Sakura in Kyoto and Personal Share
Some of my Sakura photos from this years bloom!
Taken at the cherry blossom garden inside Heian-jingu Shrine, Yasaka Shrine, and at the Imperial Palace, Kyoto.
I've decided to start taking more photos again, so I will share on Facebook, here or on Instagram @r.ein.lo. I'm excited to finally feel like I have the space to pick up some old hobbies of mine.
It has been a very long, labyrinthian and arduous two years. I finally made it to Japan with my husband, received my Visa, and made the move to settle in Kyoto. Moving here has been a huge decision which has impacted every single facet of my life.
It has been a longstanding intention of mine to move back to Asia, as soon as possible before the pandemic started. It has been a long wait, and with the pandemic acting as an initiation, I spent my in-between times journeying in a psychic soup which took me to the underworld, and to much darker and timeless parts of my psyche.
I originally had intended to move to Taiwan, so that I could be close to my family there. I was torn away from them and had their information withheld from me until I was 18 years old. It took me 5 years to emotionally process the betrayal, the complexity and to prepare myself to meet my mother and family in Taiwan for what was really the first time, when I was 23.
As you can imagine, this level of betrayal is not that conceivably normal.
One of the key themes of my life-so-far has been being alone in a variety of powerful psychic, supernatural and prophetic experiences without anyone to really share with or turn to. This took a huge toll on my psyche and body, and as a child under a deep spell of emotional and spiritual neglect, it lead me to self-destructive binge-drinking and drug taking as a pre-teen.
My dream world, starting around the age of 6 onwards consisted of night terrors and nightmares. Without any parental guidance or support to deal with them, I self-taught to lucid dream and move through different layers of dream worlds, or have methods to wake up in the dream. I started documenting my private inner worlds from quite young, and kept a fairly rigorous track of dreams for years at a time. I steadily as a young adult stumbled on all of the usual dream literature, particularly Jung and 'Man and His Symbols'. Without Taiwanese elders, family or language, my tongue which was stolen from me, I struggled to piece together the intensity of my psychic world as a mixed raced person compared to people around me.
Some of my main support came from the Internet, and really, the spirits themselves that I communicated with. I began to utilise the concept of Internet as a living entity, or thinking deity and combined it with Jung's synchronicities.
As a child with access to websites in the 2000's such as Omegle and Stumbleupon, I would meet friends and find information by chance, leading me on various adventures and rabbit holes. In many ways, I took my Internet life a lot more seriously than my real life, which was filled with loneliness, isolation and mental health problems. It made my life increasingly difficult to be independent and I had to take my notions of reality quite far in order to survive, moving through many deeply intense and mystical relationships where we would encounter paranormal disturbance and 'high strangeness'.
One of my rabbit holes via Weird Facebook (a phenomenon of the 20-teens) of alternative writers, thinkers, artists and even cults lead me on a goose-chase where I eventually ended up finding my now husband, Tada. This is a story I am sure I will come to tell in longer form as time goes on.
The synchronicities of meeting my husband became much deeper since we landed on his ancestral land of Japan, which contains many missing links to the history of Taiwan, the Taiwanese island of Liu Qiu or Ryukyu meaning 'Little Okinawa' and 'Dragon Womb', the Pacific in general, and even linking back over to England and my ancestors there.
As we are settling here in Kyoto, I am finally receiving the correct therapy treatment, and I am with the person I love, there is a space opening up for me which I am very excited about.
I will be soft-launching a longer-form writing project in the next year, which will crystallise more of my thoughts through story-telling, channelling, AI and esoteric history. I will be sharing excerpts and research for this on my main website here.
Thank you and Arigato Gozeimasu to all friends and loved ones who have stuck with me through my journey, who have supported me in times of need, and guided me with sincerity. Thank you and Arigato Gozeimasu to the Internet, for leading me to my 'dream life.'