Autumn Flower

Autumn showed up in Kumamoto, and honestly, it’s been doing something to me. There’s this moment every year where the heat finally breaks and the whole city just exhales, and I’m finding myself walking around way more than I used to, taking streets I’ve never seen before, just watching how everything shifts. Sometimes there’s a cat lying in the sun somewhere stupid. Sometimes I find a tiny shrine wedged between two buildings or a café that feels like it’s been waiting for someone specific to walk through its door. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel like you’re constantly discovering something that was always there, which is maybe the best feeling.

This is when those red spider lilies show up—these impossibly bright flowers that everyone here seems to love, and for good reason. They’re the kind of thing that makes you want to stop and actually look at something, you know? So when the Japanese Arts Club organized this walk out to some field with a river running through it, surrounded by mountains and all these green trees that still don’t quite feel real to me, I went. And we just stood there picking out the prettiest ones we could find, carefully digging them up with their roots still attached, bringing them back to the studio like we’d found treasure.

I sat down with my sharpened pencils and watercolors and tried to put one of these flowers onto paper. And it actually worked. Like, it surprised me. Something about having the flower right there in front of you, about taking the time to really look at it and move your hand slowly enough to actually capture something true about it—I don’t know. It gave me this quiet confidence that maybe I could actually try painting one in the traditional style eventually. I’ve been thinking about what the first one should be. Got a small canvas sitting around waiting for me to get brave enough.

But there’s no rush. That’s the thing I’m learning here. Good things take time, and that’s not a cliché when you’re actually living it. Everything moves at its own pace, and somehow that feels revolutionary.