In North America, the beginning of June typically marks the end of the school year. Coming from Japan, where the graduation ceremony is held in March with a touch of Winter still in the air and the new school year beginning under the cherry blossoms in April, having to graduate from a local high school in Southern California in June 1997 felt very foreign. However, like many things, one can become accustomed to the way of doing things in a new culture after living and integrating for 30 years.
This school year was probably the most unpredictable and unexpected one we shared as a family since we decided, in mid-school year, to move back from Asheville to Topanga after only being in Asheville for three and half months, and made a decision to transition from homeschooling to having kids attend school fulltime in a matter of a few days. The school our kids are now attending is an alternative, nature-based school, so the transition from our homeschooling, which was full of nature moments, to this particular school felt like a gift. Today, as kids are looking forward to wrapping up their very first “school” year and transitioning into middle and high school in August, I am having an internal ceremony to mark the end of this school year as a mom… to appreciate for the shift that happened… and simultaneously tend to a part of my heart that still holds a resonance of the days when it felt like we were barely hanging on with a very thin, weathered rope.
Now that I think of it, isn’t a ceremony like graduation such a uniquely human experience - to mark the end of a chapter as a community so we can clear a space for what might unfold next? Maybe that is why A.C. shares their quarterly Daily JIYU Calendar Doodles with us. Between the beautiful drawings they create and share, they also write their observation and approach to journaling and life. I also get a familiar sensation of having gone through a big transition when I read Job’s story about his creative journey - to close the door on something familiar and open the door to something new, to leap.
In these moments of integration, I am grateful for the scribbled notes, messily jotted-down thoughts, and quickly captured memories in my various notebooks. How I navigate my life— loosely planned chaos with a touch of perfectionism that is just enough to feel organized — mirrors the way my notebooks and their contents are organized (or unorganized). They are somewhat all over the place. I have come to imagine my journal entries as breadcrumbs left on the trail, rather than well-organized books in a library. They will be discovered by my future self, “if” they are meant to be. It’s also possible that these pages can get misplaced or never see the light of day again, and that's also okay. That’s just part of Wakako’s notebook life. But I surprise myself, or these journal entries surprise me, by how valuable these written words can be for the future integration of those moments - the moments that might have been too big to process when they were happening.
My internal graduation ceremony has been a way to create space to reflect on the personal writings from this past school year, to walk alongside the person who wrote those words during particularly challenging days, as well as those that were full of joy. Through it, I am clearing the canvas so we can paint a bright picture with the splash of our upcoming summer days, as well as our soon-to-start middle and high school days!
If you are celebrating or witnessing your own or a loved one's graduation, my heart goes out to you. It’s such a tender space that can hold grief, gratitude, and celebration simultaneously—the grief of what has passed (or what didn’t come to be), gratitude for all the beautiful gifts, and the anticipation of what’s yet to come.
Know that we are journeying together.
-wakako
always a metamorphosis in progress...
**This story is from the BK Love Letter for June 2025. If you would like to see the entire love letter we sent to our community, including links to featured stories and the new and updated BK artifacts, you can browse it via this link.
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