The Will (a short story)

The Will

by Tammy Stone Takahashi

To tell you the truth, there is a habit I have not yet broken.

In moments of anger that come like flashes of unexpected lightning in a quiet summer sky, I catch myself rearranging the contents of my will much the way I reorganize the crystal figurines on my dresser. I hardly know I’m doing it, but it doesn’t surprise me when I do. I have been doing this since I was a little girl.

Anger and fear, busy hands and busy mind, are all such close companions, aren’t they?

 I guess this ever-changing will is my way of keeping track of my feelings. Some might write in a diary or watch emotional movies to release their feelings. Or even to discover them, taking note of what makes them cry, or laugh, or feel despair, or elation. As for me, my coping method is the unending and sometimes all-consuming act of revising the ongoing, certainly non-binding will in which I leave my one precious item, a diamond, to one of my people on rotation.

Another truth: it’s not actually a diamond.

I guess I knew from the start it wasn’t real. But as a little girl, I believed that all diamonds were created in mythical times by the tears of creatures that no longer walk the Earth. Or maybe they do, but most people can’t see them, including, sadly, myself. It is because the gems are made of tears, the emotions of those who have wandered here before us, that they are so valuable.

I also believed that all stones were diamonds. It’s just that some of them had fewer tears in them than others. The emotions in those were buried so deep inside that not everyone could see how precious the stone was. Mine was a stone that I picked up on a beach while on a family vacation on Japan’s seaside. It didn’t look like the diamonds I’d seen before on TV, and I knew right away that it would become shinier and more precious the more of my tears I gave to it, that one day, at the cost of a likely heartbreak, it would become a true diamond and that the lucky recipient of it upon my death would have the most special part of me.

That was the last vacation I ever took. Soon after that, I started having trouble breathing, and I was tired all the time. The doctors found that I had a hole in my heart. An actual hole! They said it wasn’t serious enough for surgery, but that I needed to be careful, and not strain myself. But my mother started treating me like a doll after that, and hardly let me out of the house when I wasn’t in school. Then she took me out of school altogether.

When you have a hole in your heart, I eventually learned, it is called Atrial Septal Defect, or ASD, and it means that more blood than normal flows through the heart and lungs. This might cause damage, or might not. You might go your whole life not knowing you have this hole in your heart. Or you might, like me, learn to become terrified of your own heart, and of the torrents of blood that wash through it. Like a tsunami.

The discovery of the diamond, and of the hole in my heart happened so closely together that I’ll never know which of the two inspired me to write my first will. I do know that I have always intimately connected these two things. Sometimes, with a child’s logic, I imagined that if I could get the diamond shiny enough, I could plug my heart with it. Conversely, I always looked at the diamond, and saw suffering, and pain and a big, gaping emptiness. Certainly a harbinger of bad things to come.

I wanted so badly to watch my stone turn into the diamond it was destined to be. But I didn’t want to cry. My mother had always been an on-edge, nervous person, and the hole in my heart took things to a new level. I didn’t want to add to her worries. As a fearful girl living with an even more fearful mother, I tried to hold my feelings in. I was scared to the point of tears, though, all the time. Really, it was constant. It wasn’t just the hole that left my heart wide open to who knows what. Sometimes I imagined the hole inside of me to be so big that it could consume the entire, tiny country I live in. Our fates were always intertwined like this, in my mind.

My country, Japan, is an island country, as you know, a dot on Earth’s map. How is it we have not yet drowned, been subsumed en masse somewhere under the Japan Sea and the Pacific Ocean? It was so easy for me to picture Japan simply floating away, and then giving up, and sinking at any time. It still is. What anchors an island to the earth? What tethers a heart to the body, so that it does not collapse definitively, and completely?

It’s not just the fact that we are an island. We are also a country of so many mountains that we can hardly drive anywhere without winding up in the many tentacles of an elaborate tunnel system, like we have entered the belly of an eel, or an octopus, or a swarm poisonous snakes. And how have we not yet been buried under a torrent of volcanic lava, or turned to ash?

