life

Month: Jul 2025

  • The Scientist, the Cyclist, and the Shape of Memory

    The fog holds secrets—
    in every slow, borrowed step
    we become ourselves

    If you were to ask me, on an ordinary evening, how I would describe myself to someone who couldn’t see me, I’d hesitate. The words wouldn’t come easily. Not because I lack things to say, but because I no longer believe you can draw a life in straight lines.

    I am a sum of moments—some loud, most quiet. A constellation of small rituals, vanished cities, borrowed phrases, and stubborn hope. More than anything, I am the product of encounters: people who have shaped me, even when I didn’t know it. If you really want to know me, let me tell you about Birmingham, about a tree, and about Mark.

    Aston University. It’s always damp in my memory—always November, always the sky bruised with old rain. My dormitory was a cube of bricks, clinging to the edge of the city, each hallway scented with boiled cabbage and mildew. You learned not to dry your laundry inside, or your shirts would gather a sourness that never quite faded.

    My window faced a narrow canal, its water the color of weak tea. Sometimes at night, the wind would slap the pane, and I’d lie awake and listen for footsteps on the path below. I was twenty, still shedding the nervousness of a first life away from home. My routines were simple—lectures in the morning, endless cups of instant coffee, cycling along the canals when the weather held.

    It was in this bleak, beautiful inertia that Mark appeared. He was a pharmacist by training, but a cyclist by soul. “One pays the bills,” he’d shrug, “the other lets me forget the bills exist.” He was older than us, mid-thirties or early forties, but he wore his years lightly. His eyes always held the distant spark of someone already halfway out the door.

    He’d been many things, in many places: a chemist behind a cluttered counter in Leicester, a volunteer in a Spanish hospice, a sous-chef in Paris “for six confusing weeks.” He’d once lived in a Buddhist temple, and biked through Poland with nothing but a sleeping bag, a paperback, and a patch kit. He always carried that sense of gentle rootlessness with him—a man at ease in impermanence, never bound but never lost.

    Our first real conversation was at a public lecture on neuropharmacology. I’d come for the free biscuits, and because the dorm was cold. Mark was at the edge of the room, coat hanging from one shoulder, scribbling notes in the margin of a mystery novel. He nodded as I sat, offered a biscuit, and asked what I thought of dopamine. I muttered something about reward systems, feeling like a fraud. He laughed, “No one ever understands dopamine on their first try. Or their last. That’s what makes it worth studying.”

    He walked me back through the city’s puddled streets. We talked about science and poetry, about the best places for strong coffee and the worst bicycle lanes in the Midlands. I liked his questions; they made you dig. He didn’t care for easy answers.

    Not long after, he joined our group beneath the Parliament oak—an ancient, sprawling tree at the edge of campus, its roots carving up the grass. We’d meet there, huddled in scarves, passing a flask of tea or something stronger, watching the seasons blur the boundaries of the city.

    Mark listened more than he spoke, but when he did speak, he offered pieces of himself, handed over like small coins. “Everyone you sit with under this tree will live on in you,” he said one cold evening, steam from his thermos curling up into the branches. “You might not notice it now, but years from now, you’ll catch yourself using someone’s phrase, or laughing in a way that isn’t quite yours. We’re all collages. The more generous the company, the richer the mosaic.”

    I remember being skeptical. I was still living in the illusion of the self as a finished project, a completed sculpture. But Birmingham, and Mark, worked on me slowly, like rain on stone.

    Dorm life was a kind of purgatory. Our building held the humidity of ten thousand showers, and my room was never quite dry. My shoes, lined by the radiator, steamed every morning. I shared a kitchen with a diabetic woman who burned every meal, and a philosophy student who wrote manifestos in the condensation on the window.

    Mark never complained about the damp. He said it reminded him of childhood in Wales, “where even the sun comes out reluctantly.” He visited often, bringing books or a half-loaf of sourdough, and we’d talk through the night, interrupted by the rumble of trains and the soft cough of someone smoking in the stairwell.

    His advice was always indirect, almost accidental. If I griped about a failed exam or a friend’s betrayal, he’d listen, then say, “Let yourself feel it, but don’t build a home there. Pain is like English weather—it’s always moving on.”

    He talked about consciousness the way some people talk about weather or food—casually, but with awe. “You’ll find,” he said one rainy day, “that most people are just trying to move up the pyramid. Some days you’re stuck in fog, wrestling with old shame or guilt, and others, you’re standing in bright, open air—joy, acceptance, a kind of weightless peace. The trick isn’t to climb and stay there. The trick is to notice where you are, and greet each day with a little curiosity.”

    We rode bikes together on weekends, Mark always several gears ahead, slowing down only when I lagged. He wore a faded cycling cap, legs browned and scarred from old falls. He loved to chase the edge of his own exhaustion. “There’s a consciousness in pain,” he’d say, cresting a hill, “a way the world narrows and clarifies. Most people avoid it, but it’s where you really learn.”

    It was on those rides that I saw the other side of him—a wry humor, an appetite for simple things. He knew the best bakery for apple turnovers, the secret underpasses that skirted traffic, the precise hour when the canal’s reflection turned gold. We’d stop on bridges, wind roaring, and he’d point out a heron or tell a story about his father, a coal miner with a genius for practical jokes.

    Back at the dorm, I tried to carry a piece of his presence into my routines. I kept a notebook for questions—about science, about the people I loved, about what kind of person I wanted to be. I paid attention to the small things: the warmth of clean sheets after a rainy ride, the taste of coffee with a dash of cinnamon, the slow, quiet company of someone who didn’t need to fill the silence.

    The years moved on. Exams, heartbreaks, late-night calls home to Slovenia. Mark was always near but never needy. He seemed to know when to step back and when to nudge you forward. Sometimes I wondered what he was running from, or whether he’d ever really belonged anywhere. But he was always generous with his stories, even the hard ones.

    One winter, his emails grew shorter. He canceled a few rides, blamed a pulled muscle, then a cold. I didn’t push. It wasn’t until summer, after months of silence, that someone told me Mark had passed away. Spinal cancer, they said. He’d known for a while, kept it close.

    I learned later that he’d left a note for our group under the Parliament oak, tucked in a tin with a worn-out bicycle chain and a book of poetry. In it, he’d written: “You’re all made of more than you know. Don’t waste too much time worrying about what you lack. Learn to notice what you’ve kept. And keep passing it on.”

    If you were to ask me today who I am, I’d answer with a memory of rain on window panes and the soft thud of a bicycle against the dormitory wall. I am patched together from slow walks and silent meals, from the wisdom of a pharmacist who never stopped being a student, from the laughter and loss of a half-dozen friends who gathered under a tree and promised to remember each other.

    I’ve spent years moving up and down that scale of consciousness—sometimes stuck in guilt, sometimes basking in acceptance, sometimes, rarely, catching a glimpse of the place called peace. I know now that you don’t stay at the top. You visit, and you bring back what you can—kindness, patience, a little more light.

    Mark’s voice is gone, but I carry his presence, especially in the damp and fog. When I wipe condensation from the window or bike through puddles, I remember what he taught me: that consciousness is practice, not destination. That the traditions we inherit—patience, curiosity, gentle humor—are the real shape of self.

    I am not easy to describe, nor do I wish to be. But if you’re reading this, maybe you’ll understand: I am a story told by many voices, the echo of a friend’s advice, the weight of a mentor’s absence, the memory of sunlight breaking through a Birmingham fog.

    If this finds you drifting between places, or longing for an anchor in the soft uncertainty of things, subscribe. We’ll share the shade of this digital oak together, trading small wisdoms, collecting rain, letting the story grow.

  • The Traditions We Leave Behind

    dust on old boxes—
    echoes of hands that shaped melinger in the light

    When I was a child, Sunday mornings began the same way. It didn’t matter if rain lashed the red-tiled roof or if sunlight tumbled in through the kitchen window, chasing the sleepy goldfish shadows on the linoleum. My parents would be at the kitchen table, a chipped enamel teapot between them, sorting coins into little piles for the week ahead.

    There was a peculiar gravity to the ritual, as if time slowed in those early hours. My mother, still in her robe, hair tied back with a faded green ribbon, would hum old Slovenian folk songs—her voice sometimes thin, sometimes fierce, the melody rising and falling with the mood of the house. My father sat opposite, thick fingers clumsy over the coins but patient as ever, telling stories about flour rationing or how neighbors once traded jam for shoe repair.

    Sometimes my sister and I would join them, not for the coins but for the comfort—the heat of the teapot, the soft dough rising on the stove for that day’s bread, the certainty that, for this moment, nothing else was expected of us. The coins clicked against the chipped plate, and the world outside—school, storms, politics, the endless tension between East and West—remained at bay.

    The ritual wasn’t about money, not really. It was about presence, about facing what you had and making peace with what you didn’t. It was about moving through each week with a kind of deliberate humility, eyes open to both the lack and the abundance. I never understood that as a child. I only knew the morning felt anchored and whole.

    Years later, after university and a blur of moves that took me from Ljubljana to Graz, and eventually to Bern, I found myself haunted by the memory of those Sundays. Mornings in Bern are quieter—no wood stove, no scent of fresh bread rising, only the distant rush of trams and the soft clatter of bicycle wheels on cobblestones. My apartment is filled with the useful clutter of adulthood: notebooks, half-finished mugs of coffee, the constant pulse of devices. There’s always something to do. Always a bill to pay or an email to answer.

    I catch myself walking past my own kitchen table without pausing. Most days I take my coffee standing, scroll news on my phone, let the hours slip by in a kind of half-attention. I don’t sort coins. I tap my phone and watch numbers flicker on a screen—groceries, electricity, rent—all automated, frictionless, silent. The discipline of that old ritual is gone.

    It’s not that life is worse now; if anything, it’s more comfortable. Yet sometimes, in the hush between tasks, I wonder what was lost in the trade. My parents’ tradition, born from necessity and patience, has faded in the shadow of convenience. I wonder if presence—real, gritty, wabi-sabi presence—requires friction. If ease and speed, for all their gifts, erode the careful balance between enough and too much.

    When I was home in Slovenia last spring, I found an old shoebox on a shelf above the cellar stairs. Inside were rolls of coins, some tied in brittle rubber bands, others loose. There were notes too—grocery lists from my mother, penciled calculations by my father, the faded stamp of a bakery he used to visit every Friday before work. I sat on the cold floor and ran my fingers over the coins, their edges smooth from decades of passing through so many hands.

    A memory floated up, clear as the river behind our house. My father, kneeling in the dirt garden, showing me how to count out seeds for planting—one for the earth, one for the birds, one for luck. “It’s not just money you count,” he’d said, brushing earth from his hands. “It’s everything. Seeds, hours, favors. You keep track, even when you’re not sure why. Someday you’ll be glad you did.”

    Back in Bern, the memory stayed with me, looping quietly behind daily routines. I’d pause over the washing machine, remember how my mother would ration detergent—one spoonful less, so it’d last through the week. I’d walk to the market and recall my parents weighing potatoes, choosing the imperfect ones because they cooked down sweeter. Their rituals weren’t just about thrift—they were about care, about seeing the world as something you were responsible for, even in the smallest ways.

    There’s a jar of coins on my desk now. Not because I need them, but as a kind of touchstone. Some mornings, I tip the coins out, watch them scatter, pick out a few to buy bread or pay for coffee. It’s a pointless gesture, maybe, but I like the sound—the soft clink, the gentle assertion that life is measured, in part, by the rituals we keep.

    Still, most mornings are quiet, unremarkable. I drink coffee by the window, watch people pass below, wonder what invisible traditions guide their days. My neighbors, a young couple from Italy, set aside Tuesday evenings for making fresh pasta, inviting whoever happens to be free. The old man across the hall waters his plants every Sunday at exactly eight, humming a Schubert waltz as he moves from room to room. We build new rituals, almost by accident, as the old ones slip away.

    A wise friend once said to me over lunch, “You can’t build a good life by accident. You have to see it clearly, make conscious choices, and let small, good habits compound quietly, day after day.” It sounded simple, but it landed with the weight of truth. That’s the lesson hidden in my parents’ ritual—even if the ritual itself didn’t survive my move to the city, my tumble into modern convenience.

    There’s a kind of quiet, wabi-sabi wisdom in accepting that some traditions disappear for good reason. The world changes. The pace quickens. We trade coins for swipes, conversations for clicks. And yet, even as old habits fade, the impulse behind them—the need for presence, for deliberate attention, for gratitude—remains. Sometimes, what’s worth keeping isn’t the ritual itself, but the spirit that animated it.

    I try to carry that forward, imperfectly. Once a month, I balance my accounts by hand, scribbling numbers in a paper notebook, just to feel the weight of each choice. Some days I pause over a loaf of bread, break it with a friend, share a story about old coins and early mornings. I keep a single, chipped teacup in my cupboard, saved from my parents’ kitchen, as a daily reminder of the mornings that shaped me.

    Tradition changes shape, sometimes vanishing altogether, but its echo lingers if you listen for it. In summer, when the world slows and the days stretch long into evening, I sometimes walk to the river and count the ripples, think about the way time carries us forward, each hour slipping into the next.

    There are other traditions I haven’t kept. My father’s practice of mending shoes—patching soles and polishing leather until they shone. My mother’s Sunday soup, simmered all day from bones and root vegetables, the house filling with the smell of patience. The village custom of knocking on doors with gifts of apples in autumn. I miss these, too, but I don’t regret their loss. New customs grow in their place—city walks, text messages that span continents, potluck dinners with friends from everywhere and nowhere.

    I’ve learned to see ritual not as something fixed, but as a living thing. It grows, it withers, it flowers in unexpected places. The important thing is not to cling to the form, but to honor the need: for presence, for gratitude, for connection.

    Some nights, I catch myself wishing for one more Sunday morning at that old table—coins clicking, teapot steaming, the soft hum of my mother’s song floating through the kitchen. But then I remember what those mornings gave me: the patience to pause, the courage to count what matters, the wisdom to let go of what doesn’t.

    If you find yourself longing for a tradition you’ve lost, or worrying about the ones you never kept, remember: what matters is not the ritual itself, but the attention you bring to this moment. The tradition of presence is always available, wherever you are.

    If this resonates, subscribe. I’ll keep writing. Maybe together, we’ll invent new rituals worth keeping—ones that honor the past, shape the present, and make peace with the quiet, beautiful loss that comes with moving forward.

    Daily writing prompt
    What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?
    View all responses

  • A typical day

    I stepped out for a walk around five. The river was high from last week’s rain. Cyclists skimmed past, wheels hissing on wet pavement. I passed the old bookshop and almost went in, but instead kept moving, letting the evening air clear my mind. I stopped on the bridge, leaned on the railing, and let the city’s noise become a soft, distant music.

    There was nothing special about today, not at first. No revelations, no sudden change in direction. Just a sequence of hours, filled and emptied, a day as ordinary as bread and basil and the sound of trams at dusk.

    If you asked, was today typical? I’d say yes. But also: no. Today was typical the way a river is typical—always the same, always changing.

  • Describing Myself, Quietly

    shadows in the park
    carry all I ever was—
    and what I might be

    I’ve often wondered what people really mean when they ask you to describe yourself. Is it a list of things you’ve done, the jobs you held, the way you take your coffee, or is it the sum of the small choices that shape the days no one ever sees? If you ask me now, I’d rather answer with a story, and not just because stories travel further than facts. Stories are what’s left behind when the rest is gone.

    The best stories, in my experience, never announce themselves. They just happen, quietly, like two people meeting in a city that never really sleeps.

    For a few years, my life drifted, half-lived between cities: Ljubljana, Berlin, Tokyo. Work was always piecemeal—translation here, a little writing there, odd jobs that left no trace. Tokyo was where things settled, if only because it was where they fell apart.

