Years ago, while visiting Kyoto, I noticed a tradition in which certain doorway openings were intentionally built shorter than the height of nearly all visitors. I later learned there was a term for this in Japan: nijiriguchi.

As I entered these sacred spaces, I was forced to bow my head beneath the frame and, in doing so, momentarily lost sight of the very room I was entering. All visitors did. The doorway became an instrument of mandatory mystery, and I found myself grateful for every instance I was fortunate enough to experience. By simply lowering the height of a doorway, the space beyond it became unknown. I was compelled to bow in humility, while a quiet sense of vulnerability and blind trust was introduced alongside it. I was made vulnerable, even though I was the intruder.

A decade or more later, Im convinced that no one can perceive beauty without trust, and trust itself cannot be received without humility. This particular type of humility has more to do with accepting the unknown than it does with ingratiating others. Spiritual air cannot be inhaled by proud know it alls and can only exist as a result of a kind of ego disarmament.

Here now, with our final study, please consider the absence of references, aesthetic guides, or prescribed techniques as the doorway needed to see the work. The philosophical and spiritual architecture underlying the Vigils rests in the eye of the beholder.