well

i'm back in this beautiful landscape. i remember, so well, how amazing i thought it was that all this, was out there, west of the coast where i grew up, just sitting here, all along. mountains, on a plateau, under a sky, sometimes hidden by clouds. i remember how shocking it was that i could see a cloud moving toward me from so far away, and that these mountains, just began out of something so flat. i think it is strange to come back to place that was so shocking the first time around. it is making me worry that i have lost my sense of wonder. is that possible? yesterday, i walked for a long time in the woods. there had been an avalanche. all the trees were sideways. I sat next to the lake, on a giant boulder. the water was lapping the side of the rock, moving towards the edge. the clouds were moving fast above me. the rock and I were the still part. i cold feel some-thing's wings beating behind me. like a thumping in my ear. but the wings, and their body were invisible. some days it still snows, and a creek that has no run for twenty years, is threatening to flood the pasture. i keep setting my alarm to watch the sunrise, and sleeping past it.

i still find it amazing, that these mountains can be made to disappear, by clouds and rain.

i'm sitting in a diner in Jackson

because the internet at the ranch isn't fast enough to upload any images.because the internet at the ranch isn't fast enough to upload any images. It is still hard for me to describe Japan because the most accurate word I have to describe it is "mysterious." It was peaceful but hidden, full of light and shadow. I liked just riding the trains around Toyama. We would pass through mountains, through pine forests and the sun light inside the car would suddenly become dappled and dazzling. then it would be black again, then we would pass a river. I felt very separate, very on -the-edge-of-something, like i just grazed the lip of each opening I passed. I liked watching people work on their gardens wearing tall plastic boots, and the rice paddies reflecting the sky. The mountains and the ocean, the strange little museums along the shore, one for a buried forest, one for the strange mirages that happen on the horizon. They were going to build a road, but found these ancient tree stumps, so they stopped building the road and built tanks around the tree stumps and pumped in water from deep underground. and there that museum sits. One day I got a little off track and ended up walking from one town to another along the ocean. I walked through rice paddies and stumbled on a few that had been converted into tulip fields. I could see the blocks of color from far away. Tulip paddies next to the ocean. A women moved down the line, deadheading them all. It was a sunny and windy day. I finally made it to another train station that was deserted and desolate. Almost every place I was felt that way. quiet and still. The day I went to Yatsuo, it was the kind of day that changes from sunny to cloudy constantly. The village was full of little canals, and a great, sloped wall that you could wind up to a beautiful ancient street above the river bed. I wish I had gone back to that wall, with a little mirror, and maybe a flashlight and wandered around with my video camera. I got really lost that day too, trying to find the train station. I wandered around down the wall and over a river and finally saw train tracks and followed them until I got to the station. When i got there, it was nice golden afternoon light, that shines through things instead of on them.


the day I walked from one town to another.
the canal near Julianne's house.
Outside a window while the Sakura were in bloom.


someone's garage in Yatsuo. Little potted gardens.

The wall in Yatsuo.
Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) party in Toyama near the canal. I really like the light on the cart, and the little bento boxes waiting on the blue tarp.


Desolate (in a dreamy way, not a scary way) Yatsuo. I walked into one museum, and this sleeping museum attendant was all I found there.
The lights in Yatsuo. And a Building with tarps, and an orange arrow.


Some one else's garage in Yatsuo.

Takaoka. I sat under this cherry tree to eat my lunch.

from a train ride to the mountains. The bridge and its shadow.
Women working in a garden in Kanazawa.

The seats on the trains were brilliant, you could slide the back so you could sit forwards or backwards! we were going through a pine forest, the way the light would change was a wonderful shock.
A marker on the snow wall on Tateyama.
Intense tree support structure.
roadside tulips and marathon runners.
the buried forest museum.


fishtank on the sidewalk.
deer chasing schoolchildren in Nara.
Portable garden!

Still need to figure out what the aprons on stones mean.

Let's start at the very beginning.

I arrived in Tokyo on April 4--late at night. I thought it was a miracle that I found the hotel. Julianne met me the next morning--we had sashimi for breakfast at the fish market. We got there at 10am, and by that time, its activities had already lulled, but the fish and rice bowl was delicious. And we saw all sorts of things--like squid in plastic bags floating in water, and these strange barrel-on-a-platform-on-wheels things that were driven madly all over the place. It is the most chaos I have seen in Japan.

Tokyo feels like a blur, honestly. That night we went to an onsen theme park, we had our first day of hanami (cherry blossom viewing), went to the national museum where they were showing art that had to do with cherry blossom-viewing, explored the different neighborhoods of the city, tried to find the national Kabuki theater, then realized we had walked past where it once stood like 5 times--it was just knocked down and they are rebuilding it (so sadly no Kabuki). we watched masses of people cross the crosswalks and men and women in business suites and nice shoes biking all over the place, wandered through the department stores, I ate some really strange,slimy yam soup that came with my soba noodle set. We went to the Ghibli museum--it is a museum about Miyazaki's animation studio--they had these wonderful animation models (I think that is a good term for them). They were large, multi-tiered, mechanical animation sculptures where each phase of movement was an individual figurine, and each tier was a different character. The machine would start, a strobe light would begin flashing and each tier would spin and everything would come alive--a little girl jumping rope, a cat-bus crawling along, some strange creature flying, a little girl's hair being swept by the wind. it was very beautiful. At the restaurant you could order things like "the fruit sandwich of your dreams."