    It was early autumn. A damp chill hung over the city, and evenings pressed in fast. I was living in a small apartment with paper-thin walls above a bakery that started its day at four in the morning. Most days, I’d wake to the sound of metal trays, yeast blooming, the soft percussion of kneading dough.

    One night, after a failed pitch and a dinner that tasted mostly of exhaustion, I found myself under the red glow of a lantern outside a yakitori stall in Koenji. I wasn’t looking for company, but company found me. He was older, maybe by a decade, with a fox’s grin and a manner that suggested he’d never hurried in his life. His name was Kenta.

    We shared a plate of mushrooms and chicken skin, neither of us talking much. After a while, he asked, “What do you build?” I hesitated. Build? I thought of spreadsheets and emails and half-finished blog posts.

    “Nothing much,” I said. “Words, sometimes. Stories, when I can.”

    He nodded. “Words are good. You can build a whole world from words, if you’re patient enough. But only if you know how to sell them, too.”

    I shrugged. “I’ve never been good at selling.”

    He smiled, unfazed. “Nobody is, until they realize there’s nothing left to lose.”

    Kenta showed up in my life the way seasons shift in Japan—not suddenly, but all at once, as if he’d always been there. Sometimes we’d meet at dawn for coffee in a corner shop near Yoyogi Park. The owner would nod, place two cups of strong, slightly burnt coffee on the counter, and let the jazz records play in the background.

    We talked about work, but not the way people usually do. He believed in leverage—a word he never actually said, but always circled around. “If you can make something that helps people, something only you can make,” he told me once, stirring his coffee slowly, “then you never have to chase luck. It comes to you, quietly, while you’re doing the work.”

    Other days, we’d walk the long road behind Meiji Shrine, the air thick with the smell of cedar and wet leaves. I told him about my first months in Tokyo, the loneliness that never quite went away, the freedom that sometimes felt like floating in space.

    He laughed. “Freedom is beautiful, but it’s not a home. You have to choose, sooner or later, what you’re willing to stick with. Most people never do. They wait for someone else to choose for them.”

    I asked him how he got started. He talked about failed businesses, late nights learning to code in rented rooms, and a stretch of months living off convenience store onigiri. “The trick is to fail quickly,” he said. “Try, learn, and cut your losses. If something’s not working, let it go. And when you find what does work—be relentless. Pour everything in. Let it grow.”

    Sometimes we’d meet in quieter corners of the city. An old jazz bar in Ginza, a bakery that sold thick slices of toast and black coffee, or a bench in Ueno Park as dusk settled over the carp pond. In each place, Kenta seemed to carry the same stillness, the same quiet optimism.

    He taught me that money isn’t the goal. “Money is a tool. Use it, don’t worship it. Build assets, not hours. Write, code, paint, teach—whatever it is, make sure it keeps working when you sleep.”

    His lessons never came as advice, more as reminders of things I’d already known but forgotten. He spoke of compound effort, of the power of small, daily practice. “People want success fast, but the world rewards patience. And clarity. If you know what you’re doing and why, it’s easier to let go of everything else.”

    I started to change without realizing. I stopped saying yes to work that paid but meant nothing. I focused on writing stories for people who wanted to read, not for algorithms or empty likes. I built small things—guides, translations, a series of blog posts about cycling along the Tama River. I paid attention to what felt easy, what drew me back again and again.

    Kenta called these “frictionless skills.” “When you find something that feels light, it’s usually because you’re good at it. Do more of that. Don’t try to be someone else’s idea of valuable.”

    One night, after a long walk along the Sumida River, I asked him what he would say if someone asked him to describe himself.

    He thought for a long time, watching a ferry cross beneath a bridge. “I’m someone who makes things. And someone who lets things go, when the time comes.”

    If you asked me now, I would tell you: I am a collection of places, seasons, and small routines. I am friendships that return after long absences. I am unfinished work and quiet mornings and long walks through cities that change even as I stay the same.

    I am not rich in the way magazines talk about, but I am free. Free in the way that comes from building slowly, letting go quickly, and returning to the things that matter. I know how to work hard, but also how to rest. I know the value of patience, and the joy of giving something away with no expectation of return.

    I have learned to recognize what is enough.

  • The Last Dinosaur

    a mind set alight
    by soft screens and dull fingers—
    where did silence go?

    If I could bring back one dinosaur, it wouldn’t be a tyrannosaurus or a long-necked brontosaurus swaying its tail over primeval trees. It would be a quiet one. One we forgot existed. A creature more like a breath than a beast. The kind that disappeared not with fire or ice—but with distraction.

    I’m talking about the time before smartphones.

    Some people remember it like a foggy memory. Others, younger, treat it as legend. But I remember it clearly. Not as nostalgia, but as a state of mind. A way of being. I grew up in a small Slovenian town tucked between sleepy hills and fields that buzzed in the summer heat. We had phones, sure—but the kind attached to walls. With spiraled cords and the weight of commitment. You couldn’t take them on walks or into bed or into your moments of boredom. Boredom had space. It stretched. It grew things inside you.

    There was a bench near the end of the gravel road where I’d sit with my grandfather, who had a voice like walnut bark and hands shaped by time. We didn’t speak much. Sometimes he’d point to a distant bird or start whittling a stick with a pocketknife he carried everywhere. I would just sit. No screen. No ping. Just the weight of sky above us and the silent rhythm of grass in the breeze.

    That’s the dinosaur I’d bring back.

    I noticed the shift slowly. First, it was the emails. Then, the pings. Then, the buzzing in pockets, even when there was no message—a phantom itch in the mind. Suddenly, we were all carrying mirrors in our pockets, asking them: Who am I? Am I enough? Has someone validated me yet?

    In Tokyo once, I saw a man cross Shibuya with a flip phone pressed to his ear and a book in his other hand. A real book. Pages fluttering in the breeze. He walked slow, deliberate. The crowds moved around him like water around a rock. He wasn’t lost. He was anchored. I followed him for a few blocks. Not because I needed to go that way, but because it felt like walking behind an extinct creature.

    Phones became cigarettes for the mind. We light them out of habit, not need. We inhale notifications, scrolling for dopamine like miners sifting gravel for gold. And like smoke, they fill every space—waiting rooms, bathrooms, friendships. We breathe them in, forgetting what clean air tasted like.

    Wabi-sabi teaches that imperfection is beauty, and that presence—true presence—is not polished or planned. It’s the rough edge of a chipped teacup, the slow settling of dust on an old windowsill. It’s the kind of silence that can only exist if you let it.

    I remember a woman I once dated in Barcelona. She had a rule: no phones during meals. At first, it unnerved me. My fingers would twitch toward the table where it lay, face down, like a scolded child. But then the conversation would bloom. Slowly, with hesitations and missteps and laughter. One night, she made lentils with orange peel and cloves, and we talked until the candles melted down to soft wax puddles. We told stories not because we had to post them—but because they were alive and trembling inside us, needing release.

    When I think of the dinosaur, I think of that dinner.

    I don’t want to live in a cave. I love technology. I’m grateful for maps that talk and books that fit in my pocket and music that follows me through cities. But I’ve learned to carve out protected hours. I turn my phone off when I hike. I leave it charging in another room when I read. I take long baths without podcasts. Sometimes, I just sit by the fig tree my father brought back from the Adriatic and listen to the wind press through its leaves. That’s enough.

    There was a night in Kyoto, during one of those unbearably humid Augusts, where I sat beneath a paper lantern swaying from an old temple roof. Around me, the world buzzed. But inside, there was stillness. I had no Wi-Fi. No notifications. Just the clink of ice in a glass and the soft hum of a furin catching wind. That moment stayed with me. I wrote it down. Not for a blog. Not for social media. But because it meant something.

    The dinosaur isn’t about going backward. It’s about remembering. That deep, slow presence is not outdated—it’s endangered. But it still exists. It lives in walks taken without agenda. In eye contact that lingers. In the silence between thoughts that isn’t filled by a scroll. In the way light falls on a table when no one is trying to capture it.

    The wabi-sabi lesson is this: you don’t have to fix every moment. You don’t have to make every second productive. Sometimes, a quiet, imperfect, unshared afternoon is more alive than a thousand carefully curated posts.

    Let the dinosaur return.
    Let it walk beside you in the quiet moments.
    Let it remind you of the weight of your own presence.

    If you ever spot it—don’t chase it. Just sit beside it.

    And if you’re still here, reading this far, maybe something in you remembers too.

    Subscribe, if you like. But not because you’re chasing something.
    Because maybe you’re starting to sit still again.
    And maybe you’re ready to share the silence.

  • The Ticket

    two paper sparrows
    folded in my open hand—
    a wind waits to lift

    The envelope came without a return address. It was cream-colored, not quite white, the kind that feels thick to the touch and makes a sound when you slide your finger across it. I found it one morning resting against my front door like a tired traveler, tucked in beneath the daily paper and an advertisement for kitchen tiles. It held two plane tickets.

    The destination wasn’t listed—just a voucher code, the kind you redeem online. Open-ended, flexible, valid anywhere on Earth, so long as you left within 90 days.

    I brewed a strong cup of coffee, the kind I picked up a habit for after my third visit to Ljubljana, and sat on the balcony watching the fig tree. It swayed slightly in the summer breeze, leaves catching light like small hands reaching out for something just out of reach. The tree was a gift from my father, or more accurately, a descendant of a branch he once smuggled in his suitcase from a Mediterranean island. It had grown stubborn and tall, taking root in a too-small pot, just like me.

    The first thought, oddly, wasn’t where I would go, but who I would bring. That question sat heavier than expected. Friends are scattered like seeds across continents. Some had responsibilities, others wouldn’t understand the way I travel—not for sightseeing, but for something quieter.

    So I waited.

    The answer came a few mornings later, walking through the hills behind my neighborhood. I passed a bakery just as it opened, the smell of warm bread lingering in the air like a promise. An old woman outside nodded at me, cradling her paper bag like it held something sacred. That fleeting moment—it settled something. I knew then: I’d go to Yakushima.

    I had seen it once on a map, off the southern tip of Japan. A forest island, dense with rain and cedar trees older than memory. I once read that it rains there 300 days a year, and the moss grows so thick you could lie down in it and not feel the ground.

    I invited no one. The second ticket I gave to a stranger at the airport—a student from Finland, who reminded me of myself at twenty: restless, kind, and just unsure enough to say yes.

    We didn’t sit together on the plane. I watched a documentary on the mind and slept through the landing.

    Yakushima was quiet in a way cities can’t imitate. Every path in the forest led somewhere, though most of the signs were unreadable to me. It didn’t matter. The silence was fluent. The rain was a presence, not a disturbance. It smoothed over everything.

    On the second day, I found a cedar tree with a hollow large enough to step inside. I did, without thinking. Inside, the smell was damp earth and time. I took out a notebook, the same one I’ve used since that winter in Lisbon, and wrote down one sentence:

    “To find your path, sit where there are no roads.”

    That night, back at the guesthouse, the host offered me fish grilled over a small flame. We didn’t speak much. He refilled my tea, I nodded. Outside, the rain fell without pause. I thought about the student, wherever they were now, and hoped the second ticket had found its way somewhere meaningful.

    On the third day, I rented a bicycle and pedaled slowly along the coast. I stopped at a vending machine in the middle of nowhere and bought a hot can of coffee. I held it against my face before I drank it. Warm aluminum. Bittersweet. A quiet joy.

    I passed a group of schoolchildren walking in the other direction, holding umbrellas that were far too large for their small bodies. One of them waved. I waved back.

    That night, I dreamed of a younger version of myself walking through a forest just like this one, calling out names I no longer recognized.

    Travel, I’ve learned, is not escape. It’s not indulgence. It’s a return. To something forgotten. To versions of yourself hidden under the weight of daily repetition. The flight isn’t the freedom. The silence that follows is.

    Sometimes, you sit beside strangers who tell you the story of their entire life between two train stations. Sometimes you miss your stop.

    Sometimes the light slants just right through the trees and you remember the name of your first dog. Or your mother’s hands wringing water from a towel. Or the exact way the sand felt under your feet on a childhood beach. These moments don’t announce themselves. They arrive like the wind.

    One afternoon, I found a shrine tucked beneath the roots of an enormous tree. There were small offerings—coins, folded paper, a pale blue marble. I left behind a button that had fallen off my coat years ago but that I kept in my wallet out of habit. It felt like the right exchange.

    By the seventh day, I had forgotten what my own voice sounded like. I took long walks without direction, let myself be guided by smells and sounds: frying oil, a distant bell, the rustle of something unseen.

    I watched a heron take off from a stream and vanish into the fog.

    People talk about accumulating experiences like stamps in a passport, but I no longer care about the count. I care about the depth. The quiet echo a place leaves in your chest long after you’ve gone. The taste of sea salt on your lips at dusk. The kindness of a stranger refilling your tea without asking.

    And so, if you handed me two tickets again, I’d do the same.

    Choose a place off the map. Give one away. And carry nothing but questions.

    If this stirred something in you, subscribe and walk this winding path with me. The road is long, but sometimes, the right words are a kind of travel too.

  • Kitsune

    a fox slips unseen
    through shadows of memory—
    lessons in disguise

    People often ask about my nickname—Kitsune. It’s an old story, older than me, older perhaps than the mountains in which it was first whispered.

    In Japanese folklore, Kitsune are foxes with magical abilities. They appear as tricksters, shape-shifters, and guides. They bring both wisdom and chaos, depending on how they’re treated and what they choose to reveal. Foxes in these stories aren’t simply clever animals; they’re symbols of transformation, cunning intelligence, and hidden knowledge.

    My grandmother used to tell me these tales when I was a child, sitting on the porch at dusk, her voice softening with the darkening sky. She’d say, “Be careful, the fox will always teach you a lesson—but not always the one you expect.”

    The nickname stuck in my teenage years. Maybe it was because I moved quietly, never fully revealing myself. Or maybe it was because I liked to shift forms, always adapting to the environment around me. One moment deeply engaged, the next slipping away, elusive and free.

    As I grew older, Kitsune became more than a name. It became a way of thinking, a reminder of certain truths I learned early on, though it took years to fully understand them.

    One lesson stands out vividly: the art of disguise is not deception—it’s adaptation. Life demands a constant shifting, a continual evolution. Those who resist change break against it. Those who adapt flourish quietly, effortlessly.

    I’ve found the same truth reflected in the most profound insights I’ve encountered. Happiness and success don’t come from brute force or fixed identities. They come from flexibility, from knowing when to move silently and when to step into the open.

    Another thing Kitsune stories teach us: wisdom doesn’t necessarily lie in complex answers, but in carefully phrased questions. The greatest trick of the fox isn’t deception—it’s prompting you to question what you already believe.

    Years later, when traveling through the countryside of Kyoto, I met an old man who ran a small tea house. He poured me tea and asked why people seek out temples and shrines. Before I could answer, he smiled and said, “They’re looking for what’s already inside them. Sometimes you must become something else to see who you truly are.”

    I recognized the fox’s lesson in his words. Transformation, change, the quiet evolution of self—that’s what Kitsune has always symbolized for me. It’s about having the courage to constantly reshape your identity, to never hold onto any version of yourself too tightly.

    If I’ve learned anything, it’s that our greatest strength comes from understanding we are always unfinished, always becoming something new. Like the Kitsune, we move through shadows and sunlight, shifting, learning, teaching.

    But there’s a deeper story behind my nickname—a memory etched in the quiet summer nights of my youth, when cicadas sang themselves hoarse, and the world shrank to the comforting circle of lantern-light. My grandmother would sit patiently, weaving tales that blurred the boundaries between the known and the unknowable.

    One night, she told me of a fox who fell in love with a mortal, disguising itself as a woman to live a human life. It stayed, year after year, bearing children, tending crops, and growing old. But inevitably, its true nature surfaced. One quiet night, beneath a heavy moon, its tail slipped from beneath its kimono. The villagers drove it away, back into the wilderness, where it belonged.

