We are in Easter Week according to the Christian gospel.
I am a non-believer. I do not subscribe to Iron Age rituals that promise salvation in the afterlife. I was baptised as Catholic because I was a few months old and I could not express my opinion.
I generally do not subscribe to religious traditions.
I believe that Heaven and Hell are real and exist in this same world that we inhabit. There are people around who are the Devil incarnate and whose acts of malice, deceit and lack of humanity are beyond comprehension.
I believe that death is a natural consequence of the laws of entropy.
If life appears to be universal, death is also a universal event. I believe that you are born, you live and you die.
If you are lucky, you pass your genetic payload onto a new generation. Otherwise your lineage dies with you and nobody remembers that you were even here.
-o-
All cultures everywhere have a respectful admiration for the supernatural, for the unexplained and not well understood. For the coincidence, interpreted as divine whim.
Bessho Onsen lies in a mountainous part of the Nagano prefecture, away from the modernity and speed of modern Japan. A traditional village with a few temples, houses and public baths scattered around, providing access to the thermal waters of the locality -which since the 1800s has a reputation for soothing frail nerves.
There are several traditional inns -Ryokans- of varying levels of comfort, and it was in one of these that Ms. Ace, Miss Sunshine and me spent a couple of nights while travelling in winter.
The night was very cold -a few degrees below zero. A full moon was shining brightly and the village looked incredibly beautiful in the chilly winter night.
It was also the last night of a winter festival organised by the local tourism board, featuring a show with lights and sounds across the many temples in the village. Visitors would walk between locations and temples to enjoy the show and to know more about the local history.
Ms. Ace and I spent a few hours walking around the tiny village and exploring the wonderful location, when we had a sight.
It was a cat.
In the cold winter night, a cat joined us in our walking tour of the town.
By the time we started the tour there were still visitors gathered around the main attractions of the village, but by the time we bumped into the cat, it was only the two of us.
A village cat was an amusing companion for a self-guided walking tour, but the interesting part is that the cat knew how to guide us to a part of the village we had not seen before.
And then the cat vanished thru a doorway.
The supernatural may not exist but sometimes you can feel it.