After three days in Tokyo, Jules headed north to Toyama and I went east to Kyoto. I sat for a long time on the sidewalk waiting for my bus, I felt the small after shocks of anther earthquake. That was the only thing I had seen so far that reminded me that there was a disaster happening in this country.

I got to Kyoto very early the next morning. I was trying to find somewhere to eat and a Japanese woman drove me to a restaurant in her car. People here are friendly. I had ramen for breakfast. I went into this noodle shop where men wear pale blue uniforms and whenever someone enters or leaves, they all call out the same greeting, i don't know what it is but i like the way it sounds. in the tiny kitchen there is a vat of broth that is just steaming, and someone dips it up into bowls, and adds fresh noodles, pork and vegetables. I walked the philospher's path that day. it was sort of rainy, but that weather made the mossy gardens all sort of glow a little. i like that when you look down the alleyways, you see potted gardens in front of people's houses. this path follows a canal and links two main temples/shrines in Kyoto. When I needed food again, another woman led me to an Udon shop where I had wonderful noodles in a smoky broth, and the most amazing tempura. they gave me some free almond pudding for dessert and kept asking my if everything tasted alright. That day was somewhat disorienting. somewhere between two big and delicious bowls of noodles I had seen bits of Kyoto but it is hard to say much more about it. I got back to Kyoto station so I could make my way to the temple where I was staying (Shunk0-in, it was lovely) the bus ride there was long and crowded and i spent an hour just wandering around the station trying to figure out how to get to the train platform. the arrows seemed to be leading me up and down the stairs and in a giant circle. I got to the temple and felt strange and alone. it was very dark and very quiet and rainy and I had spent most of the day feeling glazed over. It was only 830 but I thought that maybe I would just lie on my futon until I fell asleep. But then I told myself that I was in Japan and should probably go out and walk around. This remains true today--excluding the big sights we saw in Kyoto, everywhere I go seems deserted. I always seem to be the only one going somewhere. That is something erie and new. I have never traveled somewhere, where I so often feel like I am the only one wandering around. I kind of like it. everything feels hushed and poised and serene. It might have something to do with the earthquakes, but the emptiness is not foreboding. it is serene. it is like I am existing on one side of a veil that had dropped down into the world. I don't know what Japan in like when it isn't cherry blossom season, and it isn't in the wake of a national disaster, but I feel like this quiet happens no matter what. I walked alone in the rain and got to a local restaurant. the hand-drawn map that I was given at the temple had it marked. I walked past and there was just a guy inside watching tv. I almost didn't go in but at that point I was pretty rain-soaked, so I opened the door, the man switched off the tv, switched on some music and cooked a meal for me on the spot. it felt cozy. I couldn't read the menu so the man who hangs out there/cooks just asked me what i liked and i told him that i wasn't a picky eater. I sat at the bar, facing the kitchen while he started assembling my food bit by bit. he put a plate in front of me, made some tea, and started placing little piles of food here and there. It was the best meal I had, and it made me feel like I could wake up the next day and see things. If i could, I would go back to Kyoto before I left just to have dinner there again. The next morning, I borrowed one of the temple bicycles and began riding around the section of the city that I was in. it was a little remote, but it was one of my favorite days so far. I felt better on a bicycle. I could actually follow the map and i felt like i could really see things. I saw two more temples, the Golden Pavillion and Ryoan-ji (a famous zen garden, later i learned that a lot of the popular tourist attractions glue the pebbles in place. a bird land in a rock garden and not a single stone moved). then i wound all the way around town. it was sort of overcast and breezy, i felt like i was actually seeing Japan. I went to a pickle shop and tried to have lunch, but they were booked, so they brought me a cup of tea and let me sample all their pickles. I bought spices from an old man that wore a checkered wool jacket and hat, who ground a mixture of dried scallions, chilis and sesame in a mortar and pestle and packed them for me in a little tin. i had some delicious sweets--mochi filled with red bean and a surprise fresh strawberry, and another sakura flavored one wrapped in a savory pickled perilla leaf. I wandered around a temple that I didn't have to pay to see, it was full of mossy crooked trees. I sat in a cafe for a while and then went to a small onsen. I ended the night at a bar--an old sake brewery where everyone sits on barrels on the stone floor. a japanese girl sat next to me pretended to read the paper until her friend came over and told me that she wanted to talk. I said that I was the one that was too shy to say hello, they made a list of thing i should see in Japan. Jules got to Kyoto the next morning. I remember thinking that it was impossible that I had been in Japan for less than a week at that point. We had a great lunch in Gion, a very picturesque part of the city. we had sakura mousse for dessert, it was heavenly. we followed the crowd to kiomizu temple. A large temple that is built on stilts. Then we had sake and a few snacks under the cherry blossoms. It was actually a magical thing to do.

riding my bike

i passed a noisy tree.

it was singing, with many birds. all the other trees had no bird sounds.

the graduation of the horizon

moving downwards going west.

and then rising again, at times, when we headed north.

and looking up into the sky and seeing two planes move away from one another, as if they just missed colliding--moving out from that corner of potential meeting.

this will become lights on wheels. that move away from one another.

and balloons that i will not let touch the ground.

dropping a balloon out of a window

building up blue

this was meant for hauendae beach, but it is happening in philadelphia instead.