    At the end of her story, my grandmother looked into the dark trees and whispered, “We all have tails hidden beneath our coats. It’s not about hiding forever. It’s about knowing when to reveal who we truly are.”

    Years passed. I traveled far from that porch, across oceans and continents, seeking something elusive. I found that no matter where I went, the essence of Kitsune trailed me like a gentle shadow—always changing shape, always guiding me toward deeper understanding.

    In a tiny café in Paris, a stranger told me a story about a fox he’d seen in the countryside, sitting silently by the roadside as though waiting for him specifically. It reminded me of my grandmother’s voice, murmuring softly into the night air. In a temple garden in Kyoto, I watched a fox statue, worn smooth by countless hands, and realized how deeply the symbolism had permeated my life.

    It’s strange, isn’t it? How certain stories follow us, becoming part of our own narratives until we’re unsure where folklore ends and our lives begin.

    I’ve become comfortable with my fox nature—the shapeshifter who moves between worlds, always learning, always adapting. I’ve learned that clarity often comes from embracing confusion, that wisdom emerges from accepting uncertainty. Like the Kitsune, my greatest lessons have come from unexpected places, disguised in quiet conversations and subtle experiences.

    Life, it seems, is less about finding the answers and more about becoming comfortable with questions that never fully resolve.

    If this resonates with you—if you’ve ever felt the call to transform, to move quietly through life, constantly adapting and evolving—subscribe and stay close. The journey is richer when traveled together.

  • The Quiet Power of Iteration

    mistakes falling soft
    like rain on an empty street—
    shaping tomorrow

    There’s something gentle yet ruthless about learning. The process isn’t loud, not usually. It’s not a spectacle. Most of the time, it happens quietly, in the spaces between one choice and another. It lives in the subtle shifts, the careful recalibration, the willingness to leave something behind and move forward.

    For a long time, I feared mistakes. Not the small ones—those were fine—but the deeper kind, the ones that shape the years. I thought that if I chose incorrectly, the path back would be impossible to find. But somewhere along the line, I learned that life isn’t linear. It curves back onto itself, gently, offering new paths when old ones vanish.

    Iterating quickly taught me something important: no decision is final. If you’re awake, if you’re aware, every misstep becomes just another guidepost. And the sooner you recognize that a path isn’t yours, the faster you can find the one that is.

    I met a man once who told me his life was a series of false starts. He smiled when he said it, eyes soft and untroubled. “It wasn’t failure,” he explained, stirring his coffee thoughtfully. “It was editing. You try something, it doesn’t fit. You cut it out and keep going.”

    That’s the secret, perhaps—to keep going. To trust that each edit brings you closer to a form that’s uniquely yours. You learn, you iterate, you discard what doesn’t serve. And when you find something that does, you stop editing and start nurturing. You become optimistic, relentlessly so, knowing that optimism, when applied consistently, compounds into something solid and real.

    This doesn’t happen overnight. Real growth never does. It’s a slow accrual, layer upon layer, subtle and profound. But it starts from those early moments of clarity—realizing you’ve found something worth investing in deeply.

    So, learn fast. Adjust quicker. Don’t fear discarding what’s not right. The journey to finding your true path is littered with discarded drafts. Each one, however imperfect, shapes you, guides you closer.

    And once you find that quiet resonance, hold onto it with optimism. Let it compound. Let it grow roots. Because that’s where the real magic lies—in the slow, steady accumulation of small, clear choices, made consciously and without regret.

    That’s how you build something lasting.

    That’s how you live.

  • The Places That Shifted While I Was Away

    There was a time when I thought movement was everything. I chased it endlessly, as if stillness might swallow me whole if I let my feet stop their dance. My life unfolded in boarding passes and receipts with faded print, crumpled at the bottom of a backpack. Cities I loved for their anonymity; streets I treasured because they held no memories of my past. A comfortable kind of solitude settled over me when I walked unknown avenues, the hum of an unfamiliar language sliding past my ears like water.

    It was addictive, that feeling—the quiet thrill of displacement. Airports became as familiar as my apartment, maybe more so. I recognized the melancholy of early departures, the metallic chill of luggage carts, the faded smell of coffee and stale perfume in the departure lounge. Strangers drifting past like unfinished stories, their faces illuminated briefly by departure boards that flashed and shifted, leaving ghostly afterimages.

    But lately, I’ve started to notice a different kind of displacement: the quiet sadness of coming back to a place you call home, only to realize it moved forward without you. A bakery closes, replaced by a laundromat with neon lights too bright for comfort. A familiar face no longer appears at the café window. Seasons drift quietly past; I return to find leaves that were green now brittle and scattered across the pavement. The small details—details I never thought to notice—suddenly sharpen into focus, and I understand the silent trade I’ve made.

    Roots. It’s a word that never held much meaning for me, until it suddenly did. My home had always felt temporary, an apartment furnished with just enough care to suggest I belonged there without ever truly committing. Books stacked neatly but unread, waiting. Dishes carefully chosen but rarely used. The furniture minimal, as though too many possessions might pin me down like a butterfly under glass. I wanted to keep my options open, to slip away at a moment’s notice.

    But now, something inside me longs to see the way morning sunlight inches along the kitchen floor over weeks and months, to understand precisely when the birds return from wherever they go each winter, to become part of the small, hidden rhythms that make a place truly home. When you stay put long enough, the days begin to layer gently upon each other, accumulating memories like dust on forgotten shelves.

    I suppose travel, in a way, allowed me to avoid this deeper kind of seeing. It let me remain weightless, skimming over the surface of life, sampling places and moments without ever sinking deeply into them. Travel teaches you much—how to navigate unfamiliar cities, how to make quick friends and quicker goodbyes—but it doesn’t teach you what to do when you stay. What to do when the stillness returns, and you’re faced with the quiet question of who you are without the motion.

    Now, I find myself caught between these worlds: the restless beauty of perpetual motion and the slow, patient grace of staying still. There’s something seductive about waking in the same bed every morning, knowing exactly how the light will spill through the curtains, how the floorboards creak underfoot, how the street below sounds as it comes alive. There’s comfort, too, in faces that recognize yours, in conversations that pick up where they left off days or weeks or months before.

    But the trade is this: when you choose roots, you leave behind that other life, the one measured in distances rather than days, in departures rather than returns. And that other life—though I tell myself otherwise—was beautiful in its own right. Each journey reshaped me, carving away layers until something essential emerged, something clearer, lighter.

    Yet, the longing remains complicated, tangled. I know I can’t have both worlds entirely. Life doesn’t work like that, no matter how carefully you try to balance it. To embrace one choice fully means to gently close a door on another. That’s the quiet price we pay for living fully, for loving deeply, for finally standing still long enough to let life catch up.

    So my future travel plans? I don’t know. Perhaps my next journey won’t involve planes or trains at all. Maybe it’ll be the slow exploration of a familiar street or the careful tending of plants on a sunlit balcony. Maybe it’s the subtle shift from moving through places to letting places move through me.

    Because lately, I’m beginning to think the real journey isn’t out there, mapped on distant shores, but here, in the quiet act of staying put, watching closely, and learning at last to call someplace home.

  • The Tree That Traveled

    a fig in a pot—
    Mediterranean dreams
    take root on my deck

    Somewhere along the glittering belly of the Mediterranean, on a family trip I can no longer locate precisely—maybe Greece, maybe southern Italy, maybe that quiet village with the cheap grilled fish and the loud waves—my father picked up a fig branch.

    Not a fruit. Not a seed. A branch. Just a piece of living wood, snapped at the right place, still wet at the end. He carried it through customs like it was just some leftover twig, wrapped in an old sandwich bag and the stubbornness of someone who refuses to let things die.

    We had spent that holiday walking to beaches with plastic chairs and palm-sized beer cans, ducking into shade like stray cats. The rental house smelled like salt and citrus. My mother made lentils with whatever she could find. My father drank the local wine and talked about soil as if it were an old friend.

    In the mornings, we would walk down to a seaside restaurant that opened early. The coffee was dark and thick, almost like oil, served in small cups that forced you to sip slowly. My father loved that. I remember dipping bread into the garlicky broth of školjke na buzaru—Dalmatian-style mussels, steeped in white wine and parsley and enough garlic to make your mouth sing. We’d wipe the sauce from the bowl with hunks of bread, eating in silence, the kind that meant satisfaction.

    On one of those days—maybe the day the power went out and we ate watermelon by candlelight—he found the fig tree. It was on a small island nearby, one only reachable by a rugged path that wound between scrub and sunburnt rock. We’d gone out for a walk, no plan, just the pull of a distant view. My mom was behind us, carrying his cigarettes. She gave them to him on strict ratios, otherwise he would smoke too much. And there, between two rocks, the fig tree stood. No business being there. The roots gripped the stone like an argument. He stood in front of it for a long time. Then broke off a branch.

    He brought back a grapevine, too. And at first, it didn’t seem like much would come of it. But he potted it anyway, with that quiet faith of his. Summers passed, and against all odds, the grapevine grew. It wrapped around the trellis and started to fruit—little green grapes, tight and tart at first, then softer, sweeter as August deepened.

    These days, he brings saplings of the grapevine to me, too. Says, “They’ll grow. Just give them time.” I nod but don’t always believe it. And then they do. Little leaves pushing out like promises. Maybe in fifteen years I’ll have my own grapes. Maybe more.

    The fig, though—she led the way.

    He put it in water the day we got back. Then in a small pot, then a larger one. Every season, it stretched. Even through the brittle Swiss winters, even when the light came late and left early.

    Fifteen years later, it shades my balcony.

    It leans slightly south, as if it still remembers the direction of the sea. The leaves are broad, with edges that seem drawn by a child. They make the light dapple, which I like. I drink coffee under them in the summer and sometimes nap with my feet tucked under the chair like a cat.

    There are days when I look at it and think of all those long car rides we used to take. The ones where my sister and I fought over who got the window seat. Where the maps folded like origami in the glovebox. Where time slowed the closer we got to salt air.

    I remember one summer in Croatia. We camped by the water, and a storm blew through so suddenly it ripped our tent clean out of the earth. My father laughed, holding the metal frame like a kite. That same summer he taught me how to skip stones, to find the flat ones by their weight.

    The fig tree now grows in the same motion. Skipping, almost. It doesn’t rise straight. It coils a little, like a sentence he never finished.

    What surprises me most is not that it grew—but that it thrives. It gives fruit. Wrinkled, sagging, dark-purple things that taste like summer held too long in the mouth. The older and uglier they look, the better they are.

    My father taught me how to cut it. He said, “Never waste a branch. Each one’s a maybe.”

    Every spring, I cut it back and root the cuttings. I give them to friends, to neighbors, to strangers who ask about it. Once, I brought a cutting to my friend Yuki in Kyoto. She planted it on her tiny balcony, and now it’s part of her morning tea ritual. She texts me pictures. Says it looks like it remembers me.

    There’s something strange and soft in knowing a piece of wood carried across borders now lives second lives in other homes. That somewhere in Tokyo, in Ljubljana, in the back of a friend’s house in Zurich, the fig has children.

    On its limbs hang wind chimes I brought back from Asia. Glass furins from Japan, thin as breath, each with a clapper that sings when the wind remembers to move. I bought one at Kasusai Temple, during a sweating August afternoon, the air heavy with crickets and incense. It rang once, sharply, and I knew I had to carry it home.

    In the hottest months, when the air swells and time feels syrupy, the chimes remind me—it gets cooler. Wait. It gets cooler.

    The fig drops another leaf. Bears another fruit. Holds another shadow.

    I watch it from the kitchen window. Some mornings it seems older than me. Other days, just beginning.

    One summer I forgot to water it for five days. I was in Berlin, distracted by music and strangers and the shape of the sky at night. When I came back, the fig looked tired but not defeated. I whispered to it. Apologized. It forgave me like only plants do—slowly and fully.

    Another summer, during a breakup, I repotted it. Needed something to dig into. I trimmed the roots, held the heavy base like it was a person. Dirt under my nails. Quiet work. My hands stopped shaking. By autumn, the fig had new shoots.

    It became a rhythm.

    To water the tree. To check the leaves. To let it speak in the way only silent things speak.

    There’s an old story my father tells about a tree that remembers every word spoken under its branches. I think of that sometimes when I sit beneath the fig. What does it know about me now?

    It has heard my phone calls. My confessions. My half-finished songs. It has seen me sick, dancing, bored, in love. It has seen me leave and come back. It has watched the years pass like trucks on a highway—loud and unremarkable.

    It knows when I’m not sleeping. It knows when I’m trying to.

    I wish I could go back to that moment. My father in his sandals, sweat on his neck, breaking off that branch. Me behind him, impatient, wanting ice cream. My mother with a towel over her head, carrying oranges in her beach bag. And the cigarettes, of course, tucked in her hand like small secrets. She rationed them strictly, knowing otherwise he’d burn through them by noon.

    The sea was warm. The sky too blue to describe.

    We didn’t know what we were carrying.

    Just a stick.

    Just a maybe.

    Now it grows on my balcony. In a country it didn’t belong to. In a life it never asked for but claimed anyway.

    The last time I visited my parents, the grapevine stood proud near the shed. Twisting, strong, bursting with fruit. What once sat in a crooked pot now climbed, bloomed, and spilled light green clusters across a wall.

    And in a paper bag, my father handed me new saplings. “They’ll grow,” he said.

    I looked at them, unsure. But I planted them. Now they stand in quiet corners of my terrace, waiting. Maybe one day, I’ll be writing about them too. Maybe in fifteen years, I’ll sit under their shade.

    And remember.

  • Farewell to the Forest Guardian

    fur against wood grain
    the breath of the forest stills—
    one watcher goes home

    Our cat died today.

    A blue-black shape, more shadow than feline. A kind of animal you don’t choose, not really. It shows up. It eats your dog’s food, hisses at your other cats, and settles on your porch like it owns the place. My mother called it a gipsy, though the word doesn’t sit well these days. Even the vet once mentioned, gently, that the name had aged poorly. But that’s the countryside—names linger long after their meanings crack.

    The cat never minded. Never answered to it either.

    It simply stayed.

    Fourteen years. It outlived every other animal that roamed our land.

    It grew up alongside our dog and seemed to think itself kin. It defended the house like a soldier, fought anything that sniffed too close—other cats, martens, whatever creature dared to blink the wrong way. A wild thing, yes, but also oddly noble. As if it had signed a secret pact with the land to remain.

    Around year ten, the vet diagnosed it with feline immunodeficiency. We waited for the decline, but it never came. Not really. It stayed fierce. Watchful. Once, when all its teeth had to be pulled from some inflamed cruelty inside its mouth, we thought that would be the end.

    But my mother, careful and absurdly tender, cut up its meat every morning. Placed it on the same stone slab. Called it softly, like she always had. And the cat—grateful, defiant—ate.

    It escaped the vet twice.

    I mean that literally. Slipped out of their grasp, disappeared through a window, and found its way home across meadows and forest. Both times. After we had warned them. After they’d smiled politely and nodded. Yet somehow 2 days later, even despite heavy rain and a thunderstorm it found its way home.

    It came back – of course it did. With a scratch on its face. Leaves in its fur. Tail high like a banner.

    In the last year it got thinner. Not suddenly. Like snowfall that doesn’t melt. It simply faded by degrees.

    There was a shift. It no longer wanted to pee outside. Something had scared it, maybe a fox, maybe just the dark. So it stayed inside at night, pacing, yowling at doors not for freedom, but to keep the world in check. Like a sentry who doesn’t know how to retire.

    I visited home two weeks ago. The cat met me on the steps like always. Rubbed against my shin. Stared with the same amber gaze. A little slower, but still genki. It always knew I was family, even after long absences.

