By Kokoro Still
Some things arrive without a sound.
A scent, drifting in —
and suddenly, a season returns,
a voice long gone, a room long changed.
Scent leaves no shadow.
Yet it lingers.
So does the Kokoro.
What Cannot Be Seen, Yet Felt
Scent is presence without form.
It cannot be held, only noticed —
when it slips into a room,
when it disappears.
It does not ask to be heard.
It changes the air,
and with it, something inside us shifts.
In Japan, stillness is often sensed
not by what fills a space,
but by what quietly passes through it.
The Fragrance of Memory
When I was a child, I would visit my grandmother’s home in the countryside.
Each visit began the same way:
the faint trace of sandalwood incense
greeting me before anyone else did.
It wasn’t just a scent.
It was a doorway —
to summers of sliding doors and afternoon naps,
to voices that now live only in memory.
Even now, if the same fragrance drifts past me in the city,
the years fold away,
and I am back in that room.
Incense and the Way Home
In Japanese tradition, scent is not decoration.
It is a path.
A single stick of incense does not perfume the air —
it calls to something unseen.
In temples, in homes,
a thin line of smoke rises not upward, but inward.
At Obon, families light incense to welcome back those who have gone.
Not loudly, not with urgency,
but with the quiet trust that scent finds its way.
Stillness in the Air
The stillness we speak of is not the absence of sound.
It is the presence of quiet noticing —
to the way scent enters a space
and makes it feel inhabited,
even when no one is there.
A room with lingering incense,
a garden after the rain,
the first breeze carrying kinmokusei — the soft scent of autumn’s fragrant olive blossoms —
these are not loud things.
But they fill the silence
with something that listens back.
The Invisible Thread
Scent fades quickly.
And yet, it stays.
In fabric, in wood, in memory.
Like the Kokoro,
it cannot be seen.
But it binds us to what we’ve lost
and brings near what we cannot name.
To notice scent
is to listen with something other than the ears.
It is to sense the invisible thread
that runs through air, through memory,
through all that lingers
when silence speaks.
feel free to share a quiet thought in the comments.
Or simply carry it into your day.
*The featured image was generated using ChatGPT.*
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