As a child, I experienced everything and everyone through energy and sensation.
It was exactly the same way I experience the world now.
For some reason, I could immediately tell when someone wasn’t being truthful.
Even when they didn’t express much, I could sense the warmth deep within them, or something quietly radiant and strong.
And sometimes, I sensed the opposite.
Without trying to look or figure anything out, I simply felt what was deep inside a person — even beyond what they themselves seemed to show.
I just assumed that everyone experienced the world this way, and that they would continue to do so as they grew up.
I also experienced numbers as energy.
When I was doing simple, single-digit calculations, I didn’t really think of them as numbers.
It was more like, “If this little one and this little one come together, this is what it feels like.”
I could sense the energy of each number and somehow knew the answer from that feeling.
I often looked up at the sky.
I would talk with invisible beings — though I have no idea who they were — and I would talk to the clouds, the wind, and the flowers.
Sometimes, if I simply gazed into space without focusing on anything in particular, I began to see things that looked like little patterns of light, or perhaps eggs of nature spirits.
I had no doubt that there were things all around us that we couldn’t normally see.
And I never questioned the feeling that everything had a consciousness of its own.
When I started kindergarten and elementary school, I remember vaguely wondering why everyone made the same crafts together or danced the same dances.
It just seemed a little strange to me.
At school sports days, I found it especially puzzling that there had to be winners and losers.
Running around and playing games like the beanbag toss was already fun enough.
Why did someone have to win and someone else have to lose?
There were so many things that seemed completely ordinary on Earth, yet somehow felt very mysterious to me.
At the time, my grandparents ran a little shop selling sweets, bread, and everyday household items.
They also had goldfish and parakeets at home.
I remember thinking,
“Grandma and Grandpa have goldfish and little birds, and they get to stay home all day. How nice.
I wish I could stay home too.”
As a child, I tired easily and often became physically unwell.
I was never particularly strong.
Only much later did I come to understand why.
The being I call “me” has a very sensitive, delicate design — one that absorbs everything around me almost like a sponge, which can make me tire easily.
What looked like ordinary physical unwellness was, in a way, part of that design.
It seemed that my body was constantly adjusting itself so that I could become attuned to the vibrations of the Earth and learn how to live here.
And then, one day when I was in elementary school, as part of that adjustment, I would unexpectedly encounter my “kindred ones” in a way I could never have imagined.