    And though I didn’t say it aloud, I think I said goodbye.

    We always kind of know, don’t we?

    My mother said it collapsed in the night. They warmed it. Spoke to it. And in the morning brought it to the vet for an X-ray.

    No kidneys left. Gone. Whether by infection or time.

    And with that, the last protector of our house was gone.

    There’s something about animals like that—they’re not just pets. They mark eras. They are anchors. Coordinates for time.

    I think what struck me most was my mother’s quiet calculation. When asked if they’d get another animal, she said no.

    She said, “If it lives to fifteen, I might be too old to care for it.”

    And that hit like something sharp and invisible. Like hearing a drawer close somewhere deep in the house.

    People talk a lot about grief. But they forget that the first sensation is often not sadness.

    It’s space.

    The absence of paw-steps. The silence where a yowl used to be. The unopened packet of food. The fact that nothing needs protection now—but something still watches.

    When the trees shake at night, when the gate creaks, I still imagine it’s there. Watching. One last patrol.

    It lived a good life. It was loved. And it knew.

    In the end, that’s all any of us can ask for.

  • Hunger as a Kind of Music

    empty bowl waiting
    quietly, the air thickens—
    hunger learns to sing

    I used to think comfort lived at the bottom of a bowl. Steam curling upward like language in a language you used to know. Bread torn by hand. Rice still clinging to the sides of a lacquered bowl. The soft fatigue of a body fed.

    But lately, comfort arrives in the space where food used to be. In the pause between wanting and having. In the long, slow hunger that doesn’t demand but inquires.

    There is a kind of clarity that arrives on hour sixteen. A sharpening. Edges become more pronounced—not just around your thoughts, but around your intentions. The noise thins. The body, unburdened by digestion, listens better.

    You begin to notice things. The scent of water. The curl of your own breath. The pulse in your fingers. Hunger, when held gently, becomes less of a demand and more of a companion. Like a child tugging at your sleeve not to be fed, but to be seen.

    A man once told me, over bitter tea in a mountain cabin, that we confuse comfort with dullness. “People seek the absence of friction,” he said. “But what they need is the presence of refinement.”

    I think he meant that when you remove the unnecessary—food, noise, even conversation—what’s left is a self that isn’t blurred by indulgence. A self you might not recognize, but should meet at least once.

    He fasted once a week. Not for discipline. Not for weight. But because, as he put it, “How can you know the music if you never sit in the silence between songs?”

    In the city, everything arrives fast. Coffee. Notification. Instant noodle. No one waits anymore. And yet, waiting makes things real. Waiting is a kind of seasoning. Hunger, too, is a kind of prayer. It says: I am willing to feel this. I am willing to meet the edges of myself without softening them first.

    I’ve come to think of fasting as a private weather system. You carry it with you. It rearranges your thoughts. You lose interest in gossip. You stop craving sugar and begin craving stillness.

    A few years ago, I spent three days in a borrowed cabin near the coast. No food. No phone. Just a kettle, a notebook, and a small ceramic cup. The first night was noise—stomach noise, mental noise, old echoes of snacks long past.

    By morning, something had settled. I brewed tea and watched a spider rebuild its web after a windstorm. It worked methodically, without panic. I sipped slowly. My hands were steady.

    I thought: There is a rhythm here I used to belong to.

    People ask if it’s hard.

    Of course it is. But so is carrying the weight of constant gratification. So is forgetting how to be alone with your own pulse. So is the blur of never pausing long enough to ask, Is this hunger or just habit?

    Comfort, I think, isn’t about fullness. It’s about recognition.

    When I fast, I meet myself without adornment. No sauces. No distractions. Just this breath. This body. This mind, climbing quietly out of the noise.

    Fasting doesn’t make you more virtuous. It just makes you more visible to yourself. It strips away the things that numb the signal. The notification loop. The second helping. The story you tell about why you need the thing you keep reaching for.

    And when it’s time to eat again—when that first spoonful of warm broth touches your mouth—it feels like the closing of a circle.

    The return. But gentler.

  • The Game You Can’t Win (But Must Play Anyway)


    tabletop silence
    the die rolls without a hand—
    lesson in the fall

    There is a game I’ve played for years, though no one taught it to me. It has no rules printed on the box, no clean counters or colorful boards. You don’t buy it. It begins the first time something important to you shatters.

    When I was ten, my uncle gave me a wooden chess set. The board folded in half like a suitcase, and the pieces rattled around inside like the memory of something that had never been finished. We played a game that summer. He beat me in twelve moves. Didn’t explain a thing. Just nodded, cleared the board, and asked if I wanted to go again.

    I lost the next game too.

    It became a ritual—our own silent season. I lost. Then I lost again. Then I made a mistake, learned from it, and lost differently.

    He called it “building the muscle between losses.”

    I didn’t understand what he meant until much later.

    One rainy afternoon in Tokyo, I found myself in a tiny bar with a man named Koji who looked like he’d been waiting there since the 1980s. He wore a corduroy jacket and smelled faintly of tobacco and wet leaves.

    “What game do you play?” he asked, out of nowhere.

    “Lately? Mostly chess. Some Go.”

    He laughed. “No, no. Not board games. The other kind. The one you forget you’re playing.”

    I must’ve looked confused, because he poured me a plum wine without waiting for my reply.

    “The kind with no winner,” he said. “Where the point isn’t points.”

    “You mean like… life?” I asked.

    He raised his glass. “Or death. Or failure. Or seasons.”

    We drank in silence after that. The kind of silence that feels like someone else is thinking for you.

    In this other game—the one without winners—pain is not a punishment. It’s a signal. Like the buzz of a wrong answer in a childhood quiz show. Except here, the reward is not correction but reflection.

    You stumble. It hurts. You pause, if you’re lucky. Ask yourself what part of you expected something easier.

    A friend once told me that his divorce was the best thing that ever happened to him. At the time, he said it with bitterness, like someone trying to convince a cracked mirror it still showed a whole face.

    Years later, he admitted he was finally learning how to sit with himself. Not run. Not drink. Just sit. Make eggs slowly. Fold clothes with attention. That kind of healing doesn’t wear a medal, but you know it by the way someone drinks their coffee.

    That’s what this game teaches. Not to win. But to notice where it hurt, and why.

    I used to think time was linear. You move forward, achieve things, accumulate. Spring into summer, summer into success. But the older I get, the more I think in loops.

    There are days that feel like winter, even in July.

    Times you’re planting seeds, even though everyone else is harvesting.

    I met a woman on a train from Ljubljana who told me she had just quit her job to take care of her dying mother. “It feels like I’m disappearing,” she said.

    Later, I sent her a book by post with a note: Seeds do their best work underground.

    She never wrote back. But I still wonder what season she’s in now.

    This game—it’s patient. It will wait while you chase careers or relationships or prestige. And then, one day, you’ll find yourself lying awake at 3:14 a.m., unable to stop thinking about a conversation from seven years ago.

    That’s a round.

    The pain will come up, uninvited. But if you press into it—not away from it—it opens a door. A small one. The kind you crawl through. On the other side, you’re a little lighter. Not because you left anything behind, but because you picked up something true.

    A boy I once knew failed every math exam for a year straight. His father punished him with silence. Not anger—just absence.

    I asked him what hurt most. “That I never got to say what I didn’t understand,” he said.

    Years later, he became a teacher. He tells his students, If it hurts, we pause there. That’s the doorway.

    The thing about pain is it can’t lie. Joy sometimes does. It can be borrowed or worn like a mask. But pain always points to something real.

    And if you learn to love the signal, you begin to evolve.

    In the deepest part of winter—when the nights are long and even the air seems brittle—I play Go online with strangers in South Korea.

    Most games I lose. But I’ve learned to love the shape of a mistake. It teaches more than victory ever could.

    I’ve come to believe that time is not an arrow but a spiral. You pass the same place again and again, but with a different view. Like standing in a stairwell, looking down.

    Maybe that’s what seasons really are.

    Not weather. Not years. But returnings.

    Spring when something new arrives. Summer when you’re full and flush. Autumn when things fall away but leave color. Winter when you bury your hands and listen.

    If there is one rule in this game, it is this: struggle well.

    Don’t waste your pain. Don’t hoard your joy. Let both move through you like weather.

    Ask better questions. Write new principles. Be wrong in more interesting ways.

    And when you sit down with someone, maybe over tea or bread or an old deck of cards—ask them what their last move taught them. Not if they won. Just what it changed.

    They’ll pause. Then they’ll tell you a story.

    And the game will go on.

  • What I Want to Make

    steam from morning eggs
    stitches the kitchen in light—
    a silence, full-bellied

    If I could choose a way to be remembered by someone I love, it wouldn’t be through photographs or poetry. Not even these words, though I try to shape them well.

    It would be through food. Through the way my fingers pinch salt. Through how I tilt the pan slightly to let the butter gather in one shimmering corner. Through the quiet that falls over a room when a dish is placed on the table, warm and certain.

    There are four things I return to again and again. Polenta with butter. Apfelstrudel. Bread. Omelettes.

    Each of them is simple. Each of them is everything. And each has taught me something about time, care, silence, or how to hold space for someone without needing to explain yourself.

    Let me tell you how. And why.

    Polenta with Butter

    The smell of cornmeal blooming in boiling water reminds me of winters when the snow lined the windowsills and the kitchen steamed like a train station. My mother stirred slowly, like she was stirring time itself. No rush. No shortcuts. The wooden spoon turning slowly, a rhythm older than clocks.

    We ate it with a pat of butter folded in, melting like gold inside a hill of yellow. Sometimes there was cheese. Sometimes just salt. Always the steam curling upward like a whisper.

    There’s something sacred about feeding someone warm polenta. It’s a food that doesn’t impress. It doesn’t seduce. It simply shows up, honest and slow. Like a friend who helps you move furniture without being asked.

    And if you’ve ever had a bad day—a truly weary, unspeakable one—you know that words often fall short. But a warm bowl of polenta does not.

    Lesson: Simplicity nourishes. Not just the body, but the part of you that is tired of trying to be impressive.

    Apfelstrudel

    My grandmother once said the dough should be so thin you could read the morning newspaper through it.

    She would stretch it out on a clean white sheet, the edges trembling like lace. Apples, sugar, a touch of rum. Cinnamon that lingered on your fingers long after the dishes were done. Sometimes raisins. Sometimes not. But always folded carefully, like a letter to someone who’d never read it.

    I once made one for a friend going through a breakup. She didn’t cry when we talked. She didn’t say much at all. But she cried when she tasted the strudel.

    There is a kind of grief that language fails. In those moments, sweetness can be a balm.

    Lesson: Technique is memory. Food remembers who taught you how to make it. And you pass that on, whether you mean to or not.

    Bread

    Bread is time made visible.

    Flour, water, salt, and yeast. That’s it. And yet every loaf is different, like handwriting or laughter. It remembers how you touched it.

    I used to bake bread late at night. Let it rise on the counter while the moonlight slipped through the blinds. There was comfort in knowing that something was becoming itself while I slept.

    The crust speaks of patience. The crumb speaks of warmth. The whole thing speaks of process—the kind you can’t skip.

    I’ve given loaves to neighbors I’ve never spoken to. Left slices on the windowsill for birds I hoped would come.

    Lesson: Presence shows. In food, in people, in days. If you rush the rise, the dough will tell you.

    Omelettes

    You learn everything you need to know about someone by how they make eggs.

    A good omelette is quiet. It doesn’t show off. It holds warmth and surprise—like a letter folded three times.

    In Paris, I once watched an old man make one with only three ingredients. Eggs, butter, and a little cheese. He served it on a chipped plate and smiled like he’d just solved a small, delicious puzzle.

    Now I make them for people I care about. Sometimes when they’re hungover. Sometimes when we’ve said too much and need a soft reset.

    You don’t need fancy fillings. You don’t need flair. You need good eggs, the right amount of butter, and a pan that listens.

    Technique tip: Beat the eggs gently, not too long. Use medium heat. Tilt the pan. Coax the eggs inward. Don’t rush the fold. Let the heat do its work.

    Lesson: Care lives in small gestures. Often it’s the lightest touch that makes something whole.

    What Cooking Has Taught Me

    1. If you want to know how someone loves, watch how they feed others. Not in restaurants, but at home. On rainy days. When they’re tired.
    2. Recipes are never just recipes. They’re maps of memory. You inherit the hands of those who stirred before you.
    3. Hunger is not always about food.
    4. Gratitude often arrives before language. A shared meal can repair more than arguments.
    5. Real joy comes not when someone says “this is delicious,” but when they close their eyes and go quiet.

    People say that food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate.

    I’d say food is the word. A quiet one. A necessary one.

    And as for those well-known quotes about eating and cooking—I think they’re all just different ways of saying this:

    “A meal made with care can travel backward through time and forward into healing.”

    Maybe it’s not as snappy. But I think it’s true.

    🌿 If you’ve ever made something just to feed someone else’s silence, this space is for you. Subscribe to walk this rhythm with me. 🌿

    —wabisabi of human life
    wabisabiofhuman.life

  • No post today

    Long week.

  • The Gentle Art of Losing Time


    time folds into dust
    when the hands forget to count—
    we become the thing

    There are moments when time forgets its shape.

    It slips through cracks in your concentration, like water down the side of a teapot, following gravity’s whisper. You sit down with an idea, and when you next look up, the sun has changed color. The world outside the window has grown quieter, or louder, or simply different.

    Time isn’t lost. It just… reconfigures.

    There’s a woman I used to know who said the best hours are the ones you never meant to spend. We were in a Kyoto cafe at the time. She was sketching something in the corner of a napkin. I don’t remember what it was—just the curve of her wrist moving like it had something to say.

    This list isn’t a list, not really. More like a set of rooms I return to. Rooms without clocks. Spaces where meaning hums faintly beneath the wallpaper.

    And in those spaces, I vanish just enough to remember who I am.

    1. Building Something You Care About

    The woodshop in my grandfather’s backyard always smelled of linseed oil and forgotten plans. I once spent a whole summer afternoon trying to fix the busted leg of a kitchen stool. The radio was on. Cicadas buzzed like static. At some point, the air turned purple.

    Later in life, it became code. Lines and functions instead of hammers and nails. But the feeling was the same: tweak, run, adjust, breathe. Hours slid by like fish in a stream.

    Sometimes I forget to eat. Sometimes I forget I have a body. All that remains is intention and response. A dance between idea and resistance.

    In those moments, I am ten years old again, sanding splinters from the world.

    2. Deep Reading

    I once read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle during a snowstorm. The power went out, so I sat by candlelight and let the story devour me. I forgot the cold. Forgot dinner. Forgot my own name for a little while.

    Reading isn’t escape. It’s alchemy. You absorb a stranger’s thoughts until they become your own. The walls of your self stretch, creak, take on new light.

    Certain books change your posture. You stand differently after them.

    They rearrange your silence.

    3. Writing to Clarify Your Thoughts

    There’s a quiet desperation that builds inside you when you haven’t written in a while. Words pile up like unread letters.

    I once stayed up all night trying to write a single paragraph about grief. When morning came, I had fifteen pages and no memory of how they got there. I’d brewed tea that had gone cold, reheated it, let it go cold again.

    Writing is how I talk to parts of myself that don’t answer to names. It’s a séance. An excavation.

    I don’t write to be understood. I write so I can understand.

    4. Learning a High-Leverage Skill

    In Tokyo, I tried to learn shakuhachi—the bamboo flute. My teacher was a man who looked like he hadn’t spoken aloud in a decade. He made me sit on a tatami mat for three full sessions before I was allowed to make a sound.

    “Breath before music,” he said.

    Now, when I learn anything new—whether it’s logic puzzles or Italian verbs—I think of him. The silence before skill. The humility in repetition.

