Lent Day 8 "Shinto"

So we start production meetings today for Paragon's next show, Sound of a Voice by David Henry Hwang.  For the uninitiated: it is a play written by a Chinese-American, based on an amalgamate fable from the Japanese Noh theatre and Shinto religion.

On one hand, it's been a fascinating trip back through memories and memorabilia from when my grandmother took me to Japan when I was 12. On the other, it has been fascinating to take the time to study the culture and religion so that they make a cogent and reasoned explanation of the work (for the study guide) to a largely Western audience.

Japan is GORGEOUS.  I would return there over and over again so that I could spend time in the countryside appreciating the beauty of it.  Every flower is a little poem; every brook and waterfall an epic tale.  In autumn, the trees die a million deaths, one for each leaf that falls. 

It is that beauty that largely informs the basis of the Shinto religion.  Shinto belief is in the spirit of everything around us, that trees and happy-little-squirrels and people all have spirits which continue on after the shell dies.  There is also a purification rite by which people are ritually cleansed by salt and water (salt water, how appropriate for an island nation), which when I read about it made me wonder just how many religions have a tradition of purification by water, and what that means in terms of universality.  I will investigate more (and probably reread Plato's Euthyphro) and report back.  Right now, I am too tired.