spirituality

In ‘Perfect Days,’ Toilet-Cleaning Is Sacred

by

Toilet-cleaning

By Joe George

Across its 123-minute runtime, Perfect Days more or less consists of the same scenes. Middle-aged Japanese man Hirayama awakens and grooms himself in his small flat. He purchases a coffee and goes to work, cleaning public restrooms around Tokyo, usually alone. During lunch, Hirayama sits in a public park and snaps photos of leaves. For dinner, he eats at a mall restaurant. At night, Hirayama washes in a bathhouse and reads from an American novel before going to sleep. The next day, he starts the process again.

That description might be enough to turn off some viewers, even before they learn that the Oscar-nominated film has very little dialogue, all of it in Japanese. But through Hirayama’s mundane life, German director Wim Wenders, who co-wrote the film with Takuma Takasaki, portrays the soul of a servant. Played by a stunning Kōji Yakusho, Hirayama’s mundane work of toilet washing becomes a sanctified act, for one simple reason: He does it for other people.

This isn’t to say that Hirayama’s life lacks drama. His routine bends from time to time, usually when an interruption occurs. These interruptions range from the impositions of his brash co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who repeatedly asks to borrow money and tries to swipe cassettes, to the unannounced arrival of Hirayama’s runaway niece Nico (Arisa Nakano). But none of these interruptions resolve through battles or protestations. Unlike most modern cinema, the theme of Perfect Days isn’t delivered via conflict.

Instead, Wenders and Takasaki locate the meaning of Hirayama’s life in the small, the sacred, and very often, the communal. He finds meaning through the act of cleaning public restrooms — and the connections this service invites. Wenders and his cinematographer Franz Lustig lovingly photograph nature, following Hirayama’s awestruck eye to some tree or plant that enchants him; they devote the same attention to the bathrooms that Hirayama cleans. Hirayama considers the lilies, sure, but he spends even more time considering the toilet bowl.

The bathrooms seen in Perfect Days were created for the Tokyo Toilet project, a public works project intended to capture Japan’s hospitality culture. The bathrooms were designed by “Japan’s leading artists” to be more than just places for biological functions. They are spaces of expression and human interaction, so that’s how Wenders and Lustig shoot them. The most striking of the bathrooms is a box shaped structure made of multi-colored glass in light shades of orange and purple. When one of the stalls in the structure is occupied, that glass turns opaque, providing privacy while filling the space with soft and inviting light.

It’s in these beautiful spaces that Hirayama encounters and serves others more directly. When a tourist asks in English how the colored glass bathroom works, Hirayama doesn’t demand she speak his language. Instead, he steps into one of the stalls and demonstrates how to make the glass cloudy and usable. In a different bathroom, Hirayama discovers a slip of paper with the beginning of a tic-tac-toe game. He plays his turn and slips it back into the crack where it was lodged, continuing the match each time he returns.

Hirayama’s opponent never appears on screen, nor do most of the people who benefit from his cleaning. Furthermore, most don’t even acknowledge Hirayama, even when he steps out of the toilet so they can use it. But he doesn’t work for recognition, a point reinforced every time the camera trains on his face — easily the greatest special effect in the film. From the crinkles in his crow’s feet when he smiles to the lines along his clenched jaw when checking the sink for wayward grime, Hirayama’s face captures the imminence of the work.

Although he doesn’t work for recognition, Hirayama undoubtedly works for people. He is no solitary monk or misanthrope. Hirayama stops to acknowledge the unhoused man (Min Tanaka) who performs dances in the park across from one of the toilets. He closes his eyes while listening to a restaurateur called Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa) sing a lament to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun.” In these and so many other instances, Hirayama revels in his connections to other people.

Such connections recur throughout the gospels, but perhaps most memorably when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. This mundane act, performed by a teacher on his students, was a break from convention. But as recorded in John 13, Jesus performed the act as an example, so that they too will humble themselves in service of other people, and thus, emulate God.

That emphasis on service helps us understand an early moment in Perfect Days, one that otherwise makes no sense. When a drunken youth stumbles into the bathroom, Hirayama stays silent and steps outside to wait. He says nothing when the youth carelessly knocks over his “Wet Floor” sign. He just sets the sign back up and returns to the ego-less dirty work of cleaning.

Hirayama may not lead an enviable life, but it is not without delight. In the closing scene, the camera stays fixed on Hirayma’s face — joy colliding with longing — in a single unbroken shot of Hirayama driving away. There’s a peace that passes understanding in the real work of service.

Joe George is a pop-culture writer whose work has appeared at Think Christian, Polygon, The Progressive, and elsewhere. He tweets from @jageorgeiii and collects his work at joewriteswords.com.

Mike Scott’s ‘Peace of Iona’ 

by

“Like being accompanied by an angel.” Iona-lover Mike Scott shares about his special relationship with the sacred Isle of Iona and how he was inspired to write the song ‘Peace of Iona’. Enjoy his song accompanied by beautiful pictures of this magical island.

