My hometown’s on fire.
I’m sickened for those that have lost everything.
It’s a nightmare, and I’m not even there.
In Tokyo, I pass a girl skipping across the intersection.
Boys in school uniforms,
Playing baseball underneath the overpass.
A couple seated and smiling on a bench.
Back in LA, the sky is black.
Here on the other side of the world, the sunset is clear.
Purple. Miraculous.
Life is so beautiful; so painful. And then it’s gone.
How can it be that the world exists in such duality?
How can we make sense of it.
Flowers bloom from ashes, eventually, they do.
Where there’s pain, there may be deeper love.
It’s how we respond, with fear, or with compassion.
With hate, or with open arms.
We’re all just people, trying to make sense of
Incomprehensible circumstances.

In the introduction of The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, a novel of life in early 1930s Berlin, Isherwood visits a character from the book years later.

“As I listened to all this,” he writes, “I marveled, as one always does, at the individual’s ability to be himself and survive, amidst a huge undifferentiated military mess. This was Frl. Schroeder’s History of World War II — and its only moral was: ‘Somehow or other, life goes on in spite of everything.’”

Life goes on in spite of everything. I talked to my brother who’s back in LA and told him how I feel.

Don’t find reasons to be sad, he said, find reasons to be happy.

If not happy, grateful. Friends and strangers here in Tokyo have asked if my family is safe. They are. That’s all that matters. I pray yours are too. Be good to each other. Why the hell else are we here, if not to help each other through.