Ryokan life.

She sits type type typing in a tatami room now, far away from what her mind's eye saw as civilization. . . civilization that is up until now. The world has been turned "sakasama" just like the pineapple upside-down cake that she made today.

I wonder. . .

how long it really takes us to understand that what's important may not necessarily be important to the world. By the time we realize that writing or playing music on a guitar is not about success but about survival, it could be too late.


Now is the time to try, to create.

dreams. . .

She had dreams of an earthquake in Massachusetts---she tried to get under her childhood bed for safety, but couldn't fit.


Later, another dream about eating blueberries and strawberries, and her younger brother. . . he was a child in the dream. She hugged him.

choices

She forgot something that happened.... a lapse in memory (she forgot to mention.) It's never happened to her, at least as far as she knows. She ate a bagel, went to sleep, and woke up in a different prefecture with no recollection of what happened in between. It was after the cherry blossom party where someone was playing a flute used in o-kagura. It was something out of a dream. . . a very beautiful dream.
She saw him out of the corner of her eye, fully knowing it was him, and she had no idea how to react. Actually just to be a few feet from him was pure bliss, and she looked up at the cherry blossoms and said nothing. He thought that she didn't remember him (or maybe he knew that she did and was just pretending), and called her name, hugging her. It was all so surreal.


How surreal are our lives, truly?


In the past few weeks, fate has been king in her life.


But how to handle her feelings about the other? She never thought life would come to this.

in transition

She sits once more type type typing in the room that's become so comfortable so familiar to her. Things, memories lying around in cardboard boxes in the room. Going back to the place where she started was maybe a strange choice, but once that seemed to be written in the stars. The work here is done.

Westward Ho!

time for a change

She sits in a completely different place, on a completely different island. The time has come for a change, that's unmistakable, but what the change will be is hard to say. Better to be in a safe place and healthy for the time being. She went to her favorite cake shop today, Sakaeya, and sipped coffee while looking out the window and writing down new vocabulary. 'Go back to being a student for a while,' a voice says, 'Learn as much as you can about your heart.'

what we really want.....

She's slightly sleepy but her mind is lucid. What we really want is a union with the divine. Everything else has no meaning, but in our search for that union, we make other things, other people important. Those things are decidedly not what we're after.