There’s a magic to things we can hold in our hands. The more digital our world becomes, the more I want to create these sorts of things. Products that feel pleasant to the touch. Art that evokes an aesthetic beauty and distinct style where the past and future dance and breathe.

Months ago, while visiting the U.S. from Japan, I had an insight: I want to create a magazine. I’d call it Citoyens du Monde (Citizens of the World), a canvas where all the things I love may converge: prose and poetry; travel and culture; colors and fonts and design, photography and art.

Eventually, I want to bring aboard other inspired souls to help me illuminate the more meaningful aspects of being a human being on planet Earth, as we’re all citizens of the world, trying our best to understand it.

Drawing from experiences toward the end of last year, volume 1 would derive from an adventure in the United States, spent largely in the desert with thoughts in outer space, and also from my time living in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan.

It would comprise one of my favorite stories that I’ve written, which is my first experience at Burning Man. To have that experience memorialized in print was enough of a reason to get to work.

I started designing the magazine while back in Japan. After months of work, I nearly sidelined the project. Yet a zine fest (magazine festival) was approaching in Tokyo, and the opportunity was too cool to pass up.

If it wasn’t for my girlfriend insisting that we sign up (she’d sell her own hand-crocheted items), I wouldn’t have pushed the magazine across the finish line. Thank god she did, as the deadline forced me to pump out five special edition copies of Citoyens du Monde to sell at the festival.

I had the magazine printed at a Kinko’s in Shinjuku on this high quality color-speckled paper. I wandered the neon-lit streets with the copies in my backpack beneath a clear January night sky, an indomitable smile on my face, my soul on fire from having accomplished something challenging and worthwhile.

At the festival, strangers held the magazine in their hands, delicately turning the pages, their expressions focused, perhaps their mouths cracked in a smile.

They probably couldn’t understand the words. It didn’t matter if they could. It didn’t matter if they purchased the magazine, either.

The thing was legit, and I was delighted. Surrounded by other creators and boundless imagination, my dream was made manifest. I was really doing it.

The idea was to publish the magazine on Amazon when I got back to the states. Now I’m back, and the magazine is live (found at the bottom of the story). I ordered the magazine and it came in the mail earlier this week, the same day my girlfriend and I started looking at apartments in Northern California.

We’ve both been on the move for years, as I lived in Japan for the last two and a half years, and Europe before that. She’d been on plenty of her own adventures. And then, last year, we crossed paths for the first time while I was on that same trip in the states.

It felt like the stars aligned. It’s love, and we’re both ready to take a real chance on this relationship. Still, this is a big change for both of us, settling down for an undetermined amount of time in the U.S.

It feels right, but I look at this magazine and I think about Japan, and I can’t help but ponder about whether I’ll live in a foreign country again.

It’s not just traveling that lights me up, not vacation. It’s the feeling that I’m part of something bigger, that I’m garnering interesting experiences ; to be a writer,  I want to believe that I’m really living an interesting life.

said Henry David Thoreau.

Perhaps I don’t feel deserving to write unless I’ve lived, first. And perhaps it’s vain, too, to believe that traveling is the only experience which equates to truly living.

I get to travel.

I’m fortunate beyond words to be able to pursue these things I want to do with my life. Most people garner life experiences by necessity, by survival. And I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it’s not traveling, but the challenging experiences I haven’t asked for that have taught me the most.

I’m just grateful to be able to choose the life I want to live. Now, I’m choosing this. I can feel the energy generating of something new and beautiful and solid right here where I am in the U.S. — potential. Love.

Even though I’ve built a brand on travel, I know that’s not the entire story of who I am, as we’re more than one-dimensional beings. Rocking between going and staying, setting roots and straying, making a place a home and wishing I had nothing of my own.

I’m a creature of habit and I’m keen to build a nest. But I also have my sights on foreign shores, as I know what I know, and I long to see the rest.

I hope to exist where these worlds entwine, the known and the unknown, yin and yang, the river and the sea, routine and the wilderness, I just want to be free.

As I get older, I’ll continue to sway between these modes of being, as I don’t intend to wander forever. But I’ll always love to roam, and perhaps with time I’ll roam more purposefully — with a story in mind, a job I’m on, a setting to explore for a book I’m writing. Right now, I’ll roam closer to home, family and friends.

And that excites me. I’m growing up, settling in, becoming more attuned to who I am. I’m fuckin’ happy, man.

I’m ecstatic to have found a woman I love. The city we’re calling home is not where I grew up. It’s diverse, strange, historic and gritty.

I’m ready to get lost here; to write here; to make friends and dance until the wee hours of the morning here. Most of all, I’m ready for something I haven’t had: a partner.

This magazine is the start of something good that I hope to do for the rest of my life. It tells a story and elucidates a chapter of my youth. It indicates wonderful things to come if I stay true to my inner compass, as I’m just a curious kid.

This volume is a true labor of love, as is all the work I do. It’s not necessarily to make money, as proceeds from the things I’ve created trickle in. When they do, it’s more like a oh, that’s nice, rather than a thank god.

I’m looking for a day job, because, as Elizabeth Gilbert says in one of my favorite books, Big Magic:

I’ve spent my twenties making things. A podcast, two books, a magazine and a blog. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. On the good days I’m up at dawn, eager to get working on my dreams. On the more challenging days it feels like I’m just trying to keep my head above water.

How am I going to make money? What if I’m in the same position in a decade?

And when the negative chatter has its way with me, that’s when I realize I need to relax. Simplify. Do less of what I don’t enjoy, and more of what I do. And what do I enjoy? Depth. Making things that last. Excavating my heart and soul. Spending time with the people I love.

I’m drifting in the ocean of creativity, happy to let the waves rock me this way and that. Soon I’ll be on to be my next book, a novel about my time in Japan.

Perhaps when The Dare to Dream Podcast grows some more, that’s what I’ll dedicate my time to. I’ll keep at this magazine; I’ll keep following my heart; I’ll keep making things that light me up inside. And if nothing makes me successful in the end, well, shit, at least I tried.

And that, to me, means I’ve lived.

Click for my reel from zine fest Tokyo