sunlight | little sarah Big World

July 31, 2013

Right Here, Right Now

I love the sunlight coming through lush, mid-summer leaves, turning them from kelly green to luminescent. Shades of turqoise, green, leaves like soft fingers, sharing secrets in the breeze. The bright, candied red of my toenail polish. Sounds of windchimes, soft caress of the lazily swirling air. Birds chirping contentedly.

There is so much beauty in the world, so much left to see and do and experience. I don’t know how much of it I’ll get to see. I feel weighted by obligations and past mistakes. Heavy with emotion. Overwhelmed at the thought of catching up–so many experiences, so little blogging.

But I will do my best, and I will start right now. Right here.

May 27, 2013

What We Write (part 2)

“He woke up every morning, thinking that today would be a new and distinctly different day, that somehow newness was possible, as long as he didn’t remember what had come before.

Which is why he tried to remember only his dreams, as if they were the one solid truth in a sea of memory.

People, thoughts, indignities, shouts, caresses, sincerity and faking it. Ebbing and flowing. Each wave new and just like the one before it. Each night’s dreams an unremarkable revelation, which is why–after a time spent chronicling them with sincere devotion and optimism into a blue suede journal purchased for that express purpose–he eventually gave it up, leaving both dreams and memories to others more sturdy or more creative than himself.

He left the journal to bleach in the sun.

Like sun leaking through the shutters of the window, he felt warmth in small, straight, disconnected lines. There was no, he realized, grand narrative into which it all fit. No satisfying, complete story to tell. His dreams were lies that somebody else whispered into his mind while he lay helpless. Creativity, true creativity, lie in thinking about himself as a thin, straight line of warm humanity touching others while they lay trapped in their dreams.”

* * *

(Written Saturday, May 25th, 2013 on the semi-enclosed outdoor patio at Design Festa Cafe & Bar, Harajuku, Tokyo. It was around 10 o’clock, after karaoke. Chad suggested we play exquisite corpse, passing a notebook back and forth, each writing a sentence, a thought or paragraph. And this is what we made 🙂

March 23, 2013

Gu-ri-mu-pu-se-su (“Glimpses”)

~Tuesday, March 19th, 2013~
(Saint Etoile, Kaihinmakuhari)

“Breakfast in a ‘French-style’ bakery at the train station. The toast set includes a small salad of cabbage, lettuce, corn, tomato, and hard-boiled egg, topped with mayonnaise. But the toast is good–thick, like Texas Toast. Blueberry-grape juice makes for a surprisingly delicious combination. Tastes a bit like jam.

Ashtrays everywhere. Here, you can get a $20 ticket for smoking on the street (and Chad almost did, first thing yesterday morning), but you can smoke most anywhere, indoors. There are designated smoking areas in restaurants, even fast food joints.

Also everywhere: R&B music. Like right now, at the bakery, or yesterday at Mos Burger (where we ordered a tempura veggie burger with rice patties for buns). Except that I don’t recognize any of the songs. It’s like Japan has some never-ending reserve of obscure, 90s R&B jams. Reminds me of Perry.”

* * *

More to come, Friends. Always more to come.