katharsis

Since 2021 ended I haven’t had the time to sit down and write on this blog. Instead, I have been writing in notebooks, keeping a daily morning journaling ritual alongside a tarot practice that I started after getting Jessica Dore’s book Tarot for Change. I’m also trying to take short morning walks around the neighborhood, just to get a bit of exercise in my otherwise (mostly) sedentary lifestyle.

At the end of December, my husband and I went on a trip to Nagoya and Shirakawa-go. To be honest, I don’t care for Nagoya, and only really wanted to go to Shirakawa-go. Since finding out about it a decade or so ago, it’s been at the top of my list of places I want to visit in Japan, but to get there, we had to take a bus from Nagoya.

Never have I ever seen so much snow in my life. It barely snows in Kobe, and even when it does, it melts as soon as it lands, so when I saw the snow covered landscape, I was enthralled. It snowed quite heavily pretty much the entire time we were in Ogimachi, so we didn’t bother hiking to the viewpoints and thus I have no photos of the village from afar.

We were only there for a few hours, but the trip, to me, was worthwhile. The village is as dreamy and charming as I’ve always imagined; I wish I could have stayed overnight and seen it in the dark. Maybe in the future.

I wanted to use this space to share my writing, but sadly there is nothing to share because I have not written anything. All I write are journal entries that are not meant to be shared. The time I could be using to write, I use instead for drawing, which isn’t a bad thing. At all. I think oil pastels are my favorite medium now, though I wish I drew more.

Some days I wonder just where the hell time goes.

It’s almost like I never run out of things to do. The good thing though is that I’ve managed to minimize the time I spend on social media. I post on Instagram and Twitter quite sporadically, and the thought of deleting my Instagram accounts continues to linger. One day I might just do it.

I no longer take my phone with me into the bedroom. Until recently I relied on an app called Endel to help me fall asleep, but I haven’t had much trouble sleeping these days, so I decided there was no need for the app anymore, and consequently, no reason to sleep with my phone under my pillow.

My Mooda app is currently displaying an army of green smiling faces (calm), so I guess I could say my year is off to a good start? I hope yours is too.

Cheers!