    The magic happens when you forget you’re learning.

    You just do the thing. And the thing reshapes you.

    5. Solving Hard Problems

    Once, I spent seven hours debugging a script that turned out to be missing a single semicolon. I felt like a monk discovering a missing grain of rice.

    But there was beauty in it. The narrowing of focus. The slow peeling away of everything nonessential. Just you, the problem, and the invisible hand that dares you to try again.

    Hard problems aren’t cruel. They’re invitations.

    You don’t solve them. You enter into conversation with them.

    6. Meditation and Breathwork

    There’s a point in sitting—usually around the 18-minute mark—when the mind slips its leash.

    Not in a dramatic way. Just a gentle drift. Like stepping out of a train car and realizing the landscape has shifted.

    I’ve sat through storms, both internal and literal. The body itches. The clock mocks you. But then it breaks—like a fever. And what’s left is just breath. The body breathing itself. Time without labels.

    It feels like being a stone at the bottom of a river.

    And for once, the current is kind.

    7. Long, Unscripted Conversations

    A friend and I once talked from midnight to sunrise. No wine. No agenda. Just tea and open windows and the smell of early July.

    We talked about god, regret, womb memories, first kisses. Laughed until our ribs hurt. Sat in silence when the stories ran out.

    There’s a sacredness to conversation that isn’t trying to impress or persuade. It just is.

    Like jazz. Like shadow puppets. Like memory before it hardens.

    8. Creating Art or Music

    In Ljubljana, I bought a small set of Japanese brushes and a bottle of sumi ink. I didn’t know what I was painting—just that the ink moved like it had its own nervous system.

    Some afternoons I play one note on an old guitar over and over until it sounds like something it wasn’t before. It’s not music. It’s meditation with vibration.

    Art doesn’t care who sees it.

    It only asks that you leave something behind.

    9. Exploring Nature

    I once followed a deer trail in the hills above Piran and didn’t come back until moonrise. No GPS. No plan. Just that soft hum of “keep going.”

    There’s a rhythm to walking without destination. Your feet negotiate with the earth. Your breath syncs with pine and birdsong.

    Sometimes I find strange stones and put them in my pocket. Sometimes I talk to trees like they’re old friends who forgot my name.

    Nature doesn’t ask questions. It just listens.

    And then, slowly, it teaches you how to listen too.

    10. Teaching or Mentoring

    There’s a boy I used to tutor who thought he was bad at math. I watched him go from shame to pride in three months, just by learning how to reframe the way he saw numbers.

    One afternoon, he solved a problem and looked up like he’d heard music.

    “Wait,” he said, “I actually get it.”

    Time stopped for both of us in that moment. Not because of math. But because connection reclaims time from routine.

    Teaching isn’t about transferring knowledge. It’s about borrowing each other’s wonder.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    Time slips away most beautifully when you’re not trying to keep it.

    Each of these moments—reading, building, breathing, walking, speaking—are not escapes. They’re reunions.

    You don’t lose time. You lose watching it. And in that vanishing act, something sacred appears.

    A self without mirrors. A breath without count. A moment that doesn’t ask to be saved, only lived.

    So let it go. Let it carry you. Let it remake you.

  • The Echo of What Bothers Me

    thoughts grind like train brakes
    the racket of being real—
    quiet still won’t come

    What bothers me?
    That I’m bothered at all.

    It’s the double-layered ache that twists under the ribs—
    not just the sting, but the shame of feeling it.

    I remember growing up in a part of town where the concrete held heat in the summer and the stairwells smelled like old socks and fryer oil. Most of us had names that didn’t fit neatly in official forms. The kind of names that made teachers pause. Or smirk. Or skip.

    We played football on gravel. Swore fluently in three languages. Learned to run fast, not just because we were young—but because sometimes you had to. Cops. Fights. The kind of threats that wore Adidas tracksuits and held eye contact just a second too long.

    I remember once, standing in the hallway outside our flat, hearing a neighbor scream and then throw a chair down the stairwell. The noise echoed in spirals. My mother didn’t flinch. She just turned up the volume on the TV and told me to pass the salt.

    We ate soup while something shattered below.

    Back then, it felt like everyone was always angry at something.
    The system. The noise. The way the bus was late, again. The way you had to wait longer if your accent was wrong. The teacher who pretended not to see your hand up. The landlord who never fixed the heating.

    Anger wasn’t an emotion. It was air. You breathed it in. You held it in your lungs until it hardened into silence.

    I used to think I’d outgrow it.
    That adulthood would bring some kind of shield, a gentler world, a softer ceiling to rest beneath.

    But here’s what bothers me now: I’ve left all that behind, mostly.
    The noise, the stairwell, the smell. I live in a quiet neighborhood now. The shoes are lined up. The kettle works. There’s a balcony with plants that don’t get stolen. The floor is wooden and creaks in pleasant ways.

    And still, I get bothered.
    By people who chew too loud.
    By emails I don’t want to answer.
    By the slow drip of a faucet that I haven’t fixed.

    By a dream that ends just before the good part.
    By a text that says “seen” but never gets answered.

    And then—I get bothered that I’m bothered.
    Shouldn’t I be over this by now?
    Shouldn’t meditation, therapy, travel, books, love—shouldn’t they have cured this already?

    I try to explain it once to a woman I’m seeing. We’re sitting in a park, drinking coffee from a place that grinds their own beans and calls their sizes “ritual” instead of “medium.”

    She listens. Doesn’t interrupt.

    Then she says, “Maybe the part of you that feels broken isn’t broken. Maybe it’s just the part that remembers.”

    That stays with me.

    Because maybe the real wabi-sabi of it all is this:
    The cracks aren’t flaws. They’re features.
    They show that something passed through.
    A story. A survival. A scar.

    The boy who ducked out of fights. The teen who flinched at slurs. The young man who learned to speak quietly, because being loud got you labeled.

    He still lives here. In me.
    And sometimes he’s tired. Sometimes bothered.

    Sometimes he just wants to sit without needing to heal.

    So I let him.
    I breathe with him.
    We pass the salt.

    That’s what I’ve learned: it’s not about not being bothered. It’s about holding the feeling without letting it spill everywhere.
    It’s about knowing the world doesn’t owe you ease, and loving it anyway.

    Last week I watched a bird land on the railing outside my balcony. It stood there a long time, longer than birds usually do. Its feathers were ruffled. Something about it looked disappointed.

    Maybe it had flown all morning and still hadn’t found what it was looking for.

    I didn’t move. Just watched.
    And eventually it flew away.

    That’s how the bother sometimes goes.
    You acknowledge it. You don’t flinch. You let it rest beside you until it finds its own wings.

    And when it’s gone, you’re left with a strange kind of quiet. Not peace. Not yet.
    But maybe the space where peace begins.

    If this stayed with you longer than it should have—consider subscribing. I send these out quietly, the way memories return: unexpected, but true.

  • Ten Things I Know Are Absolutely Certain

    If these stories drift through your thoughts long after the reading, consider subscribing. They come when needed, not when expected.

    1. If you learn to build and you learn to sell, you become a quiet kind of unstoppable.

    I once met a man on a train from Nagoya who ran a tofu business out of his grandmother’s house. He had no website, no logo, just a tiny stamp and a phone number handwritten on a napkin. But he spoke about his tofu like it was alive. Like each block carried a memory.

    “You don’t need to scream,” he told me. “Just make something real. People will find it.”

    He knew how to build. He knew how to sell. He worked alone, but his work multiplied in people’s mouths.

    1. Wealth is not money. It’s not status. It’s the quiet sound of your ceiling fan on a Tuesday morning when you have nowhere you need to be.

    Money comes and goes. Status comes and goes faster. But real wealth is choosing your days. It’s being able to make a second cup of tea just because the first one tasted too hurried.

    I’ve slept in guesthouses and on tatami floors, but I’ve never felt richer than when I had time and nobody asking for it.

    1. Specific knowledge feels like remembering something you never learned.

    It’s when your hands know what to do before your mind catches up.

    Like when I started restoring broken ceramics with kintsugi. No one taught me, not really. But gold and fracture made sense in my bones. Every bowl held a little of my own story.

    You can’t teach obsession. But you can follow it.

    1. Play long games with long people.

    A friend once fixed my bicycle without asking. He didn’t text to say he had. Just left it outside my door with a note: “You looked tired. Thought you could use a smooth ride.”

    We’ve known each other for twelve years. Nothing flashy. Just a thousand small kindnesses that compounded over time.

    In the end, that’s all that matters. Who still shows up when nothing needs to be won.

    1. Productize yourself.

    I used to journal in private. Now I write here. Same thoughts, different leverage.

    A friend once said: “You have too many thoughts to keep them in your head. Set them loose. Let them do the walking for you.”

    This blog is my quiet rebellion. A way to turn breath into bread. Words into shelter. A slow conversation with strangers I might never meet.

    1. You won’t get free renting out your time.

    I once worked a job where my soul felt like it wore office shoes. Clean. Polite. Slowly dying.

    One afternoon, I watched a man across the street selling roasted chestnuts in the snow. He looked cold. But he also looked alive.

    Since then, I’ve tried to own something. Even if it’s small. A corner of the world where I call the shots. A patch of meaning no one can fire me from.

    1. Watch your mind like you would a small child wandering near traffic.

    It’s fast. It believes strange things. It picks up trash and calls it treasure.

    Meditation isn’t a spiritual accessory. It’s a survival tactic.

    Most days I just sit. I breathe. I ask my thoughts what they want. Sometimes they just need to be seen. Then they go.

    1. Read. Not because it’s productive. Because it expands the walls of your inner house.

    I read Murakami when I want to feel alone in a good way. I read Baldwin when I need truth without comfort. I read cookbooks late at night when I can’t sleep, because the rhythm of recipes feels like prayer.

    Reading lets you borrow lifetimes.

    1. Most people follow paths paved by other people’s fears.

    When I left a job that everyone said was “safe,” I felt like I had stepped off a moving train.

    And then—quiet.

    Then a garden. Then a language. Then an idea.

    First principles feel scary at first. But they lead you somewhere real. Somewhere breathing.

    1. Happiness isn’t a destination. It’s the byproduct of noticing.

    The warmth of a bowl in your hands. The way light falls across the kitchen table. A laugh you didn’t expect.

    Gratitude is cheap and infinite. Presence doesn’t require Wi-Fi. The most beautiful things I’ve lived through weren’t on any itinerary.

    And so I stay open. I stay soft. I keep watching.

  • The Gravity Between Stillness and Storm

    For the longest time, all I wanted was security.

    Not success. Not adventure.
    Just the absence of chaos.
    A night without shouting.
    A week without a hospital.
    A home that stayed in one place.

    My childhood wasn’t a disaster.
    But it was loud in the wrong ways, and quiet in the wrong places.
    There was love, yes.
    But also alcohol.
    And the kind of illness that sneaks in through the side door—
    the kind no one controls, and no one talks about,
    except in whispers after you’ve left the room.

    One uncle died too early.
    One aunt disappeared into the grey of mental fog.
    One parent lost their job, then lost themselves in the bottle for a time.
    The world didn’t fall apart overnight.
    It simply frayed at the edges.
    And I learned to stay quiet, to clean up, to take on more than I should have.

    I remember once—age nine or ten—
    I found my mother crying in the kitchen,
    holding a spoon over a pot she had forgotten to stir.
    She wiped her eyes and said she was just tired.
    But the soup was already burning.

    That moment stayed with me more than any birthday.
    It felt like being handed an invisible suitcase.
    Heavy. Mine. Forever.

    So as I grew, I chased peace with everything I had.

    I made my bed every morning.
    I kept my grades up.
    I didn’t ask for much.

    Later, when I had my own apartment, I filled it with silence.
    Tea towels folded the same way.
    A small ceramic bowl for keys.
    My socks lined up in perfect pairs, like well-behaved soldiers.

    This, I told myself, is what safety looks like.
    Predictability. Clean lines. No surprises.

    And for a while, it worked.

    But the universe, it seems, doesn’t believe in finished stories.
    Even when I had built something quiet and dependable,
    it always cracked open again.
    Inviting in wind.
    And strangers with wild eyes.

    People came into my life and nudged me off course.

    There was the man who slept on my floor for three weeks
    after missing a flight back to Istanbul,
    and then convinced me to ride a train across the Balkans.

    There was the woman who kissed me mid-sentence in a laundromat,
    and said, “You need to learn how to let go of your furniture.”

    And I did.

    Each time I thought I was done with risk,
    something pulled me back into movement.
    A whisper. A fire. A train station in a country I hadn’t planned on visiting.

    And oddly—these moments didn’t destroy my peace.
    They deepened it.
    Made it less brittle.
    More like water, less like glass.

    There was tragedy in my past, yes.
    But also beauty.
    A kind of beauty only those who’ve wept in locked bathrooms understand.
    The beauty of surviving things you didn’t ask for.
    The beauty of still wanting to dance.
    Of laughing with someone in a café,
    even though part of you still carries the echo of old grief.

    I used to think I had to choose.
    Security or adventure.
    Stability or risk.
    But life is not a coin toss.

    It’s a tide.

    It moves forward, and back.
    And you learn to stand inside it,
    sometimes soaked, sometimes held.

    There are still nights I wake up and check that the stove is off.
    That the door is locked.
    That I haven’t lost the peace I worked so hard to build.

    And there are mornings I walk with nothing but a backpack and the impulse to leave.
    No plan.
    Just a hunger for wind and strange languages.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    Safety is not the absence of storm.
    It’s the knowing that you’ve been through worse.
    That you can carry both grief and laughter in the same pocket.
    That peace doesn’t have to be perfect to be real.

    You build a quiet life.
    But you leave a window cracked, just in case something beautiful wants to come in.
    You make your tea.
    And you learn to pack quickly, when the moment calls.

  • The Chihuahua at the Edge of the World

    Before we begin—if these quiet, wandering stories speak to something in you… if you’ve ever paused mid-walk just to feel the wind shift, or found yourself smiling at nothing in particular—consider subscribing.
    This isn’t a newsletter in the usual sense. It’s a small boat I push into your bay now and then, filled with strange truths, crooked spoons, and warm things that don’t ask to be fixed. If it lands, you’ll know.

    I found her on an island that didn’t appear on any map. No ferry routes. No signs.
    Just sand that remembered footsteps,
    and wind that had no intention of going anywhere else.

    She was lying in a hammock strung between two crooked trees,
    a half-melted pistachio-mango ice cream dripping down her wrist.
    A chihuahua sat beside her like a bodyguard that believed in reincarnation.

    “You’re here,” she said, like she had been expecting me for years.
    Maybe she had.

    She wasn’t what I imagined when I thought of Being.
    But then again, most things that matter come in the wrong packaging.

    She was wearing cheap sunglasses that didn’t fit quite right and an oversized linen shirt, damp with sea air. Her legs swung slightly over the hammock edge, tanned and sandy. Her left ankle had a faint scar—the kind you don’t remember getting but never fully forget.

    “You thought I’d be wearing robes?” she asked, reading my face.
    “Something Greek maybe? A little austere?”

    I said nothing.

    She grinned.
    “I get that a lot.”

    We talked.
    Or rather—she talked, and I listened.

    She had a voice like tidewater. Slow, rolling, pulling things from me I didn’t know I still carried.

    We talked about what people search for, and how often they skip over it in their rush to define it.

    “Everyone wants to arrive,” she said.
    “Nobody wants to be where they are.”

    I offered her the question anyway, the one that had floated just beneath my chest for most of my adult life:

    “What’s the point of all this?”

    She didn’t roll her eyes.
    She didn’t laugh.
    She just shifted slightly and held the dripping cone out to the chihuahua, who licked it once and looked away like it had tasted this truth before.

    Then, very softly, she answered:

    “It’s not the big thing.
    Not the golden revelation or the five-year plan.

