September, 2020.

Cooler days here in Asahata (Shizuoka City, Japan). Sauntering, seeing, daydreaming.

“The Mioyama sun,” he says. “The tangerines and kumquats. The persimmons. The vegetables. The soil. We have been so blessed, Kenta. And this rice. Especially this rice. Just look at this beautiful, beautiful rice.”

Along the Same Street

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la SainteTerre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes aSainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

“Walking,” Henry david Thoreau

Do you still believe there are places you can go?

Can you still conceive of faces you’d like to know?

And, oh, do you remember?

Oh, do you remember?

Sunlight kissing leaves so new.

Your hand holding all that’s true.

And, oh, do you still tremble?

WHEN A SISSY CLIMBS A MOUNTAIN IN MAY