Hello, BK community. This love letter is a challenging one to write, but I will do my best. Most of you know our family left California this summer to relocate to Asheville. This past weekend, communities around Asheville, NC, experienced significant damage and loss from Hurricane Helene and continue to do so. If you haven't heard about this news yet, you can see a glimpse of the impact on the New York Times story here. "Marshall, NC," the town mentioned in this NY Times article, is only 20 minutes from our home. Over the Summer, we were there almost weekly to meet up with our friends. Kids strolled around the sweet little downtown area, picking up lollipops from a local health shop and marveling at fun items at a game store while grownups hung out by the river, feeling the breeze of the mountain air and sharing stories from Summer adventures. We were very new to the area, but we could tell it was a well-loved and lived-in community with so many kind folks, and we looked forward to visiting there each time. It has been a week since the force of nature swept through many small mountain communities like the town of Marshall, and my heart aches for them. Aside from losing most of our utilities, I am grateful that our family, animals, house, and immediate neighborhood were spared. Our neighbors have been coming together to support each other through this challenging time. Slowly, utilities are coming back online, and we are trying to figure out how to pick up our lives from here and extend our support to the neighboring communities experiencing more difficult situations. If you have a moment and capacity, please send good thoughts and other means to support folks who are deeply affected by the impact of the hurricane in the area. It will be a long road to healing and recovery.
As a business, most of our physical BK operations are in Southern California. I am grateful for our team members at the studio working with their hands and hearts to take care of all the online orders and inquiries while I experienced non-existent to very spotty online connectivity this past week. Our Truly Yours service, which we were excited to relaunch last month, will take a little longer to complete at this time since Frido and I collaborate on the projects in Asheville, and we will need electricity to be restored to resume our service. I appreciate your patience as we go through this week and next.
From the studio, we released the pre-order for TN 2025 and continue sharing journaling tools for 2025. If you are curious about trying out the 5-Year Techo but have hesitated due to the commitment, I believe you will enjoy A.C.'s story and how the archivist in them has awakened! Trina wrote the story "On Keeping a Notebook" and reflected on her writing journey and how her relationship with analogue artifacts has evolved over the last eight years.
Between candlelight and darkness without electricity, I have been jotting down some thoughts on my Hobonichi 5-Year Techo before I sleep. I am not editing much of what goes on the page because it's too dark to see what I am writing, and I am emotionally and physically exhausted by the end of each night. What I will find on those pages in future years will be a mystery, both in the written and the underlying subconscious memos left behind by the ink marks. If I may borrow the metaphor from the beautiful story A.C. shared this month, my notebook is definitely like an imperfect ceramic vase with many, many cracks, only able to capture maybe a drop of water that will be enough to leave a water stain mark inside, and that's okay.
-wakako
always a work in progress...
Asheville, NC // October 4th, 2024
**This is from our BK Love Letter for October 2024. If you would like to see the entire love letter we sent to our community including links to the new and updated BK artifacts, you can browse it via this link.
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