I LOVE TO SEE your style on the street at moonrise. Your flair, the fact that you don’t care ‘bout what others do; I love to see people living. Living their life even when it isn’t easy.

It’s never easy. If we expect it to be, we remain unsatisfied.

Cold.

Fall into the ease of difficulty, find your flow in the climb; that’s where you will truly shine, individuals radiate shining dark, persisting, thriving, throwing up them shades amongst the collective longing for peace.

It’s not just what you wear which I admire, not a middle finger to what’s common. It’s you who make the clothes, and I discern behind the threads a soul distinct, energy in bloom.

It’s your curiosity of the arcane, the way your nose is in a book on the train or how you spend your weekend off your phone or care deeply about plants. I just wanna see you give a shit.

Do you, your darkness shining.

You inspire me to be me.

It’s a wet autumn morning. Black umbrellas flood grey streets.

The day, as with all worthy adventures, begins in a train station soba shop.

Color on a rainy day; the style of your morning stroll; a map to open a book serve as guides, not to a place, but the center of the heart.

Our time is short, I wanna make something of it; the heavy sky, silver with inclement rain feels melancholic like we — don’t need to be happy all the time; the deepest beauty derives from surviving.

The train tracks shimmer bronze and burnished. The sky withholds the sun, the sea blue clouds withhold rain, we withhold the color to see each day as meaningful.

The cold, crisp morning’s my fire.

The fire’s my beating heart.

It’s wonderful, the way the world is aged by time. Lines etched in wood emerge from passing buildings; roads crack; color fades.

The sky remains silver, purple, blue, gold; the hills red and brown, dying green as they inhale autumn and wither.

We pass a church with white spires soaring into the sky on the way to Kyoto.

I’ve been here before. The memory flashes through me. I’ve walked to those spires in spring, when roadside flowers burst with love and life meant something different.

Although I still sought beauty in the madness; it’s why I do what I do. Why I’ll never stop. I found it in an image of the Buddha on a gust of wind.

In Kyoto, a hawk flies overhead scanning the earth, upon which a soft rain falls from lustrous clouds.

Darkness falls and red autumn leaves of Tō-ji Temple dance to the tune of the cold.

Living in awe.

I walk and walk and walk and smile and think and stop to talk. What a sweet way to live, for it makes life simple; even when it hurts, continue shining darkly.

Whatever you’re going through, you’ll make it. We’ll make it.

It could take a month, a year, or ten for the stars to align.

But we got today. And while there will always be things we regret, wish were different or could change, we got one life. Ours, nobody else’s.

There’s so much to appreciate, so much others would kill for, so much love right where we are. Don’t need endless sunny days — nor do we want it.

I love a rainy day just as I crave the sun, for there’s a different sort of meaning in the gloom, the gradient of dark blue clouds and slate like stone.

The rain says chill. We don’t need to be perfect. Couldn’t be.

So easy to be bitter when life hurts. But life hurts, that’s a guarantee.

When the night is dark, when the rain falls and the ground comes alive with mud and sodden leaves, be uncommon.

Shine in the darkness.