When I was growing up, I remember so many earthquake drills at school, before I stopped going. Alongside learning how to count and multiply, or learning how to write the labyrinthine slate of Kanji characters, we were given lessons in what to do should the fault lines below us slip, and the tremors and shakes get so bad that we might be swallowed up by the earth in one fell swoop. We learned to hide under desks. We learned to listen to our teachers. We learned, in the worst case scenarios when the earthquakes were followed by a tsunami – and the water is never far behind in Japan – to run for the nearest hill, in desperate hopes of being faster than the beast-like waves.

I was never a fast runner. Later, of course, I found out that running could stop me dead before a tsunami ever could.

I don’t know if it’s like this in other countries (how I’ve longed to live in a place like Canada, where there is so much land stretching for miles and miles, so that you can go days without even the hint of water), but I learned fear like it was another subject in school. I also learned fear at home, where there were books lying around about various natural disasters, predicting when they would next come and how many tens of thousands they would affect. I learned it on the television programs my mother had on at all times, tracking the weather for any abnormal patterns, and droning on with non-stop coverage every time there was the merest hint of a geographical or social calamity on the horizon. I learned to fear walking barefoot, because the ground itself took on monstrous, claw-like dimensions in my imagination. If it wasn’t a threat today, who knew what it would be tomorrow? And what is scarier than not knowing when the disaster is coming?

Yet, when fear morphed into anger, there I was, drafting wills as though there was a future in which my possession would be valuable. As if only I was going to die one day, while this world would carry on without me. It’s amazing, the contradictions we live with. I was sure that my country, if not the whole world, was on the verge of complete annihilation, yet I was wrapped up in the pastime of planning for a glorious future world in which my diamond, in my place, would shine.

I was never aware of this contradiction, this commingling of fear and hope, despair and optimism. It also never occurred to me, when terror over the next possible natural disaster struck, that we never know what is coming, disaster or otherwise, that not one single person among us knows when we are going to die. I guess like all young people, death was not a palpable reality. I had no framework that could hold the idea that we were going to die, even if we managed to live our whole lives without experiencing a single earthquake or extreme typhoon.  Death, to me, was something that came big and ferocious, and only once in awhile, and only to the few, not the whole. Like a punishment, and I was learning that our whole small country was guilty.

And where there is guilt, there is blame. Which is how I wound up in the game of playing God with the would-be recipients of my one treasure.

The more scared I grew, the more quickly I was prone to casting blame on anyone who had slighted me. I had no siblings, so the obvious culprits were out. My father was a salaryman and was hardly ever home. This in itself was a reason to banish him from my fortune on one or two occasions, but it was also hard to nitpick his wrongdoings when we spent so little actual time together.  The recipients of my will fluctuated like this: my mother, and her mother, my oba-chan, and my two dolls, Naomi and Naomi.

They were identical. I got the first Naomi for my birthday when I was five. By the time my sixth birthday came around, I was so attached to her that I begged my mother to get me another one just like her, in case something happened to her. She tried to talk me out of it, but I was pretty relentless, and she caved. I gave her the same name; to me, they were my same best friend, like a back-up limb. When it was convenient, though, and I needed someone to blame, I found the slightest differences among them so that when forced to choose, I would pick one Naomi over the next.

I never lost either one of them, so I’m not sure how I would have handled either of their departures. I used to take them to school with me, long past an age when little girls were prone to play with dolls. Because of this, I had no friends. Not even one girl who would tolerate me or the bullying she would get for daring to be my friend, like my next door neighbor I used to play with at the park near our houses. There was no one. It seemed I wasn’t even worth bullying, and there was a lot of that going on at my school. I was basically invisible. Mari with her two dolls with the same name and her crazy stone in her pocket.

And then I stopped going to school, and it was all I could do to open my eyes and brave a world in which a typhoon could whip through our house and obliterate the three of us, or in which the earth would crack open to swallow us, or in which I would drown, either in the Japan Sea, or the nebulous fluids of my own heart’s blood.

