The mountains and the hills we see are the creases in the Earth's skin. When mother nature smiles, great rifts and cracks appear on the surface, when she cries the streams run forth from the mountains as tears from her eyes. No matter what wood you stand in, there is always the same feeling of peace among the trees, for this is where the earth breathes.
On the trail up to Takao, new shoots grew through the old roots of the forest, which burst out of the hill side like pyrotechnics, unable to be contained in the surrounding soil. And each pebble underfoot was once a piece of this great mountain, now shrapnel that peppers the floor until it can be ground back to dust.
Nature teaches us an important lesson about resilience, and how much more we are capable of than we might believe.
And on the way back, a very different kind of wonder as we reached Tokyo, as I have never before seen a train swallow a thousand people in a matter of seconds.