Princess Mononoke, magic, and life in the city

from a trail near Half Moon Bay

The deer looked straight at me. I didn’t slow my pace, kept walking down the path. As I got closer, it turned away, slightly at first then decisively. It galloped out of view, ears alert and twitching.

The forest is always hiding. It’s why the deer – that graceful, innocent, wary creature – works as a symbol for nature’s magic. Something in me lives to seek it out and admire it, to go alone into the forest just for that flash in the eyes, again and again…

But I continue down the path, to the creek, then back to my car. I start the engine and go home to get back to work. As a human, I’ve been thrown into a body and mind full of a relentless energy that asks me to build in order to live.

It brings me to a city of wealth. When the ragged homeless man confronts me with anger dragged up from the city’s dark corners, I ignore him and get in the Uber to go to the bar. When the ants raid the cupboard, I kill them. How can I do this?

Questions like this can’t be answered, but they can be posed to open insight into deeper ones. I found this in an old favorite movie, Princess Mononoke.

---

Ashitaka is a lone traveling warrior who finds himself in the middle of a battle between forest spirits and ironworkers. The story begins with him fighting off a rampaging boar spirit, who has been shot in the chest with an iron bullet, driven to rage. During the fight, Ashitaka is cursed, and is forced to leave his remote tribe to find a cure.

Later he finds the source of this bullet: Lady Eboshi, the leader of a group of ironworkers. She takes him in and feeds him at his most desperate. She is competent and generous. She gives work to men, women, even lepers.

She builds weapons. The forest spirits grow vengeful. The Lady makes a brutal vow: to kill the deer god who rules the forest.

---

Now, I’m in the ironworks. I’m in the city of hubris, and not as a bystander. A few years ago I wanted nothing to do with it – but as the curse at the beginning of the story suggests, no matter how far you go, the rampaging center comes to meet you. As a hero, Ashitaka presents my ideal response: to take up the burden of being human without losing touch with magic.

I’m no hero, and I’m early in my story. I was lost, and the city has given me work, purpose, and independence. There’s a beauty to the optimism and intelligence of this place, but it’s precarious… after a while, beauty and plenty aren’t enough. The danger is that I become ruthless.

I walk nearly every day to the top of Buena Vista Park. It takes you through a paved trail laced with wooden steps, which ascends to a view of the Bay. You hear the sound of the wind and birds and the deep hum of the city. You smell pollen and asphalt. I still go to the woods for that feeling of deep aloneness, and danger, and magic, but I’ve come to love the borderline. I don’t think of it as something to run away from anymore – an impulse that, about a year ago, brought me to a rock in the middle of the ocean known as Oahu.

I’ve come back home. I love the slight cold here, the bareness of the light, the hills. And now that I’m on this side of the Bay, there’s no nostalgia. It’s a new home that speaks the old language.

---

Sometimes I go back. Last week I stopped at an old spot along Grizzly Peak Boulevard in the Oakland hills. You can see the Bay Bridge, the giant cell tower near my new home in San Francisco, and the buildings churning the orange fog.

I’d never seen myself as a part of that violence. The cargo ships spanned the water, inexorable.

I left before the sun set.

---