Nature - Somewhere in Japan

Dispatch № 109: Birds and Boars

Spend enough time in the woods and you develop a sense of whether it’s a bird or a deer or even a snake, and it happens before you can even turn your head to see.

Dispatch № 93: Show-Runner

You can’t control nature any more than you can teach a cat to tap dance.

Dispatch № 92: Sitting on a Mid-River Stone

To simply exist and observe, to notice the small things happening around you, to be aware of your body as an element of the landscape.

Dispatch № 88: Oh, an Earthquake

I had no fear during that earthquake, and frankly never have in any that I’ve experienced. Which some people have told me is strange.

Dispatch № 77: Blemished

It represents a fool’s errand in human pursuits and is as about as common as hen’s teeth in nature.

Dispatch № 76: Truncated

Even just staring up into the branches was a joy, watching the sky sparkle through shifting gaps in the foliage.

Dispatch № 75: Fleeting Escape

Sand below us, water in front of us, the great mountain sitting huge in the blue haze to our right.

Dispatch № 74: Loud as Flowers

You feel you are swimming in a saturated, soporific concoction of apricot, honey, and hypnagogia, with undercurrents of the autumn sun’s penetrating warmth.

Dispatch № 72: For a Limited Time

Soft stridulations waft like lithe wisps of wood smoke on the gentle evening breeze, the crickets calling tenderly under the waxing crescent moon.

A starry sky rising above rice paddies in rural Yamanashi Prefecture

Dispatch № 60: Skyglow

Many years later, I laid down and gazed up from the floor of the Gobi Desert, a place with a sky so dark that the Milky Way practically slaps you in the face. There’s no missing it.