According to a Japanese Shinto tale, Enchin, a priest from Nara, was told in a vision to look for the clear water origin of the Yodo River. After a long search, he stumbled upon a place deep in a forest where mist, like a belt of white clouds, hung over a waterfall at the foot of Mt. Otowa.

Today, the temple he founded (called Kiyomizudera from Kiyomizu, which means pure or clear water) is a National Heritage site. In July, my grandson Toby, my daughter Emily and I walked the many, many steps to the area inside the complex where three small channels of water are directed for visitors to drink from with long-handled metal cups. Drinking the pure water from one channel is supposed to ensure that the drinker will have good luck in school; drinking from a second ensures luck in love and from the third, in health.

I am leafing through a photo essay Emily helped Toby make about our trip and see the caption Toby suggested for the picture I took of him filling the metal cup with water, “We didn’t know which was which, but I drank from all three.” I go to Wikipedia to find out more about the waters and read that some Shinto traditionalists think you can only drink from up to two streams because to drink from all three is to be greedy and invite misfortune upon yourself.

Quickly protective of my cherished grandson, I think that surely such a rule wasn’t written for children. Toby enjoys events, sights, flavors and sounds just because they are there before him and offer him a challenge and fun: catching nagashi soumen (flowing noodles) with chop sticks as they rush in water down a bamboo pipe, stepping across a large pond on broad rocks backed by the sun, watching koi nibble his mom’s feet when she put them in the water, fingering a gold-colored coin pressed with his name. Wishing for the best of luck in love and in health and in school means no more to him now than continuing his zest for life, evident every moment. Love and health require the ability to observe, to stay in touch, to let the senses take in information, so we can stay in the moment rather than to be stressed about moments to come or be so caught up in longing for what isn’t before us that we can’t feel the presence of what is.

But what of school? Toby starts first grade this week. His powers of observing through the senses and enjoying the world, which have taught him an enormous amount over the past six years, will be shaped in a new way, one that might deprive him of living in the now. As much as I want him to behave, learn good social habits and respect his peers and teachers, I worry that he will be bored and upset with new rules that require him to pay attention on a schedule, to squelch the connections he likes to make between his observations and to begin discarding them in order to parrot back ones being made for him. Certainly, good luck in school requires giving up some pleasures to be an acceptable student, gaining an idea about performing for the judgment of others, and postponing the pleasures of following your own ideas to new conclusions.

As I continue to look at the photo essay booklet Toby and Emily made, I think about how good luck in writing requires that we go back to a childhood state that existed before we went to school. One of my first writing teachers said it this way: in writing, at the beginning of a piece, one must always be an inventor, a mad scientist kind of person. If you aren’t willing to put anything that occurs to you on the page, to rush from image to image as if they were pots and test tubes boiling over, if you aren’t willing to make a dangerous mess, you will squelch your final product or deprive it of the excitement generated when ideas and perceptions meet and resonate with one another to explore something in a new way. Another person I learned from drew the analogy between babies learning to walk and writers who need to learn to encourage first steps in any piece of writing. She said that although toddlers teeter and fall, no one says this to them: “What bad walking. You shouldn’t try that again until you are steadier on your feet.” The late poet William Stafford is famous for saying when asked how he wrote a poem a day, “By lowering my standards.”

Before they reach school age, children do all of these things every day in the service of creating. They find something interesting from what they’ve put together that to adults looks like a mess. Frequently, they don’t stop building or reaching, even when they stumble or drop a piece of what they are holding. If they are frustrated with one endeavor, they usually quickly turn to another one. Adults don’t teach them to think, “You can’t play anymore until you learn to build that block tower so it never falls. Don’t even start building with the blocks until you learn to make just one kind of tower.”

I know that one of the most important questions we must answer as writers is how we can get back to our uninhibited selves when we write. Perhaps it is by understanding that we will have good luck in writing when we use and respond to our powers of observation, when we work from abundance rather than from the meager scratchings we allow ourselves to put on the page, deciding that only what seems flawless is safe to share, sometimes even with ourselves. We must begin to believe that even with flaws, drafts are to be treasured for what we will later mine and shape. Rather than thinking them too open to opinion and judging, too vulnerable to be real writing, we must think of them as waterfalls and springs, sources of what will later flow on the page and provide us with good luck in love, our love of words and the heightened sense of life they bring to us.

In Toby’s trip book, there is a picture of him holding up a children’s menu in Japanese. His caption reads, “Most mornings, we had breakfast at a diner called Joyful.” He smiles broadly over the menu’s heading “Joy kids.” I remember that Shinto teaches that we can return to our innate internal brightness. It teaches gratitude and humility, that everything both living and inanimate contains a kami or spiritual essence, everything. I remember that the job of the writer is to allow this life onto the page. The poet Richard Hugo in his book The Triggering Town (in which he is instructing young poets) says: the poet is the original cynic because to the poet nothing is necessarily more important than anything else. Anything can have equal emotional weight with anything else, no matter the size of the object or the commonly agreed upon value.

When we trust the spirit in things and trust ourselves to evoke the emotional importance of those things, we reach into our uninhibited and joyful selves. We create writing that will, when it is finished, move readers. It will not be writing that hurries along a safe route, but writing that exposes the vulnerability of living life.

How do we get there? Shinto beliefs emphasize purification–and that is what we do as we delve more and more deeply into our experiences, trusting that the images and words we encountered in having them will lead us to discovery and insight. We purify our writing by trusting those images, by refusing to cover them up in generalities and summary.

As I think about joy and writing, I click around more of the links I’ve found in the Wikipedia entry for Shinto. I read about kotodama, “word spirit/soul.” I am delighted to learn this Shinto belief that mystical powers dwell in words and names and can magically affect objects and influence our environment, bodies, minds and souls. Kotodama no sagiwau kuni is a classical name for Japan, the entry reveals and then translates as “the land where the mysterious workings of language bring bliss.” The phrase originated in the Man’y?sh?, the oldest collection of Japanese poetry. And so it seems clear that armed with a belief in the magical power of words to alter our existence and with our powers of observation, we will have success and good luck in our writing.

Then after we invent our writing, we reach back into what we learned in school about spelling, punctuation, and, if we were lucky, craft. We will have the best luck in writing if we apply the rules we’ve learned after we invent our material. We must allow the mad scientist time and room. Then we can look into what she has conjured, what she invoked from the gods and goddesses of all living and inanimate things. Ultimately, we will meld our invention with the most elegant package we can find for transmission of our perception to others. We’ll find ourselves in a state of grace, or love, because no matter what we are writing about, no matter whether it is from joy or from pain, the mysterious workings of our language will elevate us to a state in which our words honor what is larger than ourselves and accept all of life.

This week, when Toby enters his first grade classroom, he’ll bring the two storybooks he purchased with his mom in a bookstore near the hotel we stayed in. If I were at the Kiyomizudera temple today, I would write my prayer for him on a piece of paper and tie it up on a tree with prayers from many others visiting there. I would throw coins into the offertory chest, ring the bell, clap my hands, then press them together to pray as I saw some people doing: May my grandson suffer no ill fortune because of zestfully drinking from all three waters. Instead, while having good luck in school, may he always treasure his instinctual love of primary observation: “Arthur and I walked on the rocks and were careful not to fall into the carp water.” “There were a lot of cicadas here making lots of noise.” “This is me when I am just catching noodles.”

May my grandson use his memories of waters, carp, stones, cicadas and a new friend along with all of his experience to construct a world uniquely crafted from direct sense and sensation.

May he, and all of us, find our place where a mist, like a belt of white clouds, hangs over a beautiful waterfall at the foot of a mountain, a place where we continue to create.