Most of this weekend has been spent sitting in my front room with the windows open, either smelling the late April breeze still speckled with cherry blossoms, or listening to the soft rain patter against the dark green leather leaves of the bush tree below the sill. Minutes passed and then hours passed and soon days will pass.

The silent quality of this gentle drizzle, the birdsong behind it, the lack of voices and machines lets me hear my own breathing, uncoils my thoughts that have been so tightly wound around the spoke-stem of my reality. Each day I've gone for a walk, half an hour to an hour throughout my neighborhood in a practice I began when I returned from the doctor some weeks ago. At first it was exercise and my heart rate complained and my legs screamed for the sanctity of sofas and cartoons. But then I hit my stride and the weariness of steps turned to circulation and the feeding of energy into my joints and muscles.

And now when I walk, it is how it used to be. My legs move and my breath rises and falls, and my thoughts and laid out behind me like breadcrumbs, and my thoughts go before me like swallows, and my thoughts spin around me like small planets on which infinitely small civilizations go about the business of ecosystems.

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