I took my diamond into the bath with me every night, and when it all proved too much, let silent tears come, and waited for the diamond to emerge. Then, I dried off, went to my room, and rewrote my will, poring over the day like a glossy picture book looking for who had wronged me the most, and who had been most kind.

The thing about fear is that it knows how to breed more, so that you are always waiting for something else to scare you, while you are simultaneously trying to be in control of all the things that already do. You start to feel like if you could just have a neat, ordered list of all the things that frighten you, you might be able to take even one deep breath worry-free (every time I take a deep breath, I wonder if it will be the last, if the hole in my heart will widen so much that any number of toxins or clots will pass through like rivulets of doom, spelling my end.)

Every day that nothing comes to attack and obliterate is another day closer to the source of terror drawing nearer. And then one day, something comes along, and it was not on your list, and it is invisible, and it begins its reign of terror on a cruise ship in a harbor of your country, and it causes people to wear Hazmat suits, sit home glued to the news, and sew masks, and it causes you to be as scared as you’ve ever been of catching it and not being able to breathe, and then just ceasing to be.

An earthquake, the worst thing I could imagine before, takes so many in one fell swoop. A tsunami devastates by the hundreds and thousands, leaving you bewildered and lost and grieving, leaving a hole in the very center of you so big you are sure you will get lost inside of it. Now, though, the numbers creep up, a few today, a few more tomorrow. The numbers are small enough, that you can picture each person, lungs caving in, heads splitting open, bodies lying hooked to machines that are breathing for them. Each one with a history, a hope, a regret, tears that could turn diamonds to stone.

The fear grows bigger. We are scared to touch each other, to see another person smile. We cannot offer a friendly touch of sympathy and understanding. We are afraid of every single thing we can touch.

Which is the greater disaster, the one killing our bodies or the one killing the deep hearts inside of our hearts that need love and connection to go on?

I still have my two Naomis, though I don’t talk to them as much as I used to. A life has passed since my childhood. My grandmother died, at 92, peacefully in her sleep. My mother is in a nursing home, and suffers from dementia. Her fear, in the end, did not die as her mind started to fade. I see a worried look on her face every time I visit, though she can’t remember her name. I now have a husband, two cats and several colleagues among whom I surreptitiously take turns apportioning my worldly possessions. I have a few more of these than I used to, but I still secretly hold my stone-diamond as most valuable. It is still not translucent, or gleaming. A part of me believes it’s because I have not given it enough of my tears, though I also started to wonder if maybe tears of terror are not the the tears it needs to shine. The tears of heartbreak, of sadness over the suffering of others, or even – and this was a revelation – tears of joy, maybe these are the tears a stone requires for the alchemy to take place.

Sometimes I look back on the days I spent playing with Naomi and Naomi, my grandmother sewing her little purses she didn’t have enough people to give to, my mother making dinner while watching news of the latest national floodings and blackouts, and am filled with the kind of longing that makes the hole in my heart feel larger than usual. Why is it that we miss a past that has been at times so cruel to us? I want to hold the little girl I was then, much like I held my dolls, and tell her, “I can promise you from the future that you are going to make it. Why don’t you try turning the fear off and see what life might look like?”

But if had been able to do that, I would not be here now, wondering, and ruminating in a world gone positively mad with fear, as though it spiraled right out the hole in my heart, a whorl of windstorm and destiny.

I have come to see that we are all flowering in different ways, in different lives, all within one life. I imagine it like being in a room with every single will everyone has ever drafted, all in one giant room, one great pile representing all the items of the world that have belonged to and been precious to people. There is no one person who is going to find the whole pile valuable, but there is also no denying the value of any single item. It depends on whom you are asking. The perspective.