    It’s lying in a hammock between trees you don’t know the names of.

    It’s riding a rusted bike through flat, sunlit streets that smell faintly of tomatoes and detergent.

    It’s the hole in your sandal that you forget is there until it rains.
    And then, instead of cursing it, you laugh.
    Because it’s been part of you this whole time.”

    She paused.

    Then added, as if it were an afterthought:

    “Also, I may have had a little rum earlier.
    And smoked something with Aristippus.
    But that doesn’t make it less true.”

    We fell into a kind of rhythm.
    Not quite conversation. Not quite silence.

    She told me stories.

    About the first person who ever tried to bottle purpose and sell it in glass vials. About a fox who had once convinced an entire town to follow the stars instead of the road signs. About a woman who disappeared into a painting of a rice field because it looked more real than her life.

    None of the stories had endings. She said that was the point.

    “The best ones keep leaking into your life,” she said, “like old ink.”

    We talked about the forks in the road. The real ones.

    Like when I decided, without really deciding, to study abroad. Not because it made sense, not because I had savings, but because something inside me whispered go like a hand on the small of my back.

    I told her about the time I moved to England for a woman I barely knew. About the day we sat by the canal, and she touched my arm mid-sentence, and for a second, everything in me fell quiet.

    “Did it work out?” she asked.

    “No,” I said.

    She nodded.
    “But it mattered.”

    I told her about the accident. The one with the bicycle. The wet tram tracks. The sharp twist of bone. How I couldn’t write for six weeks. How silence became a second skin. How one morning I cried because I watched a sparrow eat from a coffee saucer someone had left outside their door.

    “Pain folds you,” she said, tracing something in the air.
    “But when it unfolds you again, the creases tell a story.”

    The sun shifted. The tide sighed.

    She stood and walked a few paces toward the water, the hammock swinging slightly behind her. The chihuahua followed at her heels, half-alert.

    “You’ll leave soon,” she said.
    “That’s alright. Just… don’t go back the same way you came.”

    I asked her if I could come back.

    She looked over her shoulder and smiled.

    “You always do,” she said.
    “Usually right before you forget something important.”

    When I finally stood to go, she placed a hand briefly on my shoulder.

    “You’re doing fine,” she said.
    “Just don’t wait until everything makes sense to begin.”

    And then, quieter:
    “Take more naps. Stretch in the mornings. Water the plants even when you’re sad. And buy the better socks.”

    The chihuahua sneezed.

    The trees leaned closer.

    The sea went on being the sea.

    If this story stayed with you longer than it should have—subscribe.
    Not for updates. Not for content.
    But for reminders.
    That soft, strange things still exist. And they arrive quietly, in your inbox, like a letter from someone you used to be.

  • The Dinner That Wasn’t in the Calendar

    ふたつの時
    皿の上に
    蒸気たち

    Two timelines—
    rising in soft steam
    from one plate.

    If I could host a dinner, and anyone I invited was sure to come—
    no delays, no wrong addresses, no polite refusals—
    I wouldn’t ask for celebrities, spiritual masters, or even the ones I still dream about
    when the train sways too gently through tunnels.

    I’d invite two people.
    My older self—the one who already knows how this ends.
    And my future self—the one who hasn’t told me yet.

    No RSVP needed. They would simply arrive,
    exactly when the dough is thin enough to read a newspaper through.

    We’d meet in a house that only exists on days when you wake up before sunrise and everything feels slightly left of real.
    Wooden beams. No clocks.
    A stove with chipped enamel and a window that fogs just enough to blur the past and future behind it.

    I’d cook Apfelstrudel—the proper kind.
    Not frozen, not rushed.

    The dough would be handmade, stretched on an old linen cloth,
    until it was almost translucent.
    You could hold a newspaper beneath it and still read the headlines.
    That’s how my grandmother did it, and her mother before her.
    I’d fill it with tart apples, lemon zest, cinnamon, sugar, raisins soaked in rum, and toasted breadcrumbs for warmth.

    The scent alone would be enough to summon them.

    The cutlery would be a patchwork of my life:
    a fork from a market in Porto,
    a knife from a ryokan in Aomori where they served pickled burdock root on rainy mornings,
    chopsticks wrapped in lacquered black from a Kyoto alley I’ve never found twice.

    The plates would be handmade Japanese ceramics—irregular, quiet in tone, slightly cracked at the edges.
    Wabi-sabi.

    The coffee would come from a roastery I visited once in Ljubljana—hidden in a courtyard, with beans roasted so slowly the whole place smelled like earth remembering fire.
    I bought a bag, forgot about it, then rediscovered it during a move.
    The best coffee always finds you twice.

    My older self would arrive first.
    He’d be wearing a scarf someone once gave him and still forgets the name of.
    There’d be something slow in his walk, but nothing sad.

    “You still make it like that,” he’d say, nodding toward the strudel cooling by the window.

    “The only way it tastes right,” I’d reply.

    He’d sit down without being asked.
    I’d pour him coffee. No sugar, just a little cream.

    “I worry about you,” I’d say, watching the steam rise from his mug.
    “You still sleep too little. Still look at your phone like it’s a person who owes you an apology.”

    He wouldn’t deny it.

    “Go outside more. Take trains without plans.
    Listen to the wind through pines. It knows things.
    Don’t waste your mornings.
    And buy the good socks. Your feet deserve kindness.”

    He’d sip, then smile with half his face.
    “Noted,” he’d say.

    Then the future self would arrive.
    He wouldn’t knock.
    He’d just appear in the doorway, holding a lemon wrapped in newspaper.
    A gift, maybe. Or a message.

    His coat would be well-worn.
    His eyes would be quiet.
    The kind of quiet that only comes from having lost something important and survived it.

    He’d place the lemon on the table without explanation, and sit between us.

    We’d eat slowly.
    Knife against crust, steam rising from apple.
    No rush. No seconds.

    I’d speak first.
    I’d talk about forks in the road—
    how I once chose to study abroad on a whim,
    not because it made sense, but because something inside me whispered go.

    I’d tell them about the girl in England.
    How I crossed countries because of her.
    How love made me braver than reason ever could.

    I’d talk about the accident.
    The one with the bike and the wrong turn,
    that shattered my wrist and made me rethink everything.

    How I couldn’t write for weeks.
    How the world went quiet, and in that quiet,
    I started to listen to myself differently.

    “You became someone new after that,” the older me would say.

    “You became someone real,” the future me would add.

    We wouldn’t speak the whole time.
    Some silences would stretch like old jazz solos—
    awkward at first, then oddly perfect.

    At one point, I’d ask my older self:
    “What did I forget?”

    He’d think. Then answer.

    “You forgot how to be bored.
    And you forgot how to be amazed by small things—like peeling oranges or hearing your name in someone else’s mouth.”

    I’d nod.

    I’d ask the future me,
    “Does it work out?”

    He wouldn’t say yes.
    He wouldn’t say no.

    He’d just look at me, tilt his head, and say,
    “You’ll remember what matters.
    And forget what doesn’t.
    That’s enough.”

    We’d sit there a while longer—three of me,
    each holding a warm mug,
    each shaped by a different wind.

    And just before leaving,
    my future self would touch the lemon,
    push it toward me,
    and say,

    “This—keep it close. You’ll understand when it’s time.”

    Then he’d walk out.
    No goodbye.
    Just the creak of old wood and a door that didn’t need locking.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    The best things rarely make sense at first.
    They come unannounced—
    as strudel dough stretched thin,
    as a detour through England,
    as a lemon placed on your table by someone you haven’t become yet.

    Life doesn’t reward logic.
    It rewards attention.
    A well-made dessert. A meaningful accident. A fork you carry for no reason—until someone needs it.

    Sleep more.
    Worry less.
    Stretch the dough slowly.
    Let your past sit at your table,
    and let your future speak when it’s ready.

    Because one day,
    you’ll be the guest.
    And you’ll be grateful someone remembered to keep the coffee warm.

  • What Gets Better With Age

    とし月が
    しずけさくれて
    味ふかし

    With age and time,
    quiet settles deeper—
    flavor grows.

    In your twenties, you want your life to happen all at once.
    You think if you miss one train, the whole station disappears.
    You stay up too late, chase too much, say yes to things that hollow you out.
    You think life is a fire that needs more wood—more cities, more people, more stories.
    But with time, you learn.
    The fire doesn’t need more.
    It needs tending.

    I learned this not through philosophy or books,
    but through strange, unremarkable moments—
    the kind that don’t seem important until years later,
    when they return in your hands like a warm bowl of something familiar.

    Years ago, I made polenta for a woman I hardly knew.

    She had shown up at my apartment in Ljubljana after a night of too much wine and too many people.
    She sat on the edge of my sofa like a guest in her own body.
    Eyes half-closed, head tilted like she was trying to stay in the room.

    I remembered how my mother used to make polenta when I was sick.
    She’d stir it slow, whispering about timing, about texture.
    She said it wasn’t food. It was repair.

    I had no medicine, no good advice.
    But I had a pot and a wooden spoon.

    So I made polenta. No butter, just salt and patience.
    I placed it in her hands without saying anything.
    She took one bite and said, “I feel like something is putting me back together.”

    And maybe something was.

    Here’s the lesson:
    The small things you do become tools.
    You don’t know when you’ll need them,
    but someday, someone will walk into your life
    and you’ll be ready.

    Like the washing machine.

    I once helped carry one down six flights of stairs in July with a stranger named Ivan.
    No gloves. No warning.
    We laughed at first, then sweated, then swore.
    My hands were wrecked for days.

    But later, when a friend asked me to help her move,
    I didn’t flinch.
    I showed up with gloves, straps, tape for the machine doors, and a bottle of Pocari Sweat.
    We got it down in under ten minutes.

    “You’ve done this before,” she said.

    I nodded.
    “Once badly. Now properly.”

    That’s what age does:
    It quietly prepares you.
    You gather experience the way a tree gathers rings—slowly, invisibly, with each passing season.
    You don’t even notice until you’re standing in someone else’s storm
    with the exact umbrella they need.

    I’ve learned how to read moods before words are spoken.
    How to boil tea that makes people cry and not ask why.
    How to give space instead of solutions.

    A while ago, I sat in silence with someone grieving.
    We didn’t talk. I just peeled an orange and handed her half.
    It was all she needed.
    Not answers.
    Just something sweet.
    Something human.

    And then there are the things you learn to let go of.

    Like needing to be right.
    Or needing everyone to like you.
    Or needing life to happen on schedule.

    You stop needing closure.
    You stop explaining your choices.
    You begin to see that what makes something meaningful
    is often what remains unspoken.

    So what gets better with age?

    You do.
    But not louder. Not faster.
    You get quieter.
    You become more precise in how you love.
    More fluent in presence.
    More aware of when to speak and when to hold a hand and say nothing.

    You learn to walk into a kitchen, boil water,
    and make something that says,
    I see you, and you’re safe here.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    Life doesn’t reward urgency.
    It rewards presence.
    What you do gently today becomes someone’s comfort tomorrow.
    A pot of polenta.
    A way to carry a washing machine.
    An orange split in silence.

    So go live.
    Learn by doing.
    Mess things up and remember how.

    Because one day, someone will need you—
    not for your perfection,
    but for your preparedness.

    And you’ll find that you’re ready.
    Because you’ve lived.
    And that makes all the difference.

  • The Light I Sleep By

    夜が溶け
    朝のくちびる
    霧に触れ

    Night dissolves—
    and morning’s lips
    kiss the mist.

    I was staying in a small apartment in Kōenji when I started waking up before dawn.
    It was winter, I think. Or close to it.
    The kind of cold that isn’t just temperature, but an attitude. A certain silence in the walls.

    The apartment was on the second floor of a building that used to be a bathhouse, or so the old man downstairs claimed. He ran a record shop that never opened before noon and played only jazz pressed before 1968.
    He didn’t sell anything, as far as I could tell.
    He just liked having the records near him.

    We never exchanged names.
    Still, every morning when I passed his open door, he nodded once.
    It was enough.

    At some point, without deciding to, I began going to sleep earlier.
    Not like clockwork.
    Not like some resolution on a wall.
    It just started happening.
    The light would fade, and something in my body—some ancient bird—would fold its wings and say, that’s enough for today.

    And when I began waking before the city did—before even the vending machines hummed their full song—I felt something loosen.
    As if I’d stumbled into a version of Tokyo that most people never get to see.
    A softer one. A little threadbare at the edges, like an old coat.

    I’d pull on my jacket, still holding the warmth of sleep, and walk.
    No destination. No headphones. Just air.
    The kind of air that carries secrets but doesn’t tell them.

    I’d stop by a convenience store—FamilyMart, usually—and buy a black coffee in a paper cup.
    Sometimes a boiled egg.
    Sometimes a chocolate chip melon pan that left sugar in my pocket lint.

    Then I’d find a place to stand.
    A bridge. A corner. A rooftop if I could sneak one.
    I liked watching how the mist settled between buildings.
    How even the crows seemed gentler in the morning, their cries slower, more drawn out.
    There was a dog I used to see, a Shiba with a crooked ear.
    He walked his owner more than the other way around.

    We nodded at each other too.
    I don’t know if he remembered me.
    But I remembered him.

    People say evenings are magical.
    But that’s because they’ve never listened to a morning.
    Mornings are quiet, yes, but not empty.
    They’re full—
    of things returning.
    Light. Breath. Thought. Birds.
    Even your own name sounds different in the morning.

    She was staying with me for a few nights.
    A translator from Kyoto.
    She liked whiskey and didn’t believe in dreams.
    Slept with her socks on and kept a small wooden owl in her bag for reasons she wouldn’t explain.

    “You get up early,” she said one morning, watching me boil water.
    “Do you always?”
    “Only when I’m not trying to,” I said.
    She blinked, then wrapped the blanket tighter around her.

    There was something in the way she looked at me—like she was trying to place a melody she almost remembered.
    She didn’t ask anything else.

    In my twenties, I didn’t care much about sleep.
    I treated it like a coin I could toss away.
    Nights were for pacing, for unfinished thoughts and half-written emails.
    Sleep came when it came—fragmented, rushed, often beside someone I didn’t know well enough to be dreaming near.

    But somewhere along the way, I realized something:
    sleep isn’t what you do after the day is done.
    It’s what allows the day to begin at all.

    The body reconstructs in the dark.
    Not metaphorically.
    Literally.
    Cells repair. Memory reorders. Feelings unclench.

    Sleep is the factory.
    Everything else is just packaging.

    “I don’t trust mornings,” she said, a few days later.
    “They’re too quiet. Like they’re hiding something.”

    “Maybe they are,” I said.
    “But so are we.”

    She smiled, but didn’t answer.
    That was the last morning we shared.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    You don’t have to chase stillness.
    It finds you.
    In early light.
    In cracked sidewalks.
    In mist that doesn’t explain itself.

    Sleep more.
    Not as escape, but as return.
    To the parts of you that keep breathing,
    even when you’re not watching.

    When the city is still folded,
    and the sky hasn’t decided its color yet,
    there’s a window.
    A kind of music.

    And if you’re lucky,
    you’ll be awake enough to hear it.

  • A Few Small Ways to Stay Human

    やわらかく
    日々に身を置く
    風のままに

    Gently—
    I place myself inside the day,
    and let the wind decide.

    It’s never been the big things that saved me.

    Not the milestones. Not the accolades.
    Not the moments with music swelling in the background.

    It’s always been something smaller.
    Something softer.
    And usually, something ordinary.

    A convenience store coffee.
    A slice of leftover cake.
    The quiet sound of someone breathing beside you who doesn’t need anything from you at all.

    These days, I don’t aim to “improve” myself.
    I aim to stay close.
    To life. To people. To the part of me that still feels everything.
    Here’s how I try.

