The Origin | VelvetWords Music

I don’t quite know why I first began to write poetry. Yet, I still vividly remember the singular experience that became my starting point.

 

I believe it was an early summer afternoon during my fourth year of elementary school, on my way home from class. As I walked near my house, my eyes were captured by a wheat field, its young leaves rippling like waves in the wind. I froze, captivated. The spectacles woven by nature are, as a rule, both beautiful and ephemeral. Gaping at the scene, a certain melancholy began to wash over me. The beauty and transience dwelling within this landscape took hold of my heart. Looking back, it was a kind of meditative experience, though to my younger self, it felt merely like a deep sense of melancholy. That feeling was also intertwined with a longing for maternal love; perhaps I was sensing a profound, vast compassion within the workings of nature. That is likely why the melancholy ran so deep. This sensation would remain with me throughout my life, though at that moment, I had not yet begun to weave words.

 

But the story does not end there. After gazing at the wheat field for some time, I happened to cast my eyes down at my feet. In that exact instant, another sensation—something far grander and stranger—surged through me. It could best be described as a question: “Why do I exist here?” It simply came over me.

My existence would not be possible if my parents had never met, nor if my grandparents, or the ancestors before them, had never crossed paths. If you erase all those encounters, I do not exist. My parents do not exist. My grandparents do not exist. If you could trace it back to the very beginning and erase the origin, no one would exist in this world. Even the universe itself would not exist. Then why am I here, and why is the world unfolding right before my eyes?

 

This question instantly filled my small body, leaving me spinning and floating. I, who did not need to exist, was trapped by the thought of existence itself. My brain began to unravel. The circuitry of my autonomic nervous system was on the verge of short-circuiting. This was not a thought; it was a raw sensation. The brain could not decipher this riddle. Just before I completely broke down, I barely managed to shake the feeling off. Since that day, I have lived with this sensation as well.

 

Words can never serve as a tool to fully unravel the essence of existence. I know this. Yet, words hold a spiritual power—Kotodama—and they are capable of conveying fragments of the truth. It would be a long time before I truly encountered poetry, but there is no doubt that these two experiences form the very roots of my poems.

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