That was my impression as I roamed the lush gardens of Japan. Beautifully sculpted, the gardens draw you along winding paths, over picturesque arched bridges spanning creeks and ponds filled with colorful fish, deeper and deeper into their mystery. 

  And I thought—though this is a difficult notion to comprehend without a radical revisiting and reimagining of our collective history—that that would have been our form of worship had not the Roman Catholic Church been imposed upon the Nature loving population of Northern Europe between the years of say 600 and 1000ad. 

  After all, Nature is the church and the scattered shrines are the altars in the magical medieval twelfth century world of the Tristan of Chrétien de Troyes and especially the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. 

  The questions I believe we should be asking are: 

  So what happened to the West? 

  And could that be why so many feel such a compelling urge to visit Japan? 

  And more importantly…

  How do we here in the West get back that sense of Nature’s sanctity?