I’ve realized over time that the value in my stone is not that it will one day be a diamond, worth a lot of money, to be coveted by others. It is a relic of my own power to imagine, to invent and create, and above all, to believe. My world is still smaller than it can be, because I choose to be confined by my geography, and now by a contagion that has shown me no one in the world is immune from calamity. But I can choose. I can try to catch a breath that does not take in the virus that will kill me, and notice: the world grows bigger. The virus knows no borders. I can decide whether or not this is an expansion of fear or one of connection. I can choose people to leave things to in my will, or people with whom to live and share a life.

I can’t choose not to have a hole in my heart, but I can choose what, in my mind’s eye, I am filling it with. I see this now, that people are getting sick and dying and falling into the earth and drowning, but also smiling and having tea together, reaping harvest and seeing hope in the shape of the clouds.

After all, a DNA test can predict if I’ll get this or that disease, and of course, I can find out any time if I have the virus. But can any of these tests predict not only how my body will respond to illness and crisis, but also how it will learn to tolerate obstacles, or learn to love, or how much those things can save me? It is only I who can test myself in these ways that will change the entire course of the world.

Today, I bought a special rag and polish. Tonight, I will have stopped waiting, for the end or for magic. I will turn off the TV, take my stone, and see which gem it will become.

*

2020: The Heart of a Decade

The Heart of a Decade

Truthfully speaking, I’m not one to remember anniversaries, think about dates, or even pay that much attention to time, though its passing sometimes evokes nostalgia, if not outright anxiety in me, someone who often prefers to live in the spacious realm of imagination that defies time until it comes along to bang the door down to teach me otherwise.

As we are about the confront the dawn of the 2020s, however, I cannot help but look back on the last decade, and realize, and even celebrate with some degree of awe, the decade it has been on a personal level (we know it has been a big decade in the social, political and environmental spheres, and I know many of us our grappling with how to move forward based on these cataclysmic changes; I am with you).

At the very beginning of 2010, at 35, I was newly-unemployed, ambiguously enmeshed in unambiguously destructive relationships, and I was freed – or unhinged, depending on my perspective at any given moment. I remember sitting in my now-emptied, soon-to-be former Toronto apartment, near the windows on which my purple sheets-turned curtains were the only remaining décor, a couple of empty wine bottles next to me, Skyping with a dear friend who pointed out how reminiscent of Demi Moore in “St. Elmo’s Fire” this whole scene was. Have you seen that movie? It was a loving comment, but it was not an assessment of how well things were going in my life, or at least the visible parts of my internal landscape.

Another good friend helped me unload my possessions in my parents’ basement in Ottawa, and I was soon off to Thailand, where I’d lived previously for a year. I’d fallen in love with this land so far from my own in every way; this time, like the last time, I had no agenda or future plans. I was older, though. There was a palpable feeling that everything was at stake, and I simultaneously felt like I had everything and nothing to lose. It was one of those rare, crystal-clear moments in a life when I was acutely aware of this edge, that it was a potential precipice… or gateway.

I spent three months consciously committing to self-exploration the main way I knew how, which was to write, though it must be said that doing nothing was also completely alien to me, and a highly subversive and transformative act in its own right, as I realized that not doing the things I was conditioned and expected to do was actually doing a whole heck of a lot more than nothing. I wafted between Thailand, Laos and Indonesia melting into hammocks, eating peasant soups (I love peasant soups; I want to run a peasant soup restaurant), and meeting special person after special person in budget guesthouse after ramshackle abode, many of whom I’m still in touch with today. I marveled at the fact that I never once, for a second, felt lost or confused. I had granted myself a gigantic time-out, and I was not so much making the most of it, as surrendering to the knowledge that life had to be lived right now, exactly as it was, exactly as I was, with no past and no future. Counter to everything I knew about myself, I magically embraced it.

