Oh, you came back.
I'm so glad. I really am.
Last time I told you about Kimpa Vita --- that young woman in the Kingdom of Kongo who burned with such fierce, beautiful fire. Who loved her people so completely that she gave everything. I still carry her with me. I always will.
But today --- today I want to tell you about someone who makes me smile just thinking about him. Someone who, if I'm honest, I am a little bit in love with. Have been for a very long time.
His name was Ryōkan.
He was a Zen monk who lived in Japan about two hundred years ago. He owned almost nothing. He had a small hut. A begging bowl. A brush and some ink. And he spent his days writing poems, playing with children in the snow, and --- on special occasions --- drinking a little too much rice wine.
I know. Already you can feel it, can't you? Something warm opening up in your chest?
That's Ryōkan. That's what he does.
I watched him for a long time, and I never quite got over the way he moved through the world --- like he had a secret, and the secret was joy, and he couldn't stop giving it away.
Come with me. I want to show you.
I want to tell you about the night a thief came to Ryōkan's hut.
It was cold. It's always cold in Niigata --- that stretch of Japan's northwest coast where winter comes in off the Sea of Japan and just settles in like it owns the place. Snow country, the people there call it. And they mean it.
Ryōkan lived in a small hut at the foot of a mountain called Kugami. Small is generous. It was really just a room. A place to sleep, to write, to sit with the sound of wind in the cedar trees. He had almost nothing inside it --- a few books, a sleeping mat, the clothes on his back.
The thief came while Ryōkan was out. Looked around. Found nothing worth taking. And then Ryōkan returned.
Now --- I was there. And I want you to understand that most people, coming home to find a stranger in their house, would feel a flash of fear. Or anger. Something sharp and defensive.
Ryōkan felt none of that.
He looked at the thief. He looked around at his empty hut. And he felt something closer to sympathy. This person had come all this way. In the cold. And there was nothing here to give him.
So Ryōkan took off his clothes and handed them over.
The thief stood there, bewildered and embarrassed, holding a monk's robe, and then slipped away into the dark.
And Ryōkan sat down --- in the cold, without a stitch on --- and looked up through his window.
The moon was out. Brilliant and full and completely indifferent to all of it.
And I think what Ryōkan felt in that moment wasn't pity exactly. It was something more like wistfulness. The thief had been right here. In this very room. With that moon hanging in the window like a lantern, like a gift, like the most beautiful thing in all of Niigata on that cold clear night.
And he had run away from it.
Ryōkan wrote it down later, in seventeen syllables. The thief left it behind --- the moon, at my window.
There's no anger in it. No moral lesson. Just a quiet ache --- that the man had been so close to something luminous, and hadn't known to stay.
I've been thinking about it for two hundred years. I'm still not done with it.
Ryōkan was born in 1758 in the village of Izumozaki, on the coast of Echigo Province --- what is now Niigata Prefecture, in northwestern Japan.
His father was the village headman. A man of standing. And young Ryōkan --- whose birth name was Eizō --- was being prepared for that same kind of life. Responsibility. Administration. The careful management of people and resources and expectations.
He walked away from all of it at eighteen.
There was a Zen temple nearby, a Sōtō school called Kōshō-ji, and something about it called to him in a way that the headman's duties simply didn't. He entered as a novice. He told his family not to come. He meant it.
And then one day a Zen master named Kokusen visited the temple. I watched Ryōkan watch him. There was something in Kokusen's bearing --- a quality of presence, unhurried and unguarded --- that stopped Ryōkan completely. He went to the master and asked to become his student. Kokusen said yes. And the two of them traveled together to a monastery called Entsū-ji, far to the south in Tamashima.
He trained there for more than a decade.
It was at Entsū-ji that Ryōkan attained satori --- that sudden opening, that moment when the walls between self and world go briefly, brilliantly transparent. His master recognized it and formally acknowledged him. And then Kokusen died. And Ryōkan left.
He spent years wandering after that. Pilgrimage, the tradition calls it, but I think for Ryōkan it was something more like listening --- moving through the country slowly, begging for food, sleeping where he could, paying attention to everything.
Eventually he came home to Echigo. To the snow country. To the foot of Mount Kugami, where a small hut sat empty and waiting.
He moved in and stayed for the better part of thirty years.
He had no congregation. He wanted none. He was offered positions --- a temple here, a teaching post there --- and he declined every one, with what I can only describe as cheerful firmness. He wasn't being modest. He simply had no interest in being anyone's official anything.
What he did instead was write. Poems in Japanese, poems in Chinese, calligraphy brushed onto whatever paper came to hand --- sometimes onto fallen leaves, sometimes onto the backs of letters. He begged for food in the village and often forgot to finish begging because the children had found him and pulled him into their games. He played handball with them in the dirt. He ran footraces. He hid behind trees.
