ALONG THE WAY: KYOTO
A lesser known, moss garden where my beloved surprised me with our wedding proposal!
Hushed, verdant and otherworldly, when we entered it, amazingly no one else was also visiting so we had the magical place all to ourselves.
Except for…
A gardener sweeping errant leaves away to ensure that the undulating carpet of green moss remained uninterrupted.
In Japanese, my soon to be fiancé (he took up the language having lived in Japan during college and later as a young businessman) asked a gardener to film him proposing while I thought it was just an ask to take an image of us.
The gardener filmed as I said yes. And then we had so much sushi at the train station afterwards that we missed our train back to Tokyo!
In Japan they assign special words to meanings that feel difficult to explain in just one word. In this moss garden and everywhere in Kyoto, I felt Yūgen, meaning a profound, and mysterious beauty; an awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep for words.
Once again, the Japanese understand how best to capture life.
