I used to say, Ubud for restoration, Kyoto for inspiration. I even wrote a post about this before, hidden somewhere in the depths of my 700+ posts. But with the travel lockdown due to COVID, I need new sources and spaces for restoration and inspiration, right here back at home. 

I’d been pining for Bali like crazy, looking through past photos, recounting crazy adventures. Even though on my last trip I wrote about how it will be my last one there in a long time. Strange I thought, but rethinking about “Ubud for restoration” made me realised I just needed restoration. For the longest time I had associated a physical place with restoration, and thinking of and needing one equaled the other. But with Bali out of reach, I needed something else. Interestingly, I gravitated back to music. Listening to songs from my past, flipping through old travel photos, each track and each image hooked to a specific memory, a past reincarnation of me. It was the next best thing I can have without travel. Music soothes the savage beast, and indeed, to music I go to restore this inner beast to beauty.

I’d also been pining for Kyoto recently. Is it any surprise that this city with it’s time-honoured traditions of craftsmanship is what I associate with making, and exactly what I do when I need inspiration? Creating tiny codepens of code to make tiny digital tools, or making a blog template to archive the posts from this site, to launching them out into the wild, and giving to people who need it – that’s what gets me inspired and energized. Through making, I tap into the energy of creation, of life, and drink it up like a man dying of thirst in the desert. 

From “Ubud for restoration, Kyoto for inspiration” to “Music for restoration, making for inspiration”.

It’ll do. It’ll do, for now.