In Ubud, Indonesia, I was rummaging for books in a secondhand shop (these are sadly all but lost to the wayside in the region now), where I needed to find three to make an exchange. About to give up, I made the strange decision to crouch down and look behind a row of books lodged against the front window to see if anything had fallen – it had. Sri Aurobindo’s “Our Many Selves” was one of many landmark moments of 2010 that profoundly changed things. It is a dense and difficult book, but I couldn’t put it down and I quite honestly felt like something bigger than I am was guiding this almost hallucinogenic (I was sober) reading experience, much of it at the airport, where I stayed overnight before an early morning flight. The book suggested that we can’t transcend ourselves, our egos, until we fully understand the many facets of our personality and character. I took this straight to heart and made it my mission to catalogue as much of myself as I understood at the time.

Everyday for three months, I wrote about one of the aspects of the self that was living inside of me and was my interface with the world. I called them “Little” versions of me: Little Timid, Little Communicative, and so on. I wrote page after page, day after day, surrounded by absolute love and kindness by everyone around me. There was the jewelry artist who suggested I try a Reiki session in Nong Khai (I’ll get back to this life-changing moment), a young Korean musician in Nong Khiau, Laos, with whom there was a language barrier, so that we sat on our neighboring balconies and just smiled, and somehow protected each other. There was a Scandinavian philosopher recovering from food poisoning in Vang Vieng, Laos, with whom I shared so many of those kinds of deeply intense conversations that stay in your psyche long after the content has disappeared. I met a brilliant medical student on the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, who suggested I try a Vipassana meditation retreat when I told her I felt a calling to learn to meditate, but didn’t want anything that was remotely trying to sell me a religion or even hinted of cultism.

Was I fully coming to understand myself after three months? Certainly not, and certainly not in any direct or concise way. Looking back, though, I can see a woman on the cusp of something that felt huge, even if it couldn’t be touched or tasted. I was most definitely earnest. I thought I was earnestly looking to know myself better, but I can see now that more importantly, I was willing, maybe for the very first time, to start regarding myself with an attitude of love – not harshness, not self-judgment, not recrimination, but kindness and love. I was finally ready, and even desperate, to come back to myself, to treat myself with the same kind of compassion I naturally felt for others. It was (is) a long, harrowing process of meeting myself with curiosity, openness and a real sense of caring.

At the end of those three months, I found myself returning to what would become – and still is, and will always be – the home in my heart of Nong Khai, Thailand. Nestled into a little pocket of heaven in Northeastern Thailand overlooking the Mekhong river is a guesthouse called Mut Mee, where many tourists come to stay for a night on their way to the border city of Vientiane, Laos, and where many fall in love with the serene quietude and the kindred spirits they meet, and don’t leave for months. It’s where I was recommended, months earlier, to have a Reiki session with Beatrix of the Nong Khai Alternative Center, tucked into the same little alley as the guesthouse, an oasis for healing, soul-soothing, learning and self-awareness. That one Reiki session was so powerful that I knew I had to start studying this healing modality – and so I returned, and this return felt like the first step of a path with direction, leading back to myself. This Pantrix center, established by two brilliant yogis – and artists, and so much more – Pancho and Beatrix, has grown over the last decades to become a true home, a mecca, really, for people interested in developing as yogis, healers … and humans. Pancho and Beatrix are as true as true yogi can come, and they’ve have become the dearest teachers who have helped and guided me in ways I will never be able to express in words. Beatrix is also a Reiki master and teacher and a stunningly insightful astrologer, and Pancho is a master-of-just-about-all trades who brings wisdom, joy, a generosity of spirit and an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of yoga. Pantrix offers free daily meditations with Pancho, seven day Intro yoga classes and intensive one-month courses and special workshops, and an overall welcoming energy that I couldn’t recommend more to anyone looking for a cleanse of mind, body and spirit. Silvie, a long time resident of Nong Khai, does amazing CranioSacral therapy and Shiatsu sessions and dance workshops just down the alleyway, and Aey, proprietor of the Hornbill Bookshop, has make her shop more than a place of commerce; she has welcomed us into her home over and over, and has transformed her beautiful space into a coffeeshop and restaurant, where she serves food, smoothies and love in equal doses.

