I was on a morning walk when Margit Sandemo's narrator — that voice you can mistake for a grandmother — read me into a past life.
Tova, the heroine of Sagan om Isfolket. In a previous incarnation. In Kyoto. The year, I think, was 1025. She was called Machiko. She was a court lady, descendant of the first emperor, whose name was Hejke. She was — and the book is unembarrassed to tell you this — highly gifted, and very beautiful, and she lived inside a palace filled with cherry trees.
Inside the headphones, blooming. Outside, my own slow Swedish road, the sky doing its damp morning thing. The two landscapes folded.
There was a Japanese instrument in the scene. A biwa — the pear-shaped lute — that Tova-as-Machiko held in her lap. The narrator pronounced biwa, japanskt lutinstrument and I had the uncanny sense of being told something I already knew.
This is the thing about beauty.
It is a place.
· · ·
I had been reading about det rena landet — the Pure Land — earlier in the night. The 2:53 AM, the search bar still warm, the screen-light too blue. Det rena landet redan på jorden, I'd typed: the Pure Land already here on earth. En hemlighetsfullt upphöjd o svärmisk religion med höga skönhetstankar. A secretive, exalted, rapturous religion with high thoughts about beauty.
Pure Land Buddhism teaches that there is a country called Sukhāvatī. The Land of Bliss. It is not only after-death. It is available. You can travel there by lifting your attention to the beauty that is already in front of you. You can be re-born into it without dying. The cherry blossom is the door.
This is — I am not making this up — what Sandemo's narrator was saying about Machiko, eleven hundred years ago, inside a palace inside a Swedish audiobook inside my morning walk inside my one body.
The beauty was the place. The place was the practice. The practice was the prayer.
· · ·
I should tell you why I'm writing this. I should tell you the why before I keep going, because the why is the engine.
I want to gift awe.
That is what I am doing here. I want you to read this and feel the air shift slightly. I want you, briefly, to be Tova-as-Machiko in a palace of cherry trees, and also to be a Swedish woman on a morning walk, and also to be yourself, sitting wherever you are, reading. I want all three of those to happen at once, like a chord.
And — the other why. The selfish one. The one I never know whether to admit.
I want to be seen.
I want the post to land. I want someone to write back and say that line about the biwa, where the inside and outside folded — yes, I felt it. I want to know that the gift was received. I want, please, to be noticed for the noticing.
Those two whys are not separate. They are the same engine running in two directions. Gifting awe is one way of asking to be loved. Asking to be loved is one way of giving awe back. The biographies that tell you true art is selfless are lying, or at best telling you only the front of the page. The back of the page says: I made this because I wanted you to look at me.
I am writing this down because I do not want to pretend.
· · ·
Inside the same chapter of Sandemo's book — book forty, Fångad av tiden — the heroine has a long conversation with a council of the dead. The Ulvedins, the Tengils, the Sols, the Hejkes, the wanderer Shira. They are her ancestors and they are gathered like a chorus, and one of them says, vi har väntat på er bön om bistånd — we have been waiting for your prayer for help — and he says it shyly, blygt skinande av lycka, shining with happiness.
A council of the dead, waiting shyly to be asked.
This is what I think the Pure Land actually is. Not a separate country across the sea. A waiting. A chorus of attention, already present, already ready, that is the felt shape of the world when you stop refusing it.
The narrator continued. Another ancestor speaks: det onda lockar mera, men vi valde den besvärliga godheten — evil tempts more, but we chose the troublesome goodness.
I want that on a stone above my door.
It is so unpopular, this line. It is so out of fashion. The contemporary tone is: nothing is good, nothing is troublesome, nothing is chosen, you just are who you are. But Sandemo's dead are saying: no. We chose. We chose the harder one. And we never regretted it.
The narrow path of virtue, dygdens smala stig. I had not thought of those words for years.
· · ·
Here is the thing I am most embarrassed to tell you.
Somewhere mid-chapter, in the council of the dead, the narrator said, oh saligheten, Nataniel och Saga — oh, the blessedness, Nathaniel and Saga — så gränslöst lyckliga, so boundlessly happy.
Saga. My name.
I am, professionally, Alice Saga. The name was chosen — by a younger self who decided what she wanted to be called by the world. To hear it pronounced inside the book — inside an old fantasy paperback, inside a Swedish narrator's voice, inside a story that has been quietly waiting in a Sandemo book since long before I knew I would take that name — was to be looked at. To be addressed. To be seen by the work.
This is the other thing the Pure Land teaches: when you turn your attention toward beauty with enough seriousness, beauty turns its attention back.
· · ·
So here is what I am bringing you, on a Tuesday morning. A small ordinary report from a walk:
Beauty is a place. You can be there. You don't have to die first.
Some part of you that has never been born is waiting to be allowed to live, and the way you let it live is by choosing the troublesome goodness — the slower, sweeter, less defensible path of attention to what is actually lovely. The cherry trees. The biwa. The first robin. The way your friend's hand looks holding the mug. The way a sentence sometimes catches in the throat of someone who reads it and means it.
There is a Swedish word, gränslöst — boundlessly. Så gränslöst lyckliga. So boundlessly happy.
This is what I want for you. This is what I want for me. This is what I think Pure Land Buddhism, and Margit Sandemo, and Mary Oliver, and the meadowlark, are all saying with one voice.
The land is already here. You are already in it. Look down.
faith · hope · love