Sometimes you have to disclaim your country and inhabit another before you can return to your own.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.

Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?

The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.

I write as a witness to what I have seen.