I’ll admit it right away: I am a fog-addict.
Fog is a re-shaper, a re-former, a hider and a seeker. It melts all forms in its great, grey kettle and forges them into mere ideas of themselves.
It fills all voids with mystery and makes the mundane extraordinary. It renews the world by hiding it from our gaze.
Walking in fog is at first a stumbling into lofty clouds. All senses suddenly seem erased and then reborn in a different universe. Fog is silence. Deep silence. That is, until the lonely cry of a gull reverberates like thunder in one’s bones.
After a while, walking in fog becomes a kind of spiritual drunkenness, a giddy grasping after what cannot be grasped. The silence becomes deeper, so that the blood pumps into one’s ears like shaman drums. Trees, rocks, ice and the sea all appear like actors on a scene – where there was nothing, something suddenly is; only to disappear at once again. The outer and the inner world become a mere mirage – of what?
Fog lifts us out of context and the loneliness is complete and absolute. There is only us and a shadow of the world. Suddenly, we don’t need Tōhaku to tell us that nothingness is filled to the brim. We see it, no we are it. And still can not define “it”.
Fog is the great teacher who wipes the blackboard of our mind so that we can start truly seeing. It teaches us the mystery of it all, the bottomlessness of being and the evanescence of forms.
Ah yes, fog.