Carol Snow, "Tour"

My first day as a substitute teacher in high school I was assigned to a class in a computer lab. The students were supposed to be making personal websites. This they did. However, they were given instructions to search the Internet for things which represented them. I felt older than dirt after one minute of watching them search. I had forgotten how powerful advertising is: glossy images lighted supernaturally, speech in even tones with no mistakes or hesitation, everyone with bright, perfect skin.

I had forgotten what it means to have your standards and aspirations bound to this unreality. Even if you're not tied to the mirage, you have friends that are. I wondered if the entire world of high school was the most manufactured dream. One meant to move product, understood subconsciously as a life well-lived.

I knew right then that the fact I loved poetry and books made me completely alien. What could I possibly offer? All I knew by comparison were scrawlings on a page, some of those scrawlings barely memorable.

When we turn to Carol Snow's "Tour," we turn to a poem also confronting the alien. Some blossoms are scattered on a path near a shrine. You're there because you want to open yourself not just to another country, but other ways of seeing and being. Shiny, pretty things are not under consideration. You want to challenge how you think.

Tour (from Poetry 180)
Carol Snow

Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or — we had no way of knowing — he'd swept the path
between fallen camellias.

You have made a journey to another land, walked a path yourself. You may briefly think yourself a mere visitor, but the word “tour” comes from the Old French word for “turn,” which itself traces back to a Greek word for "lathe"—a tool that shapes an object by means of turning.

You are changing, ever so subtly. It starts with wondering about the simplest things. What makes a shrine spiritual? What makes this shrine, in front of you, a place of worship?

"Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path / and then placed camellia blossoms there." Near the shrine (not in the shrine?) there’s a path. Someone devoted to it is there. He has walked a path. You first think he swept it, as it looks a bit cleaner than the rest of the ground. The camellia blossoms stand out upon it, as if the path is meant to frame each of them.

That would be a reverential act in the way we typically understand reverence. God is omnipotent and must be given due respect. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord (Isaiah 55:8). If you think you recognize the given path, you take care of it, treating it like your most precious possession.

But then you have another thought, one more radical. You realize that not all of us worship the same way. You wonder about other sacred actions a person could take, ones that show devotion differently.

"Or — we had no way of knowing — he’d swept the path / between fallen camellias." Maybe you’re with a tour group. Maybe one of them blurted this out, trying to say something stupid to get everyone to laugh. But what if you believe everything around you—e.g. rocks, plants, bugs—has a soul? The recognition that everything is sacred means recognizing the beauty and necessity of the fallen blossoms. One might not sweep between them to clean the dirt, but to mark the path one must take, a path between sweetness and loss.

Some forms of spirituality demand less in terms of obedience and more in terms of awareness of the mysteries of this world. I don’t say “religion” because all religions have a political, legalistic side, and the spirituality we are concerned with here, while it might be thought Eastern, could easily be seen as secular in a more original sense of the word. “Secular” from Latin saeculum, “generation, age.”

I’ll illustrate what I mean, though it may seem another puzzle. One that a commercial substituting for an educational experience will be especially distant from. When I first wrote on this poem, 15 years ago, I wondered if the wind blew the camellias down and swept the path. I wondered, in other words, if we were dealing with an air spirit living in the shrine, who perfectly realized his intent by means of an action. We mortals can only guess at this unity of intent and action. We attempt to be reverent in our diverse, imperfect ways. Maybe we have to do homage to the blossoms, over and against the dirt, or maybe we push the dirt aside—just rearrange things—in order to acknowledge that we are seeking a path. Before the expulsion from Eden, the Christian God is described as an anthropomorphic god, one walking around the garden, looking for Adam and Eve.