NO BORDERS
NO BORDERS
NO BORDERS
designed in iceland by
cerro de plata
cerro de plata
I could not have planned what I have lived in Kyoto so far.
I never thought I would be met with so much depth.
I did not plan for it, and yet it happened. Kyoto has been a school.
A school in design mastery, not only across space, but across time.
No school could have taught me this. No master. No degree.
This is something you learn by climbing a mountain where you find a poem left there centuries ago, and somehow it feels as if it was left for you.
This beauty is not natural.
It is deliberate. Meticulously designed.
A centuries-old choreography between time, space, and the human mind.
Kyoto’s temples are not simply built.
They are composed, like symphonies, like philosophical arguments, like spells.
The garden is not a garden. It is a device.
A designed experience meant to change the person who walks through it.
Kyoto does not announce its lessons. It allows you to enter them.
You feel it first in your pace. In how your breath deepens without effort. In how attention loosens from urgency and settles into presence.
The city does not rush you. It holds you until perception returns.
Nothing is random. Everything is considered.
Design is a moral duty. An act of care.
Paths curve when they could be straight. Views are revealed slowly and framed by the most gorgeous trees.
Light is filtered, never imposed. Silence is shaped as carefully as sound.
Kyoto is not made of natural beauty.
It is made of curated, centuries-old beauty arranged to teach you how to perceive the world differently. And as perception shifts, so do you.
I definitely felt a shift the moment I set foot on The Philosopher's Path. I was taught one of the biggest lessons of my life at Mount Kurama. I had the realization that inspired this essay after walking into Seikan-ji.
The transformations I keep having in Kyoto are something that can't be undone.
In Kyoto, gardens are not decorative. They are instructional. They're devices for transformation. Nothing in the gardens was random.
They're composed, like a poem you walk through with your entire body. Every stone carries weight. Every absence carries meaning.
Space itself becomes material.
Time becomes a collaborator.
These are not places meant to impress.
They are places meant to work on you.
The longer you stay, the clearer it becomes. Kyoto is not concerned with the immediate visitor. It is designed for continuity. For memory. For return.
There are moments when the teaching becomes unmistakable.
A path walked by poets since ancient times.
A poem carved at the summit.
A stone to place wishes upon.
Passing through the years,
this world becomes ever more fleeting,
yet the happiness of a person
is simply this —
to climb an empty mountain
and look at the flowers.Standing there, surrounded by wind and quiet, the lesson clarified itself. Kyoto does not seek spectacle. It seeks coherence. It teaches through arrival, through stillness, through thresholds that feel both ancient and immediate.The mountain does not care who you are.
The poem does not explain itself.
And yet, something in you recognizes what it is being shown.
Talk to you next time,
Leiry.