Could have been a ten temple day

Dan & I zipped to Kyoto for part of spring break. We walked for hours the first night and found what we thought was the big craft market .....

...and the Ancient town area with tiny tiny alleys full of restaurants and bars. 

Enroute to find bicycles we came upon the Rukkanruk temple...... 

And a huge 10 block covered market.

Walked about 10 miles to find an open bike rental place. In lovely sunshine we started out on one of six major temple, shrine and ancient site routes. Thinking about food I wished for an outdoor cafe and there .....

.....along the river it appeared with one table outside, a fantastic bento box, tea and coffee floats, a potter inside with her beautiful ware to show off, and as always it seems the ultra cute and over the top polite young servers. Move over Dan the tie man.

The first and furthest temple on our actual bike route caused us to reflect on the great treasure of our huge natural forests in BC.

The ....temple was ...

Thanks to a reminder from Uli we lit a candles and said prayers for Ann McNab on her birthday which lead to lots of thoughts about all those living, dead and far away who lives are woven into ours. You are in our hearts.

It's sister temple... Equally stunning. I got Dan to lift up one of the thin wooden shreds that help clarify the huge effort it is to keep these ancient treasures in shape. Thousands of these pieces are layered like thatch sewn on somehow and cut on beautiful angles at the edges. 

From Glenn Dixon's book, The Pilgrim in the Palace of Language.(thanks to Nelly for this book). "Here and there we saw signs that the ancients had preceded us."

Several temples later we dove into a part of the old city and discovered that we had not seen the half or the best of it. This is an awesome UNESCO site a human world treasure, and luckily it was not bombed out of existence, as was planned like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Japanese culture has developed some fine, fine ways of living that example living lightly and artfully on the earth. There are exceptions, paradoxes and complications to the sustainable in Japan and though North Americans excel in "super size" grossness can be found here too......

Another dear young server sporting a tie that rivals any Dan had...some sense of the turning of the tides. The wave of the next generation rushes in.