KUNI · 2023 — 2025
ACCOUNTS FROM THE GATHERINGS
Pilgrimage exists so that we can recognise each other. When everyone leaves, the work of the host is to hold the memory of those who have gathered.
KUNI is a living activity. We can trust that activity and allow its form to change. As elders, we create space for younger people to be seen, so that the dreams they carry can become real.
Thank you for the Sacred Hospitality that is present between us. Our pilgrimage continues to unfold.
One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned has come from sitting in a circle with people of different generations, from different parts of the world, and seeing how we can all learn from each other.
It makes me feel full of optimism to learn from the youth of Japan in particular, and hopeful that we can create a more harmonious society.
When I stepped into the circle at KUNI, I felt that I had found home among people who were leading with their souls. That was really the place I was looking for.
On this journey we’ve walked together, we all walked the path of our life and our death, and are now prepared to walk with a sense of rebirth.
Leaving behind old pieces of ourselves, but remembering and recapturing the pieces of ourselves that perhaps we’ve left behind before.
One of the moments that moved me most came on the last day, in Kyoto, listening to guests from overseas. I was listening through translation, so I may not have understood every meaning. Yet I still remember their voices reaching deep into my body and spirit, and the feeling of having understood.
Vision is not only about anticipating the future. There are things we can see by recovering our connection with history and our ancestors. At another gathering about the future, I had felt a kind of emptiness. This time, it was as if I had opened a page in a vast book—as if a great path had opened behind me.
Making art is different from responding to someone’s already articulated wants or needs. Moving into the future can often be a solitary experience. But this time, I felt that many people had come before me, and that I had always been supported by them.
The question I am living with now is how to build trust in my own work. For a long time, I could not acknowledge its value. I came to see how closely this was connected to not accepting the particular qualities and gifts I had been given.
Only recently have I begun to let go of things I had aspired to for a decade. Each time, I find it easier to forgive myself. As I build trust in my work, I want to nurture the roots of the art I will make over the decades ahead.
As a manager and entrepreneur, I had always created a gathering by standing at its centre. Part of that was ego; part was habit. At KUNI, stepping forward to lead was not the only way to contribute. Opening a space and leaving room for conversation mattered too. Volunteers helped make the gathering alongside the participants. I understood in my body that I could contribute without insisting on being at the centre.
Including the preliminary visit, I climbed Mount Mani twice. At first, I moved large stones and branches out of the way for the people following. Looking back, I think I was trying to control everything.
Then questions began to arise. What is safety? How much should I control? If the mountain as a whole is already in harmony as it is, what does it mean to remove its stones and branches?
Partway through, I turned my attention to my own body. I noticed my breathing, engaged my abdomen, and lowered my centre of gravity. I paid attention to the sole of the foot taking each step, while allowing myself to enjoy the landscape before me.
Little by little, with each step, I began to feel as though something was accepting me.
The participants were truly diverse. At times, though, I felt that conversations stopped at exchanging what we already knew. I do not mean that as good or bad. I wondered whether we could go one or two steps deeper.
Could we create together while carrying our differences, rather than deciding that this is good and that is bad? I recognised again how much these questions of division and crossing boundaries matter to me.
What could I give to this circle now? I tried a few things. On the last day, we gathered words from people in the circle and made a visual record together. I hope that, back in everyday life, it might offer even one person something to return to.
What surprised me after the pilgrimage was the stillness that arrived in my body. Whatever is happening in the world, I realised that I have the capacity to make a place of stillness within myself.
Walking alone through Okunoin at night, and praying, I began to glimpse the kind of world I wanted to help create.
It was a world where nature and human life belong together—a world in which I would want to live as a human being again, far in the future. From that relationship between people and nature, connections could grow that reach beyond time and place. I realised that I wanted to help bring such a world into being over a thousand years.
Seeing that far ahead did not greatly change what I needed to do in the present. But when I placed my immediate work, and my anxiety about an uncertain world, within that span of time, I felt some of the uncertainty loosen.
I want to take time to consider how these realisations might shape my business. How can the work I already do become part of a larger, continuing practice in which spiritual insight can emerge within everyday life? I want to attend to the form it takes, while giving it a clear centre.
During my time in Japan, I began to find joy in things I had previously experienced as burdens. Ordinary work at home could feel like service, like ceremony. The attention and intention brought to each action changed how I experienced it. That feeling is still with me.
Connecting with the source through a tradition different from my own brought renewed meaning to my own traditions and rituals. Nature woven into daily life, food still connected to the earth—these offered a sense of how older practices and systems came into being.
Back in Silicon Valley, I feel the contrast. Here, we tend to look toward tools and the future. The journey reminded me of the importance of being rooted in ceremony, ritual and continuing traditions before building tools for the future.
There is a tension between preserving a tradition and walking it forward. Somewhere between the two, I feel something is growing that does not yet have a form.
I really did not know what to expect on the pilgrimage. I was drawn to its premise, but I could not imagine what it would look like in practice.
I enjoyed connecting with people from a cultural context so different from my own. I had been involved in initiatives with values close to KUNI’s, and was curious about how those values would resonate with young people in Japan. Hearing everyone’s life stories and reflections deepened my sense of their importance. By the time we left, it felt like one big family.
My time in Koyasan, especially at Okunoin and the Mausoleum of Kukai, also stays with me. I had read about the Buddhist idea of emptiness and had practised meditation. But I think this was the first time I felt I could grasp something of it through experience. It is a felt understanding I still return to in memory, to ground myself.
A question I always bring to gatherings like this is how we maintain—and deepen—the bonds that form. I would like us to keep exploring what we discovered and made together.
And for myself, there is the continuing question of how to live what I discovered on this pilgrimage. That question does not end.
There is more that I cannot put into words. Yet I do not feel able to express it in another way either, so I will try leaving some words here.
Honestly, I still do not really know what was happening to me. Why was so much strength welling up? Why could I offer my resources to the gathering so wholeheartedly? Why could I trust everyone, the space, myself and the silence so deeply? What were the tears that came during the offerings?
My head still does not understand, but my body knows. It is a strange feeling.
I could probably find a framework to interpret it intellectually. But that does not seem to be the essence of why “this” happened.
I would like to play with ways of framing it, and to experiment in my own spaces. At the same time, I feel it would be a loss to interpret it all now.
As I listen to the after-effects that are definitely still in my body—to a small change deep in my awareness that resonates through the whole—I want to weave, little by little, a connection between the extraordinary time of KUNI and the ordinary days of daily life.
These reflections draw on writing and conversations shared by participants and volunteers. They have been selected, edited and translated for this page, preserving each person’s meaning and voice. Photographs show KUNI’s pilgrimages and gatherings.
Orland Bishop’s passage is adapted in the first person from his letters and Kotaro Aoki’s notes of their conversations in 2025.