    Sleep more.
    Not for performance. Not so you can do more later.
    Just because.
    Because your brain is a slow animal and it needs darkness.
    Because dreams are sometimes the only place your body tells the truth.

    I sleep in layers.
    Curtains drawn. Window cracked just enough to let the night speak.
    Sometimes I wake with the faint memory of something important I almost remembered.
    That’s usually enough.

    Have sex.
    Not always.
    Not just because it’s late and you’re lonely and the silence is too wide.
    But when it’s honest. When it feels like a conversation made of skin instead of language.

    I remember one winter in Ljubljana—
    the kind of winter that seems to hum beneath your coat—I was staying in a borrowed apartment with cracked tile and uneven heating. The day before, I’d had a small birthday gathering. Someone brought cake, a little lopsided, but sweet.
    There was some left over.

    That night, she came over.
    We weren’t anything official. Just two people orbiting the same kind of sadness.

    I gave her a slice of that leftover cake. No candles. No explanation.
    Then, for some reason, I sang her a Maroon 5 song—soft, a little out of tune.
    She laughed. Then she cried.
    I didn’t ask why.

    Later, we lay down in our clothes, pressed together but not tight.
    It wasn’t about need.
    It wasn’t even about desire.

    It was simply that neither of us wanted to carry everything alone that night.
    And we didn’t.

    Go for walks.
    In the city, especially.
    Around Tokyo. Alone. Slowly.

    Sometimes I drift through backstreets in Nakameguro, past shuttered shops and flowerpots left like offerings in front of low wooden doors. Other times, I head toward nowhere in particular, letting the vending machines and crows decide my route.

    I stop at a combini, pick up a small coffee, maybe a steamed bun.
    I eat it while standing near a river, listening to someone’s radio playing faintly from an upstairs window.

    Nothing happens.
    But something always shifts.

    The weight I didn’t know I was carrying gets lighter.
    The city stops asking so many questions.

    Dance.
    Even if you look ridiculous. Especially then.

    In my old Tokyo apartment—tiny, beige, and full of shadows—I used to put on Cornelius or Lamp or something strange from an old playlist and just move. Arms loose. Ankles slow. Sometimes sober, sometimes not. Sometimes with a bit of sake in my system, or half a gummy from a trip abroad still lingering in a drawer.

    It wasn’t for joy.
    It was for release.
    It was for the version of me who still remembered what my body felt like when it wasn’t being watched.

    One night, someone left a note under my door:
    “You look happy when you dance. I hope you stay that way.”

    I kept the note.

    Talk to people.
    Even when you think you have nothing to say.
    Even if it’s just about the weather or the onigiri you regretted buying.

    Sometimes I call my sister just to describe the sky.
    Sometimes I strike up a conversation with the guy who runs the soba stand near my station.
    His name is Tanaka-san. He once told me he plays harmonica in secret.

    He’s never invited me to hear it.
    But every time he hands me my bowl, I listen for the echo.

    Talk to yourself.
    Out loud. In whispers. On trains. In bathtubs.

    Ask yourself questions.
    Answer them badly.
    Laugh at how weird your voice sounds when no one else is around.

    I do this all the time.
    At first, it was a joke. Then it became a habit.
    Now, it’s a kind of companionship.

    Me talking to me.
    Me asking, “Are we okay?”
    Me replying, “Not sure. But we’re trying.”

    Laugh.
    And not just at clever things.
    Laugh at burnt toast.
    At how clumsy you are.
    At the absurdity of crying in a Uniqlo changing room because the lighting was too honest.

    I once laughed so hard I fell off a bench in a park near Mitaka.
    I was eating an egg sandwich and listening to a podcast about octopuses.
    No punchline.
    Just a moment when everything cracked open and I remembered how ridiculous it is
    to be alive and trying.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    You don’t need to upgrade yourself.
    You just need to return.
    To what’s already working quietly in the background.
    To the body that still moves.
    To the voice that answers you at midnight.
    To the part of you that sings when no one’s around
    and eats cake with strangers
    and lets a tree go unnoticed until one day,
    it’s home.

    Stay human.
    Stay soft.
    Sleep more.

    Everything else can wait.

  • The Tree, the City, and the Quiet Curve of Time

    かこもいまも
    みらいもまがりて
    ひかりさす

    Past, present, and future—
    each bending in its own way
    toward the light.

    “What are you most excited about for the future?” she asked, stirring her coffee so slowly it barely made a sound.

    We were sitting on the narrow terrace of a jazz bar in Shimokitazawa, half-lit by a broken lantern and the flickering screen of a vending machine across the alley. The night smelled faintly of miso and old wood.

    I thought for a moment. The question caught me off guard—not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. Not yet.

    The image that came to mind wasn’t futuristic at all. No robots or utopias or sparkling cities in the clouds. It was a tree. A very specific one.

    There’s a hillside in rural Slovenia where I used to walk every summer. Years ago, when I was still in school and everything I carried fit into a single rucksack, I passed a sapling pushing out of the earth next to an old stone wall. It was fragile then—thin, straight, like a pencil pushed halfway into the soil. I remember pausing, just for a second, and thinking, You probably won’t make it.

    But the next year, it was still there. And the year after that. Slowly—quietly—it twisted. The roots deepened. The trunk bent slightly eastward, leaning for the sun that had moved just a little higher in the sky. The bark grew coarse. The wall crumbled a bit beside it. And last year, when I returned after a long time away, I saw that the tree was no longer just a tree. It had become a neighborhood.

    There were birds nesting in its hollows. Beetles in the shade. A fox track just below the roots. Ivy wrapped around the trunk like it had fallen in love. The whole thing was alive with things that weren’t supposed to be there, and yet there they were. Thriving.

    I told her this.

    She raised an eyebrow, like maybe she expected something else.
    “Trees?”
    “No,” I said. “Adaptation.”

    Things on average are getting better.
    Not in a dramatic way, not fast.
    But better.

    People are learning how to listen more. To each other. To the world. To themselves. Not perfectly. But more than they did a generation ago. And pain, even when it shows up uninvited, has a strange way of becoming instruction.

    Nature’s been doing this forever.
    Twisting toward light.
    Even if it hurts.

    In Tokyo, there’s a street I like near Ueno. It’s not beautiful in the traditional sense. Loud, cluttered, full of salarymen and vending machines and the stale smell of exhaust. But if you walk it often enough, you start to notice things: the sparrows that land exactly when the traffic light turns red. The neighborhood cats that sleep beneath the ramen shop vent because it’s the warmest spot on the block. The old woman who walks her tiny dog at the exact same hour every morning, nodding politely to the garbage collectors like they’re monks.

    Everyone, everything, adapting.
    Finding rhythm in the static.

    Back in Slovenia, that tree now drops seeds of its own. The hillside changes slightly each year. Paths carved by deer. Moss growing on one side of the bark. Sometimes I sit beside it and just watch the insects for a while, wondering how many years it will live past me.

    And in a way, I feel the same when I watch a crowd cross Shibuya at rush hour. A million tiny organisms in motion, adjusting angles and timings with ballet precision. Some frown, some float. Some lost in thought, some locked to their phones.
    Still—moving forward.

    “I guess what I’m excited about,” I said finally, “is that people figure things out. Slowly. Clumsily. Often the wrong way first. But they do.”

    She sipped her coffee and smiled. “That’s very… non-linear of you.”

    “I prefer curved,” I said. “Straight lines break.”

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    The future doesn’t arrive all at once.
    It grows like a tree—twisting, pausing, trying again.
    Every scar becomes part of the shape.
    Every delay teaches direction.
    Even pain, even chaos, has roots.

    Don’t look for perfection.
    Look for cohabitation.
    Between past and present, nature and steel, sorrow and joy.
    The world is learning how to hold all of it—together.

    And so are we.

    So no, I’m not waiting for some perfect tomorrow.
    But I’m watching the way things bend toward light,
    even when the weather’s off.
    And that, quietly,
    is enough.

  • Where Harmony Falters

    ゆらぎこそ
    いのちの調べ
    音のままに

    In wavering tones
    life composes its music—
    let it play as is.

    People talk about harmony like it’s a goal.
    Something fixed. Clean. Balanced.

    A final chord that rings just right.

    But when I look back—really look—
    I don’t think I’ve ever lived in harmony for very long.
    Not the tidy kind, anyway.
    Not the kind you can frame on a wall and nod at.

    The truth is, most of life isn’t harmonious.
    It’s dissonant.
    Messy.
    A slow-motion stumble through moods and misunderstandings.
    One second you’re laughing over dinner,
    the next you’re not talking for days,
    both convinced the other doesn’t get it.

    And maybe that’s okay.
    Maybe that’s not failure at all.
    Maybe it’s how things breathe.

    If I let go of anything now,
    it wouldn’t be anger. Or sadness.
    Or even conflict.

    I’d let go of the need for constant harmony.

    Because I think I finally understand:
    harmony isn’t something you force.
    It’s something that visits.

    It comes and goes like weather.

    And the rest of the time—
    when things are cracked, off-key, unspoken—
    that’s not absence.
    That’s still music.
    Just a different kind.

    When I was younger, I thought the point was to fix everything.
    To keep the peace.
    To make sure no one was ever hurt,
    and that every conversation ended with a nod and a smile.

    But life taught me something different.
    It taught me through slammed doors,
    through cold silences in kitchens,
    through the lump in my throat when I wanted to say sorry but didn’t know how.

    It taught me through love that didn’t listen
    and love that did, eventually,
    after a long walk and some space.

    The biggest turning points in my life didn’t happen during peaceful times.
    They happened during rupture.

    I grew not from calm,
    but from the friction.

    The argument with my father that left us both raw.
    The moment I said something cruel and watched someone I loved flinch.
    The breakup that emptied me so completely
    I had no choice but to start again from zero.

    In those moments, everything hurt.
    But everything mattered.

    Because pain, when you let it pass through you,
    doesn’t rot.
    It reshapes.
    It shows you the edge of who you were
    and the door to who you could become.

    Harmony is not the default.
    It’s a brief grace.

    And when it arrives—after the tears,
    after the misunderstanding,
    after the long, awkward conversation where no one quite knew what to say—
    it feels like a warm hand on your back.
    A momentary alignment.
    A breath you both finally take together.

    But it’s not forever.
    It doesn’t need to be.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    Let go of the fantasy of perfect peace.
    Real life wavers.
    People clash.
    Things fall apart.
    And in that falling, something truer is revealed.

    Beauty isn’t in the balance.
    It’s in the attempt.
    In the small, flawed efforts we make to meet each other where we are.
    In the courage to stay
    even when everything is slightly off tune.

    Sometimes, the most honest love is the one that argues.
    Not to win.
    But to be real.

  • The Music That Found Me

    はじめての
    おとが胸打つ
    なつかしさ

    The first sound echoes—
    striking something deep inside,
    a homesickness new.

    When I was young, music didn’t come in genres. It came in waves. In moments. It came through open windows and distant car radios, from cassette tapes passed hand to hand on school buses, from the glow of music television late at night when you were supposed to be asleep but weren’t. It came like weather, sudden and unprovoked—one minute you were just brushing your teeth, the next you were fully inside the rhythm, feet moving, eyes wide, something pulsing in your chest you didn’t yet know the name of.

    There was a track—I don’t remember the name—some ridiculous Eurodance hit, probably played on a cheap boombox or Nokia ringtone speaker. It wasn’t art. It wasn’t even particularly good. But when the bass dropped, it felt like someone had cracked open a secret compartment inside my brain and poured electric syrup on all the dusty corners. My legs twitched. My heart sped up. Everything felt new and slippery and possible. I was maybe nine years old. I played it again and again until the batteries died.

    It didn’t matter what the lyrics were about. I didn’t speak English well enough to understand them anyway. It didn’t matter who made the song, or whether it was cool. The only thing that mattered was how it made me feel: invincible, in motion, like maybe the universe was clapping along with me in some unseen way. I didn’t yet understand art, or effort, or the intimacy of sound creation. Back then, music wasn’t something I respected. It was something I devoured. Like sugar. Like noise I needed in my blood.

    It was only much later—years later—that I began to actually listen.

    I think it happened quietly. Maybe I was seventeen, maybe twenty. I remember sitting in my room one night, the walls still the same, but something in me different. The song playing was slower than what I used to like—jazzy, maybe. There was a breath at the start, then a pause, then a piano note that felt like a question. I listened again, this time not for the dopamine hit but for the story. For the space between the sounds.

    And I found something I hadn’t known I was looking for: the musician.

    Not the finished track, not the studio polish—but the human. I could feel the hands on the strings. I could hear the weariness in the tempo, the joy just barely contained in the background laughter at the end of the take. These weren’t just songs anymore—they were confessions. Openings. Letters written in a language you couldn’t translate but could still understand.

    From then on, music began to mean something else. Not better. Just deeper.

    I started wandering through record shops the way people walk through forests—quiet, curious, ready to stumble upon something sacred. Sometimes I’d find a live recording from the 70s, the kind where you can hear people coughing in the crowd, chairs creaking, a glass breaking somewhere behind the mic. And that imperfection made it real. Made it matter. It was proof of life.

    I started loving music that didn’t need to impress me. Music that didn’t shout. That had nothing to prove. Japanese ambient. Sad Brazilian guitar. Polish jazz with too much echo. I liked tracks where nothing happened for long stretches, where the feeling crept in slowly, like a fog rolling through familiar streets. I liked to imagine the person playing it—alone in a room, tired, maybe hopeful—just trying to get one part of themselves outside of themselves.

    Now, when someone asks what my favorite genre is, I hesitate. It feels like being asked what kind of sky you prefer. Blue? Overcast? A thunderstorm at 3 a.m.? It depends. On what? On who I am that day. On whether I need to remember or forget.

    Sometimes, I’ll hear a song that sounds like a place I’ve never been, but somehow miss. That’s when I know I’m in the right one.

    Sometimes, the best part of the song isn’t even the chorus—it’s the pause right before it, when the entire track is holding its breath, and I’m holding mine too, and for a moment we’re both waiting to see what will happen next.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    What begins as noise can become prayer.
    What you once consumed blindly, you may one day bow to.
    Music is not about liking or ranking or even understanding.
    It’s about showing up—to the sound, to the silence, to yourself.
    The crack in the singer’s voice is not a flaw. It’s the reason you believe them.

    Every song you’ve ever loved lived inside someone first.
    And when it reaches you, when you really hear it—it’s no longer theirs.
    It becomes part of the invisible architecture of your life.
    Even after it fades.

    Even after you do.

    So no, I don’t have a favorite genre.
    But I have dozens of memories where the music found me—
    caught me mid-thought, mid-heartache, mid-summer breeze—
    and said, here, this is what you need now.
    And for a moment, I believed it.

  • When the World Was Still Small

    ほたる舞う
    こどもの夏に
    時 止まる

    Fireflies dancing—
    in the summer of childhood,
    time holds still.

    I’ve never really had a “most memorable vacation.”
    Not in the way people usually mean.
    No airport stamps or beach resorts.
    No frozen cocktails or Instagram highlights.
    But I do remember the summers.

    Long, generous summers.
    The kind that stretched like open arms—
    June to September—no rush, no schedules, no alarms.
    Just time. Pure, uninterrupted time.

    It wasn’t a vacation.
    It was a season.

    And back then, the world was still small.

    I remember the smell of cut grass baking under the sun.
    The metallic scent of summer rain hitting hot pavement.
    I remember sleeping with the window open,
    a soft wind breathing through the mosquito net,
    the air filled with the dry, peppery scent of elderflower.

    And fireflies.

    God, the fireflies.

    In June, they’d float like little spirits across the garden—
    gentle flickers, barely real.
    We chased them barefoot,
    feet slapping against warm stone and soft dirt,
    laughing like there was nothing else in the universe
    but this glow, this night,
    this light in your cupped hands.