Here in Nong Khai, I began studying Reiki and yoga, and almost immediately met my now-husband, Takeshi, who had just arrived for the first time after his visa run to Laos. I had recently completed my first 10-day meditation retreat, and it turns out and he had already done several in this style. We eagerly talked about everything that falls under the rubric of life. I told him I’d cancelled my 10-day stopover to Tokyo on the way back to Canada to stay in Thailand a few months longer, and joked that now Japan had come to me. Our connection was strong and quick, and it wasn’t long before we were making plans to do one of Pantrix’s one-month yoga intensives, and then journey on to India. We ended up doing several more of these courses and retreats over the next few years.

Ten years on, I can’t believe I have been with my love for a decade. I’m not surprised, though, to find that who I am today is so much of an ongoing product – project? Result? – of the seeds that were planted in 2010. Our journey took us to India, back to Thailand regularly and to Japan, where we made a home for six years. We have been through ups and downs, heartaches and joys, have found ourselves meeting each other and ourselves anew over and over, even as we met the challenges of feeling lost and wayward as often as we found ourselves gently touching what feels like life purpose.

We have recently moved to Canada – not only Canada, but my hometown of Ottawa, where, to be truthful, I never, ever thought I would live again once I left at the age of 23 to pursue my Masters degree in Toronto. It felt like the right time to be near family again, but being back here, where I so unceremoniously dumped my life’s possessions a decade ago, is doing quite a number on my emotions and sense of self. I feel in many ways like I’m “back where I started”, as though the last decade never happened. At the same time, as I look into myself, I’m not sure what is left of that woman-on-the-edge of 10 years ago.

At the heart of it, we, and everything around is, is changing all the time, every single second. Time does not wait for us. We can’t really look at the numbers like 2020 and neatly package our goals and expectations into a new year or decade. Still, though, we are human, and big numbers like this are a beautiful chance for us to tap in and check on our state of being. I am tremendously grateful to have given myself a chance, back in 2010, to try out a new way of being in the world that immediately brought me more profoundly closer to my heart than I’ve ever been. The challenge – and joy – is to know that this journey does not end, no matter where our life’s circumstances take us.

The gift of time is really the gift of opportunity, to discover what it is that make our hearts sing, and to create the song, note by note. Happy, happy 2020 and beyond …

*

If you happen to be in Thailand, or want to make your way there, these are highly recommended:

Mut Mee Guesthouse, Nong Khai – http://www.mutmee.com

Nong Khai Alternative Center – http://pantrix.net

 

 

Past Now Love

There is no part of our land

that has been left untouched

by the ravages of our violence

and the blessing of our prayers,

existing together, all at once;

it can be the work of a lifetime

to sit with everything we know.

There is no life without history,

and no body without memory.

To walk is to walk with ghosts,

to breathe is breathe the story

we’ve brought to waking dreams.

Fear drives dark excavations,

Wonder brings back the light.

What’s dissolved, what remains,

what brought tears, our hope,

the fluid emblems of our lives.

May we find the love within us

to seek all those sacred spaces

marked with all of experience;

the silken threads and wisps

singing to us our past laments

as we find in them everything

we need to remember about us,

and our will to make it better.

 

– Tammy Takahashi

Your Small Gestures Matter

Sometimes I think that if we had even

the smallest notion in our wily minds

that keep spinning the same old stories

for us day after day, year after year,

of how many other ways it can always be,

we would immediately look for this door.

We would stop thinking we have to make

the greatest journeys and grand gestures

to make the profound changes we seek.

Have you ever tried to smile through tears?

It feels at first like an alien invasion, strange,

unwanted, until the body responds in kind,

ignites from deep within, bearing lightness.

The smallest hand gesture, brilliantly new,

and suddenly we are carrying ourselves

as a different person, with a purpose,

perhaps, we didn’t know had been calling.

Have you ever seen cherry blossoms bloom?

