"I am walking"
2001 02 07
japanese
I am walking through a damp forest.
There isn't really a path.
I follow a faint trail where someone seems to have walked before.
It may not have been a human.
Bending down, I try to catch the scent.
The path through the forest changes, non-linearly.
There isn't a single straight line.
My eyes, accustomed to straight lines, have trouble recognizing all the shapes of the forest.
In every niche of the forest, there are a variety of living things.
There are hundreds of thousands of living things beneath where I tread.
There are trees of various heights.
They use all sorts of strategies to renew even a little of their energy efficiently.
Life like this has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.
Silence fills the forest.
Nature is quiet.
We don't know that nature is quiet.
It's particularly quiet in the daytime.
Living creatures often go about at night, as a tactic of survival.
At night all their energy causes quite a commotion.
In the forest, the temperature changes step by step.
Even the temperature is non-linear.
Our hearts love simplicity and can't grasp the principle that lies beneath these changes.
Human intelligence is still in its infancy.
It wants to reduce multiplicity to simplicity.
A pack of wolves and a lone wolf are different things.
The action of a mass of molecules differs from the behavior of a single molecule.
The human race in the latter half of the 20th century finally has come to faintly understand this.
The universe is neither geocentric nor heliocentric, but a bit of both.
© 2001 Ryuichi Sakamoto
