LIFE IS SO MESSY RIGHT NOW. i need to clean house, i can`t think properly. i want to just rip everything out of this picture, first the blanket and cushions, then the flowers, then the sofa. i just want an empty tatami room and i just want to sit on the floor, as we`ve often done over the last three years of moving and moving and moving... but it`s hard to be ungrateful though, we`re so lucky to have an apartment of our own, and furniture, and stuff. after living with both sets of parents in the last few years… and of course i saw a report on fukushima yesterday that showed a couple returning to their condemned home. everything was contaminated with radiation. as they tried picking through some of their heirlooms with the geiger counter surging the woman said in japanese, `let`s just give up`. i often think back to when the tohoku earthquake happened, and so many people living in those emergency shelters for so long, with no privacy at all. and people still now who can`t return to their homes. i remember our old apartment back then, we lived in public housing and there were cracks from top to bottom from earthquakes past… even in nara we could feel the unreal aftershocks in tohoku that kept coming and coming, and still seem to come. it was truly, surreal, and painful to think of the people living in the affected regions reminded with every echoing tremor of the trauma of the first big one. our little flat swayed like susuki grass in the wind. when we moved to canada people laughed at us for living in such a tiny space in our cabin in the woods, but we felt like kings. and i feel very lucky now for our kyoto apartment. i`m grateful to have a little space of our own again.
i`m going to clean it up and try to remember that as i go.
i`d like to revert to this relatively acceptable level of non-clutter though. in truth, i had to edit this post; originally i had actual photos of how messy our place is now, but i realized how much that would assault the psyche of people who live for clean. my own mother is one of those people and i know if she saw photos such as those it would make her skin crawl. i am slowly becoming one of those people, but i still have my flake-out non-cleaning events where life creeps in and overwhelms. as a creative and a person sensitive to aesthetics and stuff in general i need a nice, clean, minimally decorated space in order to focus on anything. lol. culturally speaking, in japan the big clean comes not in spring, but over new years holiday. i don`t think i can wait that long!
