What I have always done, through all my changes.

“Megumi, you just keep on changing, don’t you?”

People often tell me that.

What I do, where I am, what I express—
looking back, they really have changed a great deal.

I was in the world of web and design,
I made jewelry,
I made clothes,
I took photographs,
and now I work with sound.

At first glance, it may look as if I have done completely different things.

But recently,
I realized that inside, I had been doing the same thing all along.

I think
what I love is encountering “possibilities not yet seen.”

Changing is not moving away from yourself

Some time ago,

“I want to create a culture that embraces change.”

I wrote these words as my Life Purpose.

That feeling has not changed.

But compared to back then,
the way I see “change” has shifted a little.

People can change naturally
by encountering something, without forcing themselves to change.

A single sound.
A single person.
A single place.
A way of thinking you never knew.

The moment you touch something that wasn’t part of you before,
the way you see the world shifts a little.

And then

“Oh, it’s okay to feel this way.”

“So this side of me existed, too.”

you realize.

I am deeply drawn to that moment.

Awareness

One of the words I hold dear
is Awareness.

Noticing.

It is a little different from being taught something,
or being changed by someone.

It is noticing, by yourself,
a sense that was already within you.

Suddenly seeing
a choice you could not see before.

From that moment,
a person becomes able to choose their own next step.

That is why, I think,
I don’t want to be someone who hands out answers.

I want to create, in many different ways,
the moments from which awareness is born.

Crystal bowls are like people

I often think
crystal bowls are just like people.

Each has its own voice,
its own personality,
and even with the same note name, no two resonate alike.

And interestingly,
their expression changes depending on the sounds they meet.

A resonance you couldn’t hear when a bowl rang alone
may appear the moment it overlaps with another sound.

People, surely, are the same.

Whom you meet.
Where you go.
What you touch.

In that “in-between,”
a self you never knew may appear.

When I choose crystal bowls,
I measure frequencies, listen to overtones,
and check the relationships between sounds again and again.

But I don’t do it just to line up the numbers.

“Whom would this sound resonate more beautifully with?”

Thinking about this,
I tie the bonds of resonance.

The sounds gathered this way
in time become a single orchestra.

Come to think of it,
with people and with making things alike,
perhaps I have always been doing something similar.

ALCHEMIZE THE IN-BETWEEN.

Person and person.

Sound and sound.

Body and resonance.

Mineral and person.

Self and world.

What I find fascinating
is never just one side or the other,
but always in the “in-between” where two things meet.

There,
something is born that existed in neither from the start.

I call that phenomenon Alchemy.

ALCHEMIZE THE IN-BETWEEN.

From the in-between, where things resonate.

When I recently arrived at this word,
I felt as if everything I had done until now
had joined into a single thread.

Making change something freer

People change.

What they love,
what they want to cherish,
their work,
where they live,
how they express themselves—all of it changes.

Something that suited you until yesterday
may no longer be right for who you are today.

I want to live in a world
that can enjoy such changes more.

Not denying your past self each time you change,
but being able to think, “Because that self existed, I made it here.”

And being able to truly choose for yourself
the new sensations that have begun to sprout.

Perhaps the accumulation of this
is what it means to “live as yourself.”

What I want to create

So what I want to create
is not only sound, not only jewelry,
not only clothing.

Making works.
Performing.
Researching sound.
Choosing crystal bowls.
Connecting people with people.
Offering sound to places.

Through all of these,

people feel something,
notice what is within them,
choose something for themselves from there,
and something new is born again.

I want to create that kind of cycle.

Creating a culture that embraces change.

These words I have long used
have, for me now,
begun to carry a much wider meaning
than simply saying “it’s okay to change.”

Meeting.
Feeling.
Noticing.
And creating.

In that “in-between,”
there are always possibilities not yet known.

From here on, too,
I want to keep standing there.

mogmin.