Mike Scott, singer-songwriter and leader of the famous rock band The Waterboys spent many years living at the Findhorn Foundation Spiritual Community. He was next-door neighbour and close friend to Eileen Caddy, one of the community’s co-founders.

Mike has visited our retreat house Traigh Bhan on the sacred Isle of Iona on the West Coast of Scotland many times and shares with us his memories of a very special stay on Iona at midsummer 1994, which inspired him to write the song Peace of Iona.

He says there is a presence on Iona that feels “like being accompanied by an angel.”

Clouds at sunrise near the Findhorn Foundaiton’s retreat house Traigh Bhan

“I remember Iona being spoken about in hushed terms as a child as Scotland’s sacred island.  My grandmother was from Mull and knew all about Iona.  I remember the “o” sound in the name being stretched out as if it contained vastnesses.  I didn’t visit myself until I was 29 years old, the first of many visits over a twelve year period.  I was touched by the atmosphere on the island, and explored all over it on my various visits (many of them on my own).

On one of my early visits I could feel another presence in my head, like a different spiritual wavelength, or like being accompanied by an angel.  I’ve had that feeling other times since on Iona too.  I wrote the song Peace Of Iona in 1994 during a visit at midsummer.  I knew the St Patrick’s poem about “deep peace of the running waves” but I wrote my own lyrics, based on my own experiences.

I remember writing it down in the guest book in Traigh Bhan that summer, though I probably fine-tuned the words later, before finally recording it in 2003.  My last visit to Iona was in 2001, and there is no reason I haven’t returned since other than schedules and being busy, but I carry the spark of Iona inside me.  It never leaves.”

Source: Mike Scott’s ‘Peace of Iona’ — Findhorn Foundation

William Blake’s Ecological Vision: Nature’s Paradise Amid Industrial Chaos

by

By Preetha Banerjee

“Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.”

In every era of existence, there comes a time when the truth of human perception needs to be blurted out over the noise of overrationality, because only that is the solution to a global problem. The simple fact may be around for everyone to see but jargon and the thick layers of the developing discourse have obfuscated it for anyone to pinpoint. In such an atmosphere, only those individuals — who are still in touch with their inner child and have not been entirely moulded by the conditions of society — whose sharp senses can pierce through the fog of bureaucratic arguments, can dare to speak the truth as it is. They may be misunderstood or dismissed by contemporaries, but when the storm has settled, their words ring loud in the collective memory of humanity. Poet William Blake was this person in 18th-19th century Britain that was in a tearing hurry to industrialise, with little time to notice how the changes were affecting Earth and its people, and a recent performance of his poems in Delhi was a timely reminder that his warnings about swift urbanisation and unsustainable development still hold water. In the most simple and effective words he told us, once again two centuries later, that we need to stop this uncalculated, mindless consumption and find balance and fairness in the way we lead our lives.

Simplicity was also the strength of the performance titled ‘A Golden String’, where the incredible vocal artist Susheela Raman blended music with Blake’s words to present a powerful and memorable understanding of his works. Accompanied by Sam Mills on the guitar, Raman’s compositions blended with the mystic philosopher’s literary cast to acquire hypnotic qualities. Poet and musician Jeet Thayil and author William Dalrymple recited works by poets who influenced Blake or were inspired by him.

Raman’s renditions of some of Blake’s seminal works such as The Tyger, The Sick Rose, Jerusalem, London, A Memorable Fancy aptly depicted his concerns about mechanisation, the exploitation of nature and the loss of spiritual connection with Earth.

Blake lived his entire life during the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, witnessing dramatic changes to the urban and rural landscapes of Britain. His experiences in London — a city he described as filled with “marks of weakness, marks of woe” — shaped his deep ambivalence about urbanisation and industrial progress.

Not only did he see ecological destruction, air and rivers choking with pollutants, blights in fields and sudden illnesses afflicting people around him, he also witnessed the sooty faces of poor children forced into labour, corruption and fellow human beings exploiting each other.

In London, from Songs of Experience (1794), Blake wrote:

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

The repetition of “charter’d” — a word connoting ownership and commodification — applied both to the streets and the river, highlighting how public spaces and even natural bodies like the Thames were being brought under commercial control. As Kevin Hutchings, professor of English and research chair at the University of Northern British Columbia, observed in Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics, Blake used such language to critique “the subjugation of both human and environmental subjects to the logic of commercial profit”.

The smoke billowing from the mills and chimneys and the erosion of the social and moral fabric that came with industrialisation triggered Blake’s cynicism about the future of humanity. As he witnessed the skies turning dark with pollution and the poor being exploited by the greedy and power-hungry lots, he began picturing London as hell.

By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are Devils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot. He said: “Between the black and white spiders.”

Blake’s environmentalism was not rooted in science or policy but in a theological and imaginative worldview. He believed that all of nature was a manifestation of the divine. “Every thing that lives is holy,” Blake declared in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This was not poetic flourish — it reflected a cosmology in which nature, spirit and imagination were inseparably entwined.

