Lying down in the three-tatami room in this old wooden building feels like floating, yet also undeniably connected.

To the sound
Down there
A heavy clanking freight train, carrying commodities in big iron boxes
A lighter, illuminated train, four cars filled with commuters on their way home from Okayama
Up here
A crow, cawing, settling in for the night on the branch of a tree
A bend, rustle, flutter

The room I am in is made of wood—a building that has been here for a century
The Crow’s room is a living Camphor tree—thought to be eight centuries old

—

Leaning up just enough from my pillow to see over the wood, through the delicate lattice of the sliding door, a small pane of glass
a glittering rectangle in the middle of light-holding washi paper
shows me the lights of the city and sea
shining, reflecting, twinkling
dissipating light across the varied surfaces
warm scented hinoki, butting up against soft shikkui plaster
orange, pale yellow, green, red
flash, glow, sent
through the air, from all those places
up to here

up here
to play in this small three-tatami room

—

Yes, the wind slips in through cracks
sounds from outside are not fully blunted by soundproofing
Light makes its way through here and there

Yet I sleep, more than in other, more modern places, knowing where I am

Watching my breath, inhaling the rustic scent of tatami, exhaling as every tension from the day leaves—out through those cracks in the doors, past the Camphor’s branches, across the tracks, riding an ocean breeze into the night

The night devours those things

Where I am and who I am feel, for a moment, the same

—

A simple structure, just enough
The way they placed it, with the landscape
How the builder’s hands moved
and the materials they held

Here inside, a century later
it all still provides immense comfort

Can a building that helps us know where we are, also help us understand more fully, who we are?

Note: This writing is one of several that took shape during the Onomichi Writer’s Residency at Miharashi Tei this past winter.

Another Story: Slow down with me to another small Japanese town, tucked away in the mountains above Nara basin, it feels like a different world — yet it’s just one subway stop from Osaka city.

—

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Sometimes it’s only a small nod, a hello, a recognition―just to say my life is intertwined with yours, and that I understand this with gratitude.

Most people actually don’t do this in daily life, even here in Korea. In fact, I have become known to some in our village as the foreigner who bows to the Dangsan Namu.

In English, Dangsan Namu might translate as “guardian tree” or “god tree” with a lowercase “g”. These trees are sacred, and that sacredness is tied to the place where they live.

Trees like these exist in old villages and neighborhoods throughout the country, and not only in the countryside.

Walk through the glass and concrete canyons of Seoul or Busan long enough, and you will also find Dangsan Namu between the high rise towers and apartments.

While they still grow however, the trees―especially those in big cities―are often forgotten. Ask a young urban dweller in Korea about their local Dangsan