe in a moment. In Uji, Dōgen says⁴:

An old master named Yaoshan said:

‘For the time being standing on top of the highest peak, just being-time.

For the time being moving along the bottom of the deepest sea, being time.

… In this word “being-time,” time is already just being, and all being is time.’

According to this master teaching, existence and time are not separate.

We are time.

Mind blown.

Back down by the river in a quiet corner of South-West England, on that autumn evening when I was out searching for words, I watched the moon edging up into the night. It was a huge harvest supermoon, glowing yellow-orange in the darkening sky. As I stared, a thin cloud moved across it, rendering it blurry at the edges. It looked just like the golden sphere in my dream.

I mean, just like the golden sphere in my dream. It was only then that I understood.

The golden sphere is time.

It is the pulsating energy of a moment, holding all of the past and all of the potential for the future.

It is the heartbeat of our very existence.

The golden sphere is us, living fully.

It is the manifestation of present awareness, when we take in the light of the world and send our own light beaming back out.

It is the essence of our aliveness.

It is what makes us human.

I went back to the Airbnb and wrote with all the urgency of a farmer in the olden days, gathering his crops beneath the moon.

I wrote about how I was waiting on a delivery of white daffodil and pale pink tulip bulbs to plant with my children around the swing seat where we like to sit and think about my mum. How the day before we had baked an apple crumble with the last of the apples from our tree. How a few days previously I had greeted the equinox at dawn, wearing ankle warmers my mum had knitted. How I had been sitting on a bench by the river with a mug of tea and some ginger cake when a flock of geese passed overhead in perfect V-formation, and how I had thought about all the people I had encountered in Japan as I travelled thousands of miles to write the book, and how grateful I was to every single one of them.

So much can happen in a year, in a lifetime, in a day. Time is a strange, unfathomable thing. It expands and shrinks depending on the intensity of our activity, and seems to be suspended completely in moments of devastation and in moments of bliss. But mostly the world keeps turning, the sun and moon keep rising, and life goes on, while our sorrow and joy and hope and memories live on too.

Our grief goes on. The alchemising of our grief and loss goes on. Our unfolding, unbecoming, returning, goes on. I’m not done shedding ash, slowing, listening. This is also kokoro work. Part of my life’s work. And tending to it is the ultimate self-care.

The year following my mother’s death - the year I wrote about in Kokoro - didn’t make me stronger, it just made me realise that I was already stronger than I knew. The taller I stood in my vulnerability, the longer the shadow of strength that fell behind me.

Grief. Shōshin (傷心). The scarred kokoro. The gaping wound might heal, but the scar remains. My scar is in the shape of the words my mother inscribed on my kokoro at the hospice: We get to have this day.

I am still in midlife. I still feel hikikomogomo (悲喜交々) the bittersweetness of joy and sorrow in my heart. I still go to tell my mother news of my children and then remember all over again. But the living it took to write Kokoro, and the exposure to all kinds of wisdom and kindness along the way, changed me for sure. I can see now that it is an honour to carry such grief, to have been loved by someone and to love them so much that their loss was unleashed with so much power.

No one knows for sure what happens what we die, but until that point, we do know this:

For as long as we are alive, we will continue to change.

Let this remind us that we can always begin again.

For as long as we are alive, we have a kokoro to help us sense the darkness and the beauty in the world, and respond with creative expression, empathy and love.

May we let the kokoro be the guide.

For as long as we are alive, we have time.

Let’s live it well.

This year the Autumn Equinox falls on Monday September 22 (or Tuesday September 23 in some time zones). May you find a moment to mark the crossing of this threshold into the darker part of the year. Perhaps you might like to write a gratitude note, have a release ceremony (writing down what you want to let go of and then burning that, safely of course) or perhaps simply to go for a long walk, and breathe in the crisp, fresh air.

How lucky we are to experience another autumn. How blessed we are that we get to have this day.

QUESTION: What single word might you have (or have you had) inked* onto your body and why? I’d love to know. (*If not tattoo, then perhaps Sharpie, for a while)

LAST CALL FOR RIVER OF WORDS (writing + platform building immersion)

Friends, writing has done so much to help me navigate this wild and beautiful life over the past few years. I am just about to head back into the writing cave for several months, to work on my next book, but before that I am running my RIVER OF WORDS writing + platform building immersion LIVE one more time.

Starting on Monday (September 22), for the next seven weeks a small group of us will dive deep and be carried by the river from source to sea, finding new ways to express our particular take on the world. There are just a couple of spots. If you would like to join I encourage you to register now, as this will be the last ever time I will run this class live due to my own writing commitments.

You are welcome to enjoy a subscriber discount - just use the code RW15SC925 to get 15% off (valid until class begins or sells out, whichever is sooner). CLICK HERE to book your spot.

The carefully designed curriculum will help you understand who you are as a writer, inspiring you to tune in to inspiration any time, showing you how to mine your life for moving stories that connect you to your readers, giving you direction for your writing, and enabling you to cast off anything that is holding you back from flourishing as a writer. You will come away from River of Words with thousands of words on paper, at a collection of polished pieces of writing, and a six-month plan for building your writing platform.

By the end of the seven-week live immersion you will:

• feel able confidently share your words with the world

• know your writing voice

• understand which online platforms are the most valuable for writers, and come away with a six month plan for growing your audience

• have the tools to build a dedicated following and rich writing life

• be part of an intimate group of writers who will offer you accountability and community as you step fully into your writing life

Practically speaking River of Words includes:

• beautifully crafted writing lessons

• staged assignments to help you write fearlessly, from your heart, and develop the skills and confidence to edit your own work

• specific growth techniques for your writer platform (this is for soulful, sustainable growth rather than hacks)

• your place in an intimate circle of writers led by me

• SEVEN weekly TWO HOUR (magical!) live writing circle sessions

Find out more and book one of the last spots HERE.

1. Xavier Rudd was singing Jan Juc Moon, which can be found on his astonishing album Jan Juc Moon

2. Each Moment is The Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time by Dainin Katagiri (Boulder: Shambhala, 2007) p.11

3. For an in-depth analysis of Uji, or ‘Being-Time’, I highly recommend Shinshu Roberts’, Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dо̄gen’s Shо̄bо̄genzо̄ Uji (Somerville: Wisdom, 2018) which is the commentary I carried with me to Eiheiji

4. According to The Zen Master’s Dance: A guide to understanding Dо̄gen and who you are in the Universe by Jundo Cohen (Somerville: Wisdom, 2020) p.119

Image Holly Bobbins