The Green Became More Green

At 7:45 every morning, the crickets begin.

I know this now the way you come to know the rhythms of a place you have lived inside long enough — not because you checked the time but because your body learned it, the way bodies learn things that happen consistently and with conviction. They start softly and build quickly, layering sound upon sound until the air outside is thick with it — a living, pulsing wall of noise that my children have begun to complain about with increasing urgency.” My ears hurt”. I understand. And still I find myself listening to it each morning before I reach for my coffee, something in me glad for the reliability of it.

The rain stopped. The heat, strangely, did not rise to replace it. Instead the days have settled into something almost perfect: cool mornings, cool evenings, the middle hours warm and clear and generous. Mt. Yotei visible from every window, unhurried and enormous, doing what it has always done.

The green became more green.

The quiet became more quiet in the hours the crickets allow it.

Our friends left some days ago and the days have been rushing toward their ends ever since — as if without the anchor of other people’s rhythms, time simply does what it wants. I watch each day close and feel the familiar mixture of gratitude and something I cannot quite name. Not loss exactly. More like the awareness of impermanence arriving, as it always does, slightly before I am ready for it.

We leave in three days.

I have been thinking about slowness.

Not as a concept — I have thought about it as a concept for years, written about it, practiced it with varying degrees of success. But as a need. As something my body and my mind have been reaching for with an urgency that has surprised me these last weeks in Niseko, as if something finally broke the surface that had been building pressure underneath for a long time.

Over the weekend we managed to fit in skateboarding and rafting and a visit to a milk farm — all of it good, all of it worth doing. And still my favourite thing, the thing I return to in memory with the most warmth, is sitting on the sofa with a cup of coffee, looking at the mountain. Doing nothing. Just being in the presence of something larger and more patient than myself.

I sometimes wish I wanted more from my days. More doing, more achieving, more filling. But I am, at this point in my life, almost entirely unashamed of wanting less. Of wanting the long morning and the unhurried afternoon and the evening that melts into itself like the sun on the horizon — warm and slow and entirely sufficient.

Slow down.

I think that might be my next theme. My next invitation to myself. It is certainly already the theme of my yoga practice, though it arrived there uninvited and not without a fight.

I have been practicing Ashtanga for more than four years.

In that time it has been, at different moments, my joy and my sanctuary, my discipline and my learning ground, my remedy for difficult days and my celebration of good ones. The early mornings in the Mysore room. The smell of that particular space — sweat and incense and the particular warmth of a room that holds many bodies in focused movement. The sequence, always the same, which is the point: the sameness that reveals difference, the repetition that becomes, over time, a kind of conversation with yourself.

And then the knee. And the months of managing around it, modifying, listening to what the body would and wouldn’t allow.

And somewhere in those months of careful adjustment, something shifted — not just physically but in the deeper relationship between me and the practice.

It has become a struggle.

I want to say that plainly, because I think there is something important in saying it plainly rather than softening it into something more comfortable. The practice that was once my joy has become a space where I encounter more pain than pleasure, more frustration than ease. Some asanas I cannot enter without discomfort that is loud enough to be a warning. My ego, which has always had opinions, has been particularly vocal — telling me I should be further along, should be able to do more, should not be here, in this limited and compromised body, when the practice once felt so fluent.

I have been asking myself, more and more honestly: why do I practice?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. I have been listening to Ashtanga podcasts, absorbing other people’s relationships with the same tradition, marvelling at how different each path through it is — how the practice that looks the same from the outside is experienced completely differently from inside each body, each life, each particular set of circumstances. I knew, theoretically, that yoga teaches far more than physical alignment. But something about this difficult season is teaching me what that actually means, in practice, in the body, on the mat on a morning when nothing comes easily and the question of why you are there at all is louder than the breath.

I have met myself on my mat every day anyway. Through the pain and the frustration and the mornings when I wanted to walk away from it. I acknowledge that there is not much joy in my practice right now. The struggle is real — mental and emotional as much as physical, a negotiation between ego and compassion, between ambition and the quiet wisdom of a body that is simply asking to be treated with more gentleness than I have been accustomed to offering it.

I am trying to be patient with this. To let the process unfold at its own pace rather than forcing a resolution I cannot manufacture.

My plan had been to join an Ashtanga shala in Sapporo — and now, honestly, I am not sure I will. I have found a space in Zagreb for when we return to Europe next month, and something in me feels that the right next step with this practice might need the ground of a familiar city under my feet, a teacher I can build a relationship with over time rather than a few weeks.

For now I practice here, in the mornings, in whatever way the day allows. That is enough. It has to be enough. And slowly, quietly, I am beginning to understand that the practice of enough — applied to yoga, to planning, to the body, to the self — might be the thing I am actually here to learn.

Seven months.

That is how long we have been living inside the Traveling Village (while it lasted and afterwards with families that followed along)— this constellation of families that became, over the months, something closer to chosen family. Seven months of communal dinners and shared bathrooms and children growing up alongside each other and adults navigating the particular intensity of proximity without the usual social distance that keeps acquaintances from becoming something deeper.

It has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. It has also, lately, reached the point of fullness. I have felt it growing over the last weeks — a quiet but unmistakable need for space. For the five of us. For the slower, simpler rhythm of just our family, without the calendar of communal life, without the constant richness of other people’s presence and needs and energy.

I need time for us to reconnect with each other without the wider community as the context. Time to watch films together without planning around anyone else. Long walks that don’t need to accommodate anyone’s pace but ours. Conversations that have the luxury of going unfinished because we will see each other again at dinner. The ordinary, unremarkable intimacy of a family that has just been living, rather than one that has been living as part of something larger.

I don’t say this as a criticism of anything we have built. I say it as the truth of where I am — which is the only kind of writing I know how to do.

Next year is planned. Or planned enough — the France ski hub in January, Goa in February, the threads of adventure and community and new landscapes that will carry us forward into whatever that year becomes.

But first this one needs to be finished. Lived to its end rather than rushed through on the way to what comes next. Three more days in Niseko — in this green, in this cricket-loud quiet, in this place that has given me more than I arrived expecting. Then Sapporo. Then Seoul. Then Croatia and the ground of home, which is not a place exactly but is the closest thing we have to one.

I don’t want to hurry any of it.

I want it to move the way these last Niseko days have moved — like the evening light on Mt. Yotei, which doesn’t rush its going but simply stays as long as it can, colouring everything gold before it lets the dark come.

Slow.

Like the green that kept getting greener.

Like the quiet between the crickets.

Like a woman on a sofa with a cup of coffee, learning, finally, to simply be where she is.