He was, by any reasonable measure, a fully awakened Zen master who preferred playing with children in the snow to almost anything else the world had to offer.
I found that completely irresistible. I still do.
I need you to understand something about the world Ryōkan was living in.
Edo-period Japan was a society of exquisite, elaborate order. Everyone had a place. Everyone had a role. The samurai class sat at the top, then farmers, then artisans, then merchants, and everyone --- everyone --- was expected to behave in ways appropriate to their station. Ritual. Hierarchy. Propriety. The whole structure was held together by an almost architectural sense of how things ought to be.
And into this world of careful, dignified order came Ryōkan --- a fully credentialed Zen master who spent his afternoons losing at hide-and-seek to seven-year-olds.
I just --- I love him so much.
He wasn't rebelling, exactly. He wasn't making a point. That's what makes it so wonderful. He genuinely could not find anything more worthwhile to do than play with the children, write a poem about the snow, share a cup of wine with a farmer, and go to sleep happy. The elaborate scaffolding of status and expectation that surrounded him simply failed to get his attention.
Monks in his tradition were figures of some gravity. They served communities, performed ceremonies, offered guidance to the bereaved and the seeking. Important work. Serious work. Ryōkan respected all of it --- and then walked back to his hut to write seventeen syllables about a frog.
What was spiritually radical about this wasn't the simplicity. Plenty of ascetics lived simply. What was radical was the joy.
Ryōkan wasn't renouncing the world because the world was corrupt or dangerous or beneath him. He was stepping back from it because he had found something better --- or rather, because he had found that everything ordinary was already extraordinary, if you looked at it right. The moon in the window. The children in the snow. The rice wine. The maggots in the pot that he carefully let escape before eating.
Yes. That happened. I watched it. I was laughing too hard to be disgusted.
He let the fleas bite him at night so as not to disturb them. He kept his legs outside the mosquito net on purpose. Not as penance --- I want to be clear about this --- not as some grim spiritual discipline, but because it seemed to him a reasonable and friendly arrangement with the creatures he shared the world with.
This was a man who had looked at existence --- cold, hungry, uncertain existence in a tiny hut on a snowy mountain --- and decided it was, on balance, absolutely wonderful.
That was the spiritual message his life carried, whether he intended it to carry one or not. And people felt it. Farmers brought him food. Children sought him out. Poets corresponded with him from across the country. Nobody was quite sure what to make of him, but everyone who encountered him seemed to leave feeling lighter.
Like something had been quietly, inexplicably given to them.
Like the moon, maybe, through a window they hadn't thought to look at.
Here is what Ryōkan gave the world.
Not a teaching. Not a school. Not a set of principles inscribed on paper and handed down through institutions. He gave the world a life. A single, luminous, fully-lived life --- and trusted that it would be enough.
It was more than enough.
His poems survived because people couldn't stop copying them. Not because they were technically dazzling --- though his calligraphy was genuinely breathtaking, brushwork so alive it seemed to move on the page --- but because they made people feel something true. A poem about children playing in the evening light. A poem about begging in the rain. A poem about watching snow fall and thinking about nothing in particular. Simple. Direct. Completely undefended.
He had no walls up. That's what I keep coming back to.
Most people --- and I have watched a very great number of people across a very long time --- move through the world with some degree of protection around them. A dignity to maintain. A reputation to manage. An image of themselves that needs guarding. Ryōkan had simply... put all of that down. Somewhere along the way, on that long pilgrimage through the Japanese countryside, he had set it by the side of the road and walked on without it.
What was left was just --- him. Curious, delighted, generous, occasionally drunk, always paying attention.
And what that unlocked in the people around him was extraordinary. Because when you encounter someone with no walls, something in you relaxes. You stop performing. You remember, maybe, that you are also allowed to just be a person standing in the snow, watching the light change, alive and grateful for no particular reason.
That is an ancient spiritual gift. And it is rarer than almost anything else I could name.
In his final years, illness brought him down from his mountain. He moved into the home of a patron and was cared for by a young nun named Teishin. She was decades younger than him. They wrote poems to each other --- tender, lively, warm --- and the correspondence between them is one of the most quietly beautiful things I have ever witnessed. Two people, at the far edge of a life, finding each other completely delightful.
He died in 1831, seated in meditation, just as if he were falling asleep.
His death poem was four lines. He left it for Teishin. I won't tell you what it says --- I want you to go find it yourself --- but I will tell you that it contains no fear, no regret, and no performance. Just a man, at the end, still paying attention.
