I’m on the train to Kinosaki, a town three and a half hours north of Osaka on the Sea of Japan. I hear the low, rhythmic hum of the tracks, spinning and thudding over and over.

My eyes trace the world beyond the glass, red pines racing past and dark blue rivers with the water white where it falls, the landscape pleasantly subdued.

There’s something nice about the brown fields. They are the Earth, much of it, vast expanses not to be overlooked by the more vivid details. What of the self is brown fields? The soul. Gazing upon them I feel free, their breadth like reaching fingers, stretching wide as part of me.

Gray clouds linger overhead, backlit by the bright light of the afternoon sun. What of the self is the rays of the sun? The spirit, that which persists, pierces clouds and inspires growth.

And the heart? The sea; the rivers veins, cold and blue and flowing, breathing life into every city and village as rain falling from the sky as tears, emanating from thoughts of the past.

Rain dropping that was once of the sea; tears flowing that were once of the heart; a piece of the whole, a drop that augurs the potential of a brewing storm. The cold rain touches you — in that moment you feel it all — the fields and the clouds and the sun and the sea, the potential of a storm contained, the heart and the spirit and the soul as one.

I’m reading The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of my all-time favorite authors. I really like this book, his latest. It’s rare to truly be excited about a book. But that’s how I felt with all of Knausgaard’s books, both his fiction and nonfiction.

His style inspired me to be a writer, peculiar in a way that I can’t put down; it’s him. He’s curious about the mundane nature of life, and that’s what writing is to me, imparting the beautiful mystery in our mundane nature.

Yet life is nothing but mundane nature, for mundane derives from the Latin mundus, world, yet now the word’s synonymous with dull, prosaic. Look outside and explore the world. Look within and uncover your own. Our nature is anything but mundane.

It’s the middle of February.

The passing trees are black and bare; It’s still surreal living here, and yet problems are problems and challenges remain — but I’m here, and life is blossoming, and I gotta believe that these things are gonna play out as they’re meant to.

The characters in the book are in Moscow. Setting captivates me perhaps more than anything, for setting comprises geographical location, topography, history and culture, how these things entwine.

The fire in me catches as I simultaneously read about a mother and son driving along a river in Moscow, while looking up and out the window at a river in the Japanese countryside.

I imagine the dusky landscape illustrated through the page. The mother’s resentful brother-in-law has picked up her and her son. I imagine the river black, the surrounding snow white, and the tension in the quiet car.

Then I look outside and there’s a dark blue river flowing. There’s bamboo, gold and green and swaying. There are mountains and hills, patches of blue sky.

Beyond it the air grows colder, darker, quieter. This is the world beyond what we can understand, for we remain here, in the world of trains and books and trees and snow; the world of fire.

What about that world exists in this one?

Does the emptiness seep within our bounds of sky? Does it grab us, speak to us, inspire us? I think if we breathe deeply and ask it to.

The auburn hills sit half in shadow and half in sunlight, touched by what’s out there, aglow with the rays of the sun. Maybe we are too. It feels that way when the spirit rages, as if we possess the light of the sun and are here on Earth to shed it.

That’s what people do. That’s what love does. It makes the pain worth it, the dark light, just as the moon makes beauty of the night.

We grow from a child and learn right from wrong, but what’s right and what’s wrong? An understanding inherent perhaps as the leaves which grow on the trees. We’re different yet the same, all affected by time, inner longing, unseen forces both dark and light. The winds of life gust through us all, ripping away our inherent understanding.

The world gets cold and then it warms; in some places the sky’s blue for as far as the eyes can see and in others gray with rain or white with snow. But creatures persist, because of what we share.

That’s what fascinates me about history: it’s raw, cold, resilient — absolutely beyond comprehension. Human beings love and they struggle and they fight. We endure.

Some try to understand why. Why we’re given these bodies susceptible to pain, minds that strangle themselves, souls meant to be free, yet bounded by our own constraints.

I’m gripped by wars of the past, wars of today, for they make me wonder how human lives can become just numbers, for it’s utterly incomprehensible how so many can be lost in the blink of an eye. There and then gone. It doesn’t make sense.

Do we know what life is? What it’s meant to be? War destroys people, yet it often does something equally unimaginable: it inspires courage, extraordinary acts of love which bear the meaning of a lifetime lived.

Is this whole bloody mess worth it if you die in love? If you breathe your last breath from a heart that’s felt both joy and pain; is it all worth it for one gulp of cold air, that breath containing what’s gone and what’s to come?

What is life but a single moment lived well? To know just once the color of passing pines. Sometimes, it feels enough just to know the love of one good friend, with which you’ll never be alone. It makes it all worth it.

The world goes by and pours through me and opens me. The broken trees and river dams don’t give a damn about me. They exist just to exist, coming and going in the blink of my eye.

Do we? Can we live a lifetime in a day, contemplating a single phrase, our life and all that it contains, our verse broken down until it’s nothing but a word, a day, a single word of your utmost truth, long awaiting to be spoken by the voice of you.