He claimed to have seen visions of angels in trees as a child — an encounter that marked the beginning of a lifetime of spiritual experiences through natural forms. Such visions revealed to him the sacredness of the natural world, a view that stood in direct opposition to the mechanical worldview emerging in Enlightenment Britain.

A key element of Blake’s ecological vision is his use of anthropomorphism — attributing human traits to non-human beings. This device, far from being mere metaphor, expressed his belief that nature was alive, conscious and capable of moral and spiritual engagement.

In poems such as The Tyger and The Fly, Blake gives animals subjectivity and agency. In The Fly, he wrote:

“Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?”

Here, Blake dissolves the boundary between human and insect, inviting empathy and identification across species. As Hutchings argued, this “anthropomorphic sensibility” signals Blake’s rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, which sought to objectify and dominate nature. Instead, Blake sought a “relational ecology” — one in which all beings shared a divine essence and moral worth.

In Auguries of Innocence, Blake assigns emotional and spiritual attributes to non-human beings:

“A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.”

This line portrays the suffering of a bird as cosmically significant, making clear that the confinement of even a small creature disturbs the moral fabric of the universe. Hutchings notes that Blake’s frequent use of anthropomorphism “is not merely a literary device, but a declaration of his ecological vision” — a vision in which nature is not inert but emotionally and spiritually expressive.

This approach aligns with modern ecocritical thought, which challenges the anthropocentric divide between human and non-human, subject and object. Blake’s anthropomorphism resists objectification and opens space for ethical regard.

While Blake mourned the physical destruction caused by industrialisation, his deeper critique was philosophical. He viewed Enlightenment science and industrial capitalism as promoting a mechanical view of nature that stripped it of spirit. In Jerusalem, he writes:

“The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; and when separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel…”

Angela Heagy, faculty member at Southern New Hampshire University, noted that Blake “resisted Enlightenment narratives that regarded nature as a passive object to be analysed and consumed”. For him, the problem was not technology per se, but the mindset that turned nature into a lifeless resource.

This critique is memorably captured in Jerusalem, where Blake imagines a pastoral England marred by “dark Satanic Mills”. While the mills have long been interpreted symbolically, Hutchings clarifies that Blake was directly engaging with the destruction of rural life caused by industry.
But this obsession with ‘human nature’ brought him criticism that he wasn’t truly a nature’s poet like his Romantic contemporaries. Specifically, his critique of William Wordsworth, with whom he shared a relationship of mutual admiration, turned him into an ‘adversary of nature’ in the eyes of critics.

The two, standing in the same London, simply focused on different aspects — where Wordsworth saw ethereal beauty and ‘smokeless air’, Blake saw the mosaic of green fields being swallowed by grey concrete of factories. Blake’s intimate view of nature clashed with Wordsworth’s distant appreciation of nature as an external object. “Blake was in all likelihood offended by the passivity implicit in Wordsworth’s depiction of human-nature relations,” Hutchings wrote.

Blake’s three-year residence in Felpham, West Sussex (1800-1803), was transformative. Removed from the chaos of London, he found spiritual renewal in rural life. As Hutchings observed, this period marked a shift in Blake’s work — from the polemic to the pastoral, and from the apocalyptic to the ecological.

He gardened, observed the changing skies and described in his letters a deeper communion with the natural world: “In the morning I see my Saviour by the Light of the Sun” (Blake, Letters, 1800). The Finding Blake project noted that these years allowed Blake to envision a society founded not on exploitation, but on ecological and spiritual harmony.

Blake’s concern for children — particularly those subjected to industrial labour — paralleled his concern for nature. In The Chimney Sweeper, he highlights the violence of both social and environmental systems:

“They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.”

The image of a child blackened by soot reflected both the human cost of industrialism and the spiritual pollution of society. Just as children were being commodified, so too was nature. For Blake, both required protection and reverence.

He also wrote against organised religion, equating the Church with the oppressive State that benefitted from the torture and unfair treatment of children. The Church, he believed, played the role of convincing poor families that it is their spiritual duty to provide their labour for the growth of the nation. From The Chimney Sweeper:

“And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.”

In Garden of Love, he voiced his disdain for institutionalised religion more plainly, painting chapels in the same brush as concrete factories.

“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.”

In Blake’s universe, nature becomes a form of resistance to oppressive systems. His poetry often celebrates the overlooked and the fragile, such as in Auguries of Innocence:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

Blake’s sacred minimalism challenges modernity’s scale and speed. Nature, in its smallest details, contains cosmic significance. This view dismantles the hierarchy of beings and affirms the dignity of all life.

William Blake was not an environmentalist in the conventional sense. He proposed no conservation laws, led no protests. But his poetry remains one of the most radical environmental visions in English literature. He called on humanity to see nature not as object, but as subject; not as resource, but as kin.

His anthropomorphism, mystical vision and resistance to industrial modernity anticipated many of today’s ecological philosophies. In a world grappling with climate collapse and ecological grief, Blake’s voice offers a sacred atmosphere — one in which “every thing that lives is holy,” and every robin’s suffering matters.

Source: William Blake’s Ecological Vision: Nature’s Paradise Amid Industrial Chaos