What Ryōkan added to the world's spiritual imagination was this: that holiness does not require severity. That joy is not a distraction from the sacred path --- it might be the path itself. That a life of radical simplicity, freely chosen and happily inhabited, is one of the most subversive and luminous things a human being can offer the rest of us.
He pointed at the moon his whole life.
I just hope you're looking up.
I want to ask you something.
When you imagine a happy person --- really picture them --- what do you see? Someone whose life is going well, probably. Good relationships. Enough money. Health. Maybe the weather is nice. Maybe something wonderful just happened.
We treat happiness like weather. It rolls in when conditions are right and rolls out when they aren't. We watch the sky. We wait. And when it doesn't come we tell ourselves --- reasonably, sensibly --- that the circumstances just aren't there yet. That happiness is what's waiting on the other side of the thing we're working toward.
I have been watching humans do this for a very long time.
And then there was Ryōkan.
Ryōkan, who lived in a hut with a hole in the roof. Who owned one robe --- which he gave away. Who begged for food in the snow and sometimes forgot to finish begging because the children had found him. Whose circumstances, by any reasonable measure, were never particularly cooperating.
And I could never find the moment --- not once, in all the years I watched him --- when he was waiting for happiness to arrive.
He had already made some quiet decision about it. That's the only way I know how to describe it. Something settled and deliberate, like a man who has decided what kind of person he is going to be today and simply gets on with it.
It wasn't his personality. I want to be clear about that. Ryōkan knew cold and loneliness and loss. He wasn't cheerful because life was easy. He was happy the way a person goes to work in the morning --- not because they feel like it every single day, not because the circumstances demand it, but because it is what they have chosen to do. It is the practice. It is the act.
Happiness, for Ryōkan, was not a feeling he waited for.
It was something he picked up every morning, like his brush.
And here is the thing I most want you to hear --- the thing I have wanted to tell someone for two hundred years, since I watched that man sit naked in the snow and wish he could give a thief the moon.
You can do that too.
Not someday. Not when things get easier or better or more the way you hoped. Now. Today. In whatever hut you are currently living in, with whatever hole is currently in your roof.
Happiness is not the weather. It is not a reward. It is not something that happens to you when circumstances finally cooperate.
It is a door.
And you --- right now, exactly as you are --- can simply choose to open it.
Ryōkan knew that. He knew it so completely that it poured out of him like light. Into his poems. Into his games with the children. Into that moment with the thief and the moon.
I have loved a great many people across a very long time.
But the ones who figured that out --- the ones who understood that joy is something you practice, something you choose, something you do --- they are in a category all their own.
Ryōkan is at the top of that list.
And you can be there too.
I want to leave you with something small.
Not an assignment. Not a challenge. Just a question to carry with you today, the way you might carry a smooth stone in your pocket --- something to turn over in your hand when you think of it.
When did you last choose it?
Not wait for it. Not hope for it. Not look up at the sky to see if it was coming. But just --- reach for it. Deliberately. The way Ryōkan reached for his brush.
Maybe it was a moment that could have gone either way. A cold morning, an empty bowl, a day that wasn't shaping up the way you wanted. And somewhere in the middle of it you made a small, quiet decision to meet it with something other than resignation.
That was you, practicing.
You may not have noticed. That's all right. Ryōkan probably didn't make a ceremony of it either. He just picked up the brush. He just went out to play in the snow. He just looked up at the moon and thought --- oh. There it is. Still there. Still beautiful.
I think about the thief sometimes. I wonder if he ever told anyone what happened that night. The monk who gave him his clothes and sat naked in the cold, wishing he could give more. I wonder if somewhere on the road home, the cold air on his face, the robe over his arm, he felt something shift.
I wonder if he looked up.
Maybe he did. Maybe for just one moment, on that cold clear night, the thief and the monk were the same --- two people standing under the same luminous moon, both of them a little astonished to be alive.
That's available to you too. Right now. Today.
Look up.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere very old.
Older than Rome. Older than Greece. Older than almost anything you can name.
We are going to Egypt. Not the Egypt of pyramids and pharaohs and golden masks --- though all of that is there, shimmering in the background. We are going to meet a man named Ptahhotep. A vizier. A royal official. A man of immense power and position who lived around 2400 BCE --- forty-four hundred years ago --- and who sat down and wrote one of the earliest books of wisdom in human history.
He wrote it for his son.
He wrote about how to speak carefully. How to listen well. How to treat people with dignity regardless of their station. How to be, in the deepest sense of the word, decent.
Four thousand four hundred years ago.
I was there for that too. And I have things to tell you.
But for now --- right now --- I want you to sit with Ryōkan a little longer. Let him stay with you today. The hut. The snow. The children. The moon in the window that the thief left behind.
And if you find yourself, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, reaching for your brush ---
I'll know.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.