    July came with the beer festival.

    It was small—local.
    Held in a field that was otherwise just cows and clouds.
    But for one week, it transformed:
    the scent of fried onions, yeast, sweat, and beer foam
    hung thick in the air like mist.
    Men carried crates, their hands dusty with hops.
    Women wore faded tank tops and wide smiles.

    I helped out behind the counter—passing bottles, wiping tables.
    I didn’t drink yet.
    But I remember the cold condensation on glass.
    The slick, sticky floor under my shoes.
    The way the music thumped through the soles of my feet.

    It was messy.
    Honest.
    Alive.

    Most days we just wandered.

    Down narrow paths behind the village,
    across wheat fields full of crickets,
    into the woods where light filtered down like something holy.

    We didn’t know much about the world then.
    Didn’t need to.

    We had the river,
    and the way the frogs croaked at dusk.
    We had trees with names.
    We had bikes that squeaked.
    We had freedom disguised as boredom.

    But slowly—without anyone really saying it—
    those summers began to vanish.

    The first signs were subtle:
    jobs, responsibilities,
    the pressure to “make something of yourself.”
    Suddenly, time had a price.

    The fireflies still came in June—
    but I stopped chasing them.
    There was always something else to do.

    The beer festival still called for help—
    but I had moved to the city.
    I had other plans.

    And then, one day, I realized:
    summer was no longer a season.
    It had become a date on the calendar.
    An interruption.
    A logistics problem.
    A time to “get away” rather than be.

    The world had grown big.
    Too big, maybe.

    Sometimes I miss the smallness.
    The certainty that everything worth knowing
    was within biking distance.
    That fireflies would return.
    That you could fall asleep to the sound of nothing but wind and insects.

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    The beauty of childhood wasn’t in what we did—but in how time held us.
    Those long summers weren’t extraordinary.
    They were ordinary, deeply.
    Unpolished, half-forgotten, full of pause.

    Wabi-sabi teaches us that what fades is not lost—
    it simply returns in quieter forms.
    A scent.
    A memory.
    A night where the wind smells like June again.

    That is enough.

    So no, I don’t have a favorite vacation.
    But I had those long, sunburnt months
    when time felt like a friend,
    not a thief.

    And sometimes, late at night,
    when the window’s open and the air smells like warm dirt—
    I remember.

    I remember it all.

  • Still We Go

    風の中に
    こたえはなくとも
    道はひらく

    Even if the wind
    holds no answers—
    the path unfolds.

    I’m not an authority on anything, really.
    Not in the way the word usually implies.

    I don’t have a degree in peace,
    a certificate in resilience,
    or a badge for surviving the wild days of this strange life.

    But if I had to claim expertise in something…
    maybe it’s in learning to stay when it’s easier to run.
    Or how to sit with the parts of myself that never got applause.
    Or how to laugh when things make no sense and still take one step forward.

    In that way, I suppose I’m an apprentice of hakuna matata.

    Not the Disney gloss version.
    Not the shiny hakuna matata that skips through jungles singing about worry-free lives.
    No—I’m talking about the quieter kind.
    The one whispered to yourself
    when the bank account is low,
    your lungs are tight,
    and someone you love hasn’t called in weeks.

    The first time I really heard it—hakuna matata—I wasn’t a child watching The Lion King.
    I was in my twenties, on a bus in Zanzibar.
    The driver had one cracked tooth and a radio that only played static.
    When the road turned to sand and the engine sputtered,
    he didn’t curse.
    He just turned, smiled wide,
    and said,
    “Hakuna matata, rafiki. We go slow. Still we go.”

    I never forgot that.

    No worries?
    It sounds naive at first.
    But it’s not about ignoring the storm.
    It’s about dancing in it without asking the thunder for permission.

    It’s not about pretending you don’t feel fear.
    It’s about not letting fear drive the car every damn day.

    It’s not apathy.
    It’s presence.

    A full-bodied trust that the river carries even when we don’t know where.

    These days, when people ask what I’m “good at,”
    I don’t talk about skills.

    I talk about the morning I lost my job
    and still made miso soup for breakfast,
    because nourishment matters even in collapse.

    I talk about how I sat with my sister in silence
    the day we both missed our childhood at the exact same moment,
    and how we didn’t try to fix the ache.

    I talk about the times I walked through the city at night,
    no music, no company,
    just me and the old streetlights,
    learning to be okay with not being okay.

    If that’s not authority, I don’t know what is.

    I can’t tell you how to win at life.
    But I can show you how to bow to it.

    How to carry water up the hill
    and still find joy in the splash of it cooling your feet.

    How to light incense for no one,
    just because the room feels better with the scent of patience.

    How to live as if it all matters—
    even when you’re not sure it does.

    Haiku for the wind-hearted:

    しんぱいを
    手放したあとに
    空が広い

    After letting go
    of the heavy weight of fear—
    the sky feels wider.

    So no, I’m not an authority.
    But I’ve learned how to pause.
    How to keep breathing.
    How to smile with a cracked tooth
    and say,
    “Hakuna matata, rafiki.”

    We go slow.
    Still we go.

  • What’s Your Definition of Romantic?

    はじまりの
    気づきは静けさに
    ひらく心

    The beginning,
    of what matters—
    blooms in silence.

    I never really cared much for romance.

    Not the loud kind, anyway. Not the kind with choreographed declarations or roses stacked like bricks at a roadside flower stall. I’ve walked by too many of those on rainy days, the plastic wrapping fogged over, the stems bent, heads wilting under the weight of the idea.

    When I think of romance—if I’m being honest—I don’t think of candlelit dinners or long-stemmed flattery. I think of something quieter. Something almost forgettable if you blink too fast.

    Like someone who notices when your tea’s gone cold and warms it without a word.
    Like a hand on your shoulder that doesn’t try to fix anything—just stays there.
    Like waiting at the airport even though the delay was three hours and you said they didn’t have to.
    Like remembering which side of the bed you sleep better on, and never making a thing of it.

    I guess I find romantic whatever survives the performance.

    There was this moment once.
    Not a big one. Just a hallway.
    Just winter socks.
    Just her holding out a peeled clementine.

    She didn’t ask. Didn’t say anything.
    Just pressed it into my palm.
    And I remember thinking:
    This is what stays.

    In my family, we never talked about love. Not in words. But my mother cut fruit at night, placed it in bowls she never expected us to thank her for. My father didn’t hug much, but he always waited at the window until I made it inside.

    So I grew up with this idea that love is not an exclamation—it’s a continuation.

    Not something you chase, but something you let linger.

    I once stayed in a small inn on a Japanese island.
    The lady there, nearly seventy, brought me breakfast—miso soup, rice, a grilled fish—and when I bowed and said, 「ありがとう」, she just smiled and said,
    「こちらこそ。」 — “I should be thanking you.”

    That, to me, is the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said.

    I’ve dated people who sent me poetry.
    And others who didn’t say much at all.

    One of them used to place their phone facedown whenever we ate together.
    That meant more than the sonnet someone else once mailed me.

    Sometimes I think: I don’t care about romance.
    But then I remember the sound of someone’s breathing slowing next to mine,
    a meal shared wordlessly,
    a letter never sent but written anyway.

    And maybe that’s exactly what romance is:
    Not an event, but a pattern.
    Not a chase, but a rhythm.

    A girl once asked me what my love language was.
    I said I don’t know the names of those things.
    But I’ll walk with you until your train comes.
    Even if it’s cold. Even if we don’t speak.
    And I’ll remember your favorite kombucha brand even six months after you’re gone.

    To me, romance isn’t romance unless it’s real.
    Real as your silence when you’re tired.
    Real as staying when there’s nothing exciting left to say.
    Real as the wear on the wooden kitchen table you both sat at for years,
    eating cheap dinners, dreaming louder than the city around you.

  • The Prayer Without a Shrine

    —

    The first time I saw someone bow to the wind, I didn’t think much of it.

    It was somewhere north of Sendai, in a half-forgotten station with vending machines humming against the sound of distant mountains. A man in a brown jacket, maybe late sixties, stood in front of an empty platform and performed the gesture I’d only seen before in shrines. Two bows. Two claps. One final bow. He wasn’t facing anyone. There was no altar. Just the world.

    He noticed me watching.

    「どこでもいいよ。」
    “Anywhere is good.”

    That was all he said, smiling faintly, before stepping onto his train.

    It stayed with me.

    I’ve been bowing since then—not every day, not religiously, but in small hidden corners of life. Train stations. Under trees. While the kettle boils. When no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching.

    Not because I expect an answer.
    Just because it feels like the right thing to do.

    —

    This morning, I found myself doing it again—by the kitchen window, the one that fogs slightly after each coffee. The air smelled like spring but moved like winter, sharp at the edges. I stood there barefoot, half-awake, and before I realized it: bow. clap. clap. bow.

    Not for luck.
    Not for requests.
    Just for the sake of remembering.

    A kind of quiet nod to the morning.
    To the fact that I’d made it this far.

    —

    I’ve never been good at praying in the traditional sense.
    Too many questions. Too little formality.

    But gratitude? That I can understand.
    Even when I forget to call it by name.

    There are moments—fleeting, maybe once a week—where I feel it rising, uninvited. Like standing at a crossing when the red light takes too long, and you have just enough time to notice the smell of someone baking bread somewhere down the road.

    Or when a friend laughs too hard at your bad joke and your stomach knots, just a little, in a way that says this matters more than you think.

    It’s not dramatic.
    But it lingers.

    —

    I think about my grandmother sometimes, slicing apples at the table. Her movements slow, rhythmic, like music no one else could hear. She had a way of doing things as if they were sacred, even if they weren’t.

    “If your hands are always grabbing,” she once said, “they won’t know how to open.”

    She didn’t mean it as philosophy. Just a comment. But it landed like scripture.

    —

    These days, I don’t ask for much.
    Not because I don’t want. But because I’m learning the difference between wanting and needing.

    What I have:
    Friends who are still here.
    A family who is still mostly healthy, even if more tired around the eyes.
    My own hands, still working.
    A spine that mostly cooperates.
    Some tension left in the soul, which is good—it means I haven’t stopped growing.

    Freedom.
    Not in the global sense, not in the dramatic political way.
    But the kind that lets me say no, or yes, or I need a break without fear.

    It’s enough.
    And when it’s not enough, I try to remember it could be.

    —

    Sometimes, when I’m alone on the street and the sun hits just right, I do the gesture again. Bow. Clap. Clap. Bow.

    No one notices.
    That’s the point.

    The world doesn’t need your rituals.
    You do.

    —

    When I was younger, I thought expressing gratitude had to be loud—parties, speeches, toasts over loud dinners.

    But I’ve come to believe that real gratitude is quiet. Almost invisible. Like the warmth of worn denim, or the sound of your mother stirring tea two rooms away.

    It hides in the ordinary.

    —

    Last week, I sat with a friend at a corner café, one of those places where the coffee is too expensive but the light is just right. We spoke of work, of fatigue, of the creeping sense that time is slipping through cracks we didn’t even know existed.

    And then he paused, mid-sentence, and said:

    “You know… despite everything, I feel lucky.”

    We didn’t say much after that.
    We just drank slowly, as if the coffee might turn to memory in our mouths.

    —

    Wabi-Sabi Lesson
    Gratitude doesn’t need a temple.
    It only asks for a moment.
    And a willingness to mean it.

    The act is enough.
    You bow—not because it changes the world.
    But because it reminds you that the world is still worth bowing to.

    —

    I’ve come to see gratitude like tending a small garden.
    Invisible. Daily. Quiet.

    It doesn’t always bloom.
    But when it does, it makes even an ordinary life shimmer for a while.

    No gods required.
    Just attention.
    And a bow.

    Anywhere is good.

  • The Weight We Can’t Quite Name

    —

    やがてくる
    まだ見ぬ嵐に
    傘をたたむ
    eventually
    even for unseen storms
    we fold our umbrellas

    —

    There’s a kind of heaviness that doesn’t announce itself.

    It’s not panic. Not despair.
    It’s the quiet worry. The one that crouches low in the chest and waits.

    I don’t even know if it’s one thing.
    But lately, when I lie in bed long after the world’s gone quiet—when no one needs an answer and nothing is urgent—my thoughts stretch out into a shapeless future. A field of fog I can’t quite enter.
    And I feel it.

    The weight.

    —

    Maybe it started with how fast everything moves now.
    Or maybe how nothing moves unless you push it yourself.
    Maybe it’s all the small moments I’ve watched vanish in the scroll of someone else’s life, until I couldn’t tell which parts of my own were real, and which were just stories I tried to fit into.

    I’m worried we’re losing our rhythm.
    Not the productivity rhythm.
    The one that told us when to rest.
    When to be still.
    When to tend to the garden even if nothing was blooming yet.

    I’m worried we’ve forgotten the language of slow.

    —

    I went for a walk last week. Just a small trail behind my grandparents’ place, that familiar field where the same pine tree leans a little more every year.

    There’s a bench halfway through, carved by someone long ago.
    It’s always there—weathered, cracked, stubborn.
    I sat.

    It wasn’t the view.
    It wasn’t the silence.
    It was something else—some soft ache behind the ribs.

    Maybe it was the thought that we don’t build benches anymore. Not ones meant to last decades.
    We build updates.
    We build replacements.

    But not places to rest.

    —

    A few years ago, in Aso, I met a couple who owned a small soba shop just off the main road.
    Everything was hand-cut. The broth made from scratch every morning.
    I asked them why they never expanded, never franchised, never put it online.

    The woman looked at me and said,
    「なくすのがこわい。」
    “I’m afraid to lose what I’ve already built.”

    I think about that often.

    Not out of fear.
    But out of care.

    —

    I’m worried that the future won’t leave room for care.
    That everything will be optimized, but nothing will be cherished.
    That we’ll have access to everything except ourselves.
    That the quiet will disappear under the noise of what’s next.

    —

    Back when I was living in Birmingham, there was a woman in the flat next to mine who used to hum when she washed dishes.
    She didn’t know I could hear her.
    But I did.
    Every evening around six.
    No music. Just the rhythm of water, plate, voice.

    It was the most human thing in the building.

    And I’m scared that sound—those kind of sounds—might not make it through.

    —

    We’re good at fixing things now.
    But not so good at tending to them.

    We know how to grow fast.
    But not how to grow deep.

    We know how to talk.
    But not always how to sit in the same room and say nothing.

    —

    I’m worried that the small rituals will vanish.

    The slow pour of coffee in the morning.
    The way someone folds a shirt before putting it away.
    The way my grandfather brushes crumbs from the table with his hand, every time, like a ceremony.
    The way someone lights a candle not for light, but for memory.

    —

    And yet—

    There is a kind of faith in still being worried.

    It means something matters enough to protect.

    It means we still recognize the shape of what’s fragile.

    —

    So maybe the worry isn’t the enemy.
    Maybe it’s the thread.

    The one that tugs us gently back toward what matters.
    The one that asks us to build not faster, but truer.

    To make fewer things—and mean them more.

    —

    I don’t know what the future will look like.
    I don’t know what we’ll lose, or what we’ll trade for convenience.

    But I do know this:

    I want to keep a corner of my life where nothing needs to be efficient.
    Where water boils slowly.
    Where letters are written by hand.
    Where I still buy vegetables from someone who grew them.
    Where the pine tree I planted has time to grow tall enough for birds to nest in it—
    even if I won’t live long enough to see them.

    —

    Wabi-sabi lesson:
    Not all worry is fear.
    Sometimes it’s a map.
    One you draw with every small thing you continue to do with care.

    —

    So, yes—
    I’m worried.

    But not without reason.
    Not without hope.

    Because even if everything changes,
    we still have the choice to move slowly.
    To listen more.
    To build something that lasts, even in quiet.

    And that’s something I plan to keep doing.
    While I still can.