alone in kyoto

I’m in Kyoto and it’s the first day of summer after the longest rainy season I can remember since arriving in Japan, almost three years ago now.

I’m taking a taxi because it’s what you do in Kyoto: you ride a bike or take a taxi with white doilies on the seats and drivers who say ooki ni as you pass through the automatic door. Today it is hot and I’m moving between a record store and a cafe set back in a residential area, a thirty minute walk from almost anywhere at all.

The name of the record store is meditations and it’s on the second floor of an old building next to a spice curry restaurant and across the road from an organic supermarket. I stumbled across meditations when I was unsuccessfully looking for a jonny nash vinyl online and liked the branding of the store so much I started checking up on their website periodically, entranced, as if it were a fashion blog from 2009.

Meditations is, like many independent retail stores in Japan, minuscule in size, but full to bursting with character, a type that cannot be performed, only collected, over time, through personal interest and experience. The counter is backed onto a very large window which shows the street below and the organic store across the way. There is a table in the centre, arranged with a handful of art and meditation books, a small selection of stones, and a large selection of incense from India, Bhutan, Vietnam and Japan. In the back left corner there is a tiny tea space, set up, it seems, for Chinese tea. A tap and a kettle, a small clay teapot, a selection of thimblesque glasses and cups. Incense fills the space to the point of almost tasting it, music pushes through the speakers so thick it fills the mouth.

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Records are divided into very few categories: ambient, jazz and spiritual, mostly. Japanese and overseas. They are organised into shelves and on the floor. It is on the floor I find two records, The Pavillion of Dreams by Harold Budd and Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo by Francesco Messina and Raul Lovisoni. I end up purchasing the latter, not before choosing myrrh and frankincense incense, made specifically for the store. I spend probably thirty minutes in the space in total. Just myself, the owner and the resonate silence between tracks of ambient, blasting sound.

It is when I spend time in small shops or cafes like this that I am filled with a lot of inspiration, as well as excitement and hope. I am overly optimistic, and genuinely believe we’re all designed to be engaged in work we enjoy to some extent, that satiates a deep part of us even when it’s hard, even when it doesn’t work out as planned, even when it can and will never be our full time job.

If you have ever held a dream bigger (or smaller, or different) to the life you currently live, you have likely spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it all work.

What might be more valuable, I think, is instead to ask:

How truly, deeply comfortable am I with the unknown, the transitory and the in-between?

From meditations, I flag down a cab on the hot side of the road and take myself, my woven handbag I bought for $10 a year ago and haven’t put down since, a paper shop bag with two glass cups (from Iran and India) wrapped in newspaper inside and my record in a clear handled sleeve to a cafe I (kind of) booked my whole Kyoto trip because of.

The cafe is in an old house or kominka in a residential area. Three stone steps up from the street is a semi-ornate entryway. A large wooden door with a traditional style awning, a bamboo grass talisman and a fabric sign for ice cream, flitting in the hot breeze.

As I walk through the threshold from the street to the garden surrounding the cafe, I feel my body descend ever so slightly into a tiny bow. Since moving to Japan I am fascinated at how the animal part of my body responds to culture and environmental space. In Australia, I find myself smiling broadly at strangers, talking to people in line for coffee or behind the counter as if I’ve known them my whole life. I say thanks heaps and see ya and this is an acceptable, expected way to speak. In Japan, my mouth presses herself into a tight line as I jut my head forward to approach the counter as if asking a question. I cover my face when laughing in front of a stranger. My body nods and bows multiple times per day as if possessed, especially and always on the precipice of entering a new space.

A few stone steps later, I am at another threshold, sliding open a rattly door, removing my shoes and taking a half step up onto the tatami floor. There waits a tiny stool, a linen curtain and a bell. The woman before me sounds the bell and the waitstaff quietly wander, socked feet, into sight.

As someone who likes to write poetry, who practices and teaches yoga, I think a lot about transitions, in-between, the liminal space. I know intimately this is one of the most challenging places for humans to be.

It is also one of the most fertile, ripe with possibility.

Learn how to soften into the in-between space here. Watch a free class on tending the creative life here. Follow me on IG here. Be the first to know about a poetic life, an online writing workshop series here.