When I open my window every morning,
I see Mount Fuji.

We are glad to know it. Perhaps we even feel gently jealous of the Japanese sage who, just on opening the window of his own house in the morning, can enjoy the view, at once artistic and sacred, of the perfect mountain in its snowy cone; a mountain pregnant with tradition and feeling, symbol of a nation and a people, of a faith and an effort to rise from an earthly basis to a vertex in the clouds near the highest heavens. Mount Fuji, image and inspiration of the Japanese people and of all those who with them appreciate their values and delve in their spirituality. Its view every dawn from one’s own home consecrates, no doubt, and ennobles the rest of the day with the pointed reminder of the eternal goal that awaits us while it guides our steps day by day in grateful pilgrimage. Happy indeed the man or woman who begins the day at the feet of the sacred triangle of Mount Fuji against the rising sun.

Things change a little when we come to know that the Japanese sage who uttered those words lived very far away from Mount Fuji; indeed he lived in another one of Japan’s many islands from where no other land could be seen even in the far horizon; and, what is worse, his house was situated in the midst of a little village and its crowded streets, where the only thing he could see on opening his window in the morning was the wall of his neighbour’s house with its off-colour paint and its weather stains in desolate condition. To top it all, our good man had never left his village and had never in his life seen Mount Fuji, which he only knew through pictures and poems as a remote name, a symbol, a fantasy. Whence, then, his proud claim to see Mount Fuji from his window? Was it presumption? Was it wishful thinking? Was it poetic licence? Was it a dream?

It was something simpler and deeper at the same time. The sage had learned to value ordinary life in its true worth, to take every passing incident as a manifestation of life itself, to discover nobility in the commonplace and beauty in homeliness, to know that every word is a message and every face a revelation, to see the whole of creation in a blade of grass, and Mount Fuji is a mud wall. He had found the sacred meaning of existence, the soul of the universe, the unity of the cosmos. He had no need to live on a sacred mountain or in a solitary cave. No need of images or recitations, no need of scriptures or rites. He had gone through all that with due reverence and devotion and that had brought him in due time of effort and grace to the direct contemplation of all in all, of heaven down on earth, of the divine in the human, of Mount Fuji in the wall across the street. That is how he saw it every morning, and blessed his day with the far and close memory of sublime spirit in humble matter. The eyes of faith see redemption in every event, and grace in every gesture. That was the secret of the remote worshipper of sacred Mount Fuji.

And this is the secret of the ennobling of the soul in the midst of daily routine. The contemplation of Mount Fuji every day on opening the window…, whatever that window may be. The cult of the ordinary. The novelty of repetition. The surprise of boredom. The inner and true reconciliation with things as they are and with life as it is. Joy in the present without waiting for success in the future. Greetings to the wall in front without envying the neighbours of Mount Fuji. To open the morning with that attitude in one’s soul in the best way to set the day on its course of joy.