《A Journey in Search of the Soul's Abode: My Origins》① (5-part series) The Entrance is "The Celestine Prophecy"💫💫💫

I have written about this several times, but these are events from when I was just over 20 years old. The explosive worsening of my atopic dermatitis and the truth about food and pesticides I learned while trying to cure it. Furthermore, the bankruptcy of the company I joined right after graduation.
These two events shook the ego I had constructed. Distrust of society. I stopped trusting politics, and I stopped trusting the capitalist society.
The world I saw appeared to be wobbling and shaking.
Why must I go through such experiences? And the rails I thought I was on proved to be so fragile that they collapsed with ease.
I wanted to be able to grow my own food. With that thought, I became interested in agriculture.
I had a choice: go learn by working as a volunteer at an acquaintance of my mother's who practiced organic, pesticide-free farming, or take a part-time job harvesting lettuce, which was regular farming but paid money. I chose the latter, a large-scale lettuce harvesting farm in a place called Kawakami Village in Nagano Prefecture.

I took the Chuo Line to Nagano Prefecture. When I got off at the station, the grandfather was there to pick me up. We traveled through the mountain village scenery and arrived at the house. There was the grandmother, the master, his wife, and I think two children.
Besides me, there were two other men around my age who had come for the part-time job.
One was Mori-kun, who had come from Osaka.
The other was Bush-kun (a nickname), who had also come from Yokohama. This Bush-kun was a person who would have a great influence on me during my twenties.
His appearance was like someone who had just come down from living in the mountains. No, more like someone who had emerged from the jungles of South America or Southeast Asia.
I was so shocked by his appearance that my eyes nearly popped out.

Life meant waking up at 4:30 AM and the three of us part-timers piling into a truck to head to the fields. Once at the fields, we did the harvesting work. There was a person in charge of cutting the lettuce from the root with a knife, a person packing them into boxes, and a person loading the boxes onto the truck. The master would start working around 2:00 AM. The grandfather and grandmother would also come. Around 7:00 AM, the wife would bring breakfast, and we would take a break.
The work was hard, and I ate plenty at breakfast, 10:00 AM, lunch, 3:00 PM, and dinner, but I still lost weight.
At night, I was tired and fell asleep immediately. The mornings were early.
Sometimes the three of us part-timers would go to the hot spring in the village.

Bush-kun knew a world I was unfamiliar with and taught me many things.
People called hippies, traveling with backpacks. Stories about things you couldn't smoke in Japan. Festivals for hippies. We also talked about the world of the spirit. About the soul. I learned from Bush-kun that there was such a thing as spirituality, and I ended up reading a book he recommended to me.
He had brought the book with him to Nagano.
It was a book called "The Celestine Prophecy."
When he talked about what was written in that book, his eyes sparkled. A world like this really exists. There is a world that cannot be seen with the eyes.
I was excited by this unknown world. My heart trembled. I had a premonition that beyond this society that looked gray, and beyond the world I had lived in, there was a shining world.

Once my three-month part-time job ended, I clutched my salary of several hundred thousand yen in cash and set off on a journey to India and Nepal, just as Bush-kun had told me about.
This was around the end of 1999 to the beginning of 2000. It was my first trip abroad.

Continuing to Part 2!

Thank you for reading.
This is another installment in my series of looking back on my life.
I seem to like looking back. 😂
I've written bits and pieces before about my time in Okinawa, memories of Australia, yoga and cigarettes, but I think this might be the final retrospective series. 🤔
Even so, the weeks go by so fast. It feels like time is racing toward the end of the year.
I hope you all take care of yourselves.

Namaste ✨

Part 2 is here 💫