‘A climb more demanding in spirit than the body…’
With these words, Mount Shichimen volcanoed into
consciousness. The magic mountain, shaking
my mind with dreams of an expedition into the soul. It would take seven years
until I could join a Buddhist pilgrimage for the three day march. People trekked its contours each spring and
autumn to reconnect with the laws of the universe, the memory of ancestors. I
too sought to chant the mountain's path to reach sunrise over Fuji, uncertain
what the journey would reveal.
It seemed I had already started the climb on my first trip
to Japan in 2009. I was enjoying coffee
and cake on a visit to the home of Mr Ijima, the leader of the Shishin temple
who organise a twice yearly trip to the mountain. In the jet-lag mist of stories about Mount
Shichimen that night, I felt the summit of something I couldn’t yet
understand. Mr Ijima explained that my
work at Foyer Federation was like a tree growing branches but missing its roots;
that we were looking at young people’s current and future talents without
considering the full significance of where they came from. Thus, the full potential to transform conflict
and challenge, he felt, was being lost. Mr
Ijima showed me how his temple applied a combination of Buddhism and modern
psychology to unravel the connections of generational influence. I began to
wonder if the importance of family was something missing within me as well as
my work. How to make sense of it though,
as something relevant beyond an eastern belief? What followed from that night is too difficult
to explain here, but its relevance has haunted me ever since.
After 2009, I introduced the concept of Advantaged Thinking
with Foyer Federation as a way of applying positive, asset-based approaches to
improve the lives of young people we ‘disadvantaged’ with our beliefs and
stereotypes. It led to over 5 million
pounds of funding in 2013-15 for Advantaged Thinking programmes in the context
of advancing young people’s health and employability. That should have been a
pinnacle moment. But by spring 2015, my
mother had suffered a stroke, my parents and I struggled to embrace its change
in our life, and I resigned my job in the belief that something was lacking in
how charity (or my experience of it) worked, which I felt I could discover by
being outside it. In the isolation that
followed, I had my chance to find the meaning of Mount Shichimen. I reconnected with lost family relatives and
retraced the paths of grandparents whose memory had resurfaced during my first
trip to Japan. I spent more time in ‘the
moment’. Sometimes I felt hurt as people I once helped seemed, in my
frustration, to ignore my new ideas on charity as an art and the development of
inspiration to impact on more lives. Equally, though, I felt more aware of the
need to let the past go – to create a different space for fresh meaning to
exist. Mount Shichimen illuminated my imagination
with hope.
I laced up my hiking boots two days after the long flight from London. The time had finally come. Together with my Japanese family, our footsteps carried the lightness and weight of connected ancestors. We experienced closeness among the spring shades of mountain colour. Sometimes the climb was unrelenting in its steepness, while at other moments the belief of reaching the summit overshadowed straining limbs. 
I remembered how my grandfather Charles had
died from a heart murmur, long before I was born. My heart punched out the rhythm
of the climb. At every point on the
journey, as we stopped to mark the presence of shrines, we stripped away layers
of our daily life like onion skins, reaching for the sweeter values
beneath. Most of all, I felt the
appreciation of the pilgrims - from the tea that greeted us at resting points,
to the stones we sometime slipped on, everything had equal resonance and space.
The right to be is something so easily
forgotten.
When we reached the summit, scattered like runners at the
end of a marathon, a line of monks waited in welcome for us, their faces
smiling moons. The moment needed no
applause; everything defined us.
Existence was so fragilely present, in the
touch of snow under foot, an exchanged bow, the treasured tears cleansing my
eyes. It was overwhelming, as though we
had entered an outer layer of our lives, and only stars lay beyond the thin air
we breathed.
I felt it the next morning, too, rising to a snowy world of
unfamiliar dark shapes. After a night under a cocoon of blankets, we watched in
the bitter cold as a bank of clouds around Mount Fuji lit with the the sharp gold of a fresh chanted dawn. A white space of inspiration, containing all
possibilities, seemed to float between us.
It was as though, rather than reach a new horizon, we had returned to an
older sky.
After the long descent down, we got dressed and took our
sleepy seats on the bus for the drive back on the motorway. At the first stop for refreshments, people
ventured out into a shopping mall, returning with a treasure trove of ice
cream, coffees and junk food. Familiar
habits were taking us home. Our climb
beyond the mountain had begun.
The word ‘shishin’ means children’s feelings toward their
parents, and parent’s feelings toward their children. In Shishin, both feelings are brought
together to create harmony from the conflict of experience, just like the climb
brought us together, from different lives, to a single illumination of
dawn. I reflected if it was this
disruptive harmony that was missing in our work in the UK. We seek to involve young people, but do we fully
appreciate what their challenges signify, have we found a dialogue to embrace our
joint transitions together, with equal power and appreciation? I wondered if an
expression of Shishin would deepen our discovery. Putting aside existing structures and
beliefs, a starting point for generational inspiration could flourish.
For me, this is what the magic of Mount Shichimen
represents. Like the fragile blossom of
a Japanese cherry tree it blooms and fades under our eyes. It is as much within us, as it grows outside
through others. Until we reach a point
to bring inspiration back into our all our lives, we repeat the same problems
that are the root of things we wish to overcome.
The climb is something best measured, as with all experiences
of inspiration, in its gradual treasuring over time. I am still descending, unravelling from it,
climbing again through it, reaching for new ideas on the trek to good; looking
for others to join with my footsteps and heartbeat on...
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