At many Shinto shrines in Japan, visitors can leave a donation and receive a written fortune on a strip of paper. Often, the strips are encased in small clay statues or “selected” by drawing a piece of marked bamboo (or, more rarely, the fortune itself) from a box. Near the place where the fortunes are, there’s usually a rack or display of paper strips, like this one (located at the base of the mountain at Fushimi Inari). These strips are fortunes people drew but did not want to receive. By tradition and Shinto belief, if you leave your fortune at the shrine where you drew it, the deities will
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Culling the Herd…And Finding Myself in the Pages
I love books. This probably comes as no surprise, considering that my two “day jobs” involve writing them and working with people who write (and publish) them. My name is Susan, and I’m a book addict. Fortunately, the KonMari method doesn’t require me to shed any specific number or percentage of my beloved books. In fact, the beloved ones don’t have to go anywhere. Instead, I have to pick up each book (without reading them–a requirement that has proven more challenging than I expected) and decide whether or not I have a “connection” to it that merits returning it to the shelf. When I started, I didn’t
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