The owner of Panda House, an inn near Temple 22 (Byôdôji), in the town of Aratano, had a lot of advice to give us about being a pilgrim. At one point in his patter, he nodded toward our staffs and said, “Whoever made those covers for you knew what she was doing.”

My face, I’m sure, made a look that said “Uh, sure…what?”

“You know. ‘Ichigo-ichie.”

“Oh! Right!” I said, just hoping I’d figure it out later. It took me a little longer than that.

This is where I confess another area of ignorance, undercutting any confidence I have that I am “fluent” in Japanese (something, by the way, I’ve never felt, but that my career makes it so that I have to pretend to be so). Apparently, “ichigo-ichie” is a key Japanese proverb that expresses both an ethic and an aesthetic that many people seem to know now thanks to a book called The Book of Ichigo Ichie: The Art of Making the Most of Every Moment, the Japanese Way, by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles.

I mean, sure, I knew THAT part. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention when the phrase itself came up in class, if it had, in fact, ever come up. A couple of years ago, someone asked me to describe to them “the Japanese aesthetic,” a question I should have just refused. The typical answer might have been to go with a description of the “wabi-sabi” aesthetic, “the beauty in imperfection and impermanence” that pervades Japanese tea ceremony. I definitely appreciate that stuff. But what I answered, instead, was with a description of an aesthetic of the singular moment, when some small thing—a bowl of salt at the entrance to a restaurant, a sprig of a flowering tree in a vase—captures your attention and takes you out of the flow of the day to appreciate the present moment.

On the Shikoku pilgrimage, the ichigo ichie idea comes up over and over. It essentially means “a single moment, a single meeting.” It certainly captures the continual experience of transience imbued with many singular encounters that linger and feel deeply dyed in their moments. For me, it can refer to countless moments of awe along the route and at the temples when plants, buildings, statues, the environment and so on feel almost overwhelming in some way. Mostly, it refers to the fact that throughout the journey, you will meet people—some, walking like you, some, living in the places you pass through—with whom you can have a brief, but meaningful connection. I can think of so many, some that I tried, fruitlessly, to “capture” in a picture, some that have come back to me and Sam over the subsequent days that still move us. But for the most part, what it feels like is that we move from one sense of wonder to another, throughout the day, day after day.

We arrived at Temple 40, Kanjizaiji, today (I know, I’ve got a lot of stories I haven’t yet written down over these past days) and in a little shack near the main hall they had nearly a dozen “tenugui” (hand towels) for sale. Sam and I are suckers for these and because they’re light and compact, we often convince ourselves we can pick one up, even as our packs begin to bulge. This time, the shack had a tenugui that was devoted to the “ichigo ichie” ideal. It reads:

”Encounters are the pipe the links people to people.
Encounters are the treasures of this life.
I am grateful that I am filled with encounters.”

This blog should be about this overall, but this post is about those covers on our walking staffs. How did the innkeeper at Panda House see our staff covers as capturing the essence of the pilgrimage? It has to do with the fact that the Japanese language is rich in puns, both verbal and visual. With only 5 vowels and 7 (or so) consonants, there are lots of words in Japanese that sound like each other. “Nose” and “flower,” for example, are both “hana” (said with different emphases on first or second syllable).

In this case, “ichigo” can mean either “a single moment” or “strawberry” and “ichie” can mean either “a single encounter” or “a wooden branch.” By knitting the staff covers with a strawberry dangling at the side, the woman who gave us these covers, the innkeeper at our first stay near temple 1, gave us a visual pun to remind us constantly of the ethic of the pilgrimage. Our strawberry staffs can remind us, at any moment, to treasure our momentary encounters, whether those are with people, nature, buildings, animals, food…anything.