Without ever leaving its one sacred place

In the world of cycles, seasons and Time,

it does the only thing it knows how to do,

but does it with all the effort of its being,

which is not effort at all, but fulfillment,

and for the briefest moment in our history,

because every single blossom did the same,

we have a tree that moments ago was bare,

and is now grander than any work of art,

and the blossoms have not arrived to stay,

but to live out their short symphony with grace,

and leave the tree stronger for their presence,

and leave a world that will never be the same.

 

– Tammy Takahashi

Our Freedom

To see, and not know what

We are so terribly seeking,

What profound simplicity

There can be between the eyes

That are gazing and the world,

The gazed upon, the beloved,

If we let it. If we let it be.

What a pure, unfettered love

It can be, this relationship

Between we who want to know,

And the eternally, sagely known.

Let us forego the violence

Of our need to cast ourselves aside

To be in the arms of love.

Let us instead turn the gaze inward,

Unflinching, even when it hurts,

And throw so much love here

That we cannot help but come awake,

Trembling, excited, for we are here,

In the exact way we need to be,

And we have welcomed ourselves,

So we are finally free.

A Prayer, A Soft Place to Land

Our prayers are not for we and they;
We pray because we want to know,
Finally, that the soft and loving places
Where prayers land know no division.
There are places all over the world,
Across the entirety of the map of one heart,
Where we can travel to, wayward at first,
But with increasing sense of purpose,
That will greet us like the loved ones
We now, after ages, know that we are.
They are shrines large and small
Decorating the most modest of habitats,
Honouring the dead and reminding us
That we have never walked alone;
They are the colours, sounds and textures
We can finally recognize for what they are,
Unique as the moon to our stargazing hearts
To our experience of being human,
So that we will never overlook them again.
We close our eyes, join hands together,
We stand where we are, in silent tears,
And know the prayer has brought us here,
The prayer is all around us, ancient, wise,
That it created the conditions of our lives.

– Tammy Takahashi

Beautiful Handmade wallets from Japan!

My Japanese mother-in-law, fondly known as “Mi-chan”, is immensely talented at everything artsy and craftsy, and her sewing skills are second to none. Look at this amazing wallet she has designed/made – completely stitched by hand! And using amazing Japanese fabrics,  mostly fine cotton, traditionally hand-dyed … so great and compact for cards.

Do you want a Mi-chan eco-wallet of our own? Please email me at tammystonetakahashi@gmail.com!

xo

Tammy

 

 

The Invitation

At first glance,
coming into the space,
there is bright light
casting darkness within.
The luminescence overpowers.
It is alluring, mysterious, it blinds.
We can stay here for a moment,
either terrified of the shadows
or subsumed by a desire
to merge with the light.
But everything changes,
And here is the invitation:
to sit,
(there is a seat waiting for you)
and look through the fiery frame,
to watch the parts slowly appear,
to witness life unfold.
To gaze outward,
with the clear and deep memory
of how this light first penetrated you,
to feel this illuminated self
and the outer spaces as one,
to feel the power and grace
of bringing self to world,
to do what’s needed,
to make things right,
to honour the shadows
and to find the light.

– Tammy Takahashi

Our Beating Heart

Passing through,

deep-down reckonings with

our place in a world

made perfect with

our humble imperfections.

The sun, which does not dim

in our darkest days,

the sky, never once lowering

as we dive into our every shadow,

the view, always changing,

the light speckling magic

where we least expect it

before it continues its dance

across the spaces

we inhabit,

between us,

passing through,

moving toward what stills us

past change,

past commotion,

in our truest space:

our beating heart.

 

For the Living

For life and for the living,

for the choices we make

on the side of life

that keep us cushioned

in earth’s warm embrace,

breath springing from breath,

heaving, mounting, rising,

majestic being coursing through us

when we feel it, and when we don’t,

and all we have to do

is know this to be true,

to bring our feet softly to ground,

feel life playing with our skin,

and we are gazing ever upward,

taking in with curious eyes

what the heart already knows,

as we begin our journey there.

 

– tammy takahashi