quiet is powerful

you know it is.

I am at the Tokyo Opera City Hall and I am silently crying as lighting flashes through the window and the rain pours outside.

Every single cell in my body feels as if charged by an electrical current.

I feel both deeply relaxed, floating, and acutely, hungrily alive.

c/o ichiko aoba

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The Tokyo in my heart and my everyday life is quiet.

The town I live in feels more like a village. The main street has three florists, a handful of coffee shops, a grocery store and a bathhouse. There are no neon signs or flashing lights. In a heartbeat, I can be in the middle of Shinjuku station, carried along by a sea of people, a breathless, pulsing chaos, but here, everything is quiet, most of the time.

In the winter evenings as I walk home from the supermarket, after buying sweet potatoes or ice cream or coffee beans, I can see the stars, a luxury I thought I had left behind. Some afternoons, I hear piano lilting from a house a few doors down. Very often I recognise the sounds from Ghibli films. Beside the house with the piano is a small empty plot, which occasionally bursts forth with wild flowers, tall grasses, spindly cosmos.

My favourite Tokyo is a lightly raining one, in the early summer. The city seen from above, or through a taxi window, when it rains, is beautiful. The lights blur and the softly jostling umbrellas remind me of something whimsical and nostalgic: a ladybug holding a clover leaf, a garden fairy wearing a flower as a hat.

To me, Tokyo smells like rain and dark roast coffee. Old wood and wet concrete. It sounds like gentle jazz, piano music. A soft tinkering, a quiet buzz. The grinding of coffee beans.

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During her performance, Aoba Ichiko whispers as much as she sings and delicately fingerpicks the guitar. She tells tiny stories, whistles and hums between songs, sips from a ceramic cup. The sound is so quiet and yet, powerful enough to send light throughout my entire body. It is both the music of the angels and the depths of the womb. It is psychedelic and honey sweet. It is also, at times, playful, silly and cute.

It is just her, a guitar and hundreds of people hanging onto every single moment.

A speck of dust floating in a light beam, a pearl of water on a leaf.

---

For so much of my life I genuinely believed that in order to be confident, successful and loved, I had to be louder.

Louder with my voice, louder with my energy, more assured in my beliefs and opinions.

I regarded my sensitivity as something to be fixed, to be shed rather than something to be understood and held close as a powerful force.

When I first started teaching restorative yoga, people looked at me with pity and said, I’m sure you’ll have a real class soon!

When I suggested to publishers and agents I wanted to write a poetry book, not an instruction manual on Rest, I received that same gaze: Unfortunately poetry doesn’t sell.

I have very literally been in the business of the quiet and gentle for years and I still need reminders that what I’m doing is enough.

I have very literally marketed my business by writing poetry and yet, I waver, when someone with authority tries to tell me it’s impossible, that poetry doesn’t sell.

It is no surprise, really. The voice of the outside world is so loud. Even when you have years of evidence ranging from the subtle to the very physical, it shouts back at every turn. Even when you have two businesses in two countries founded on the soil of softness, of lyrical words, of becoming still enough to feel it all.

This is how ruthless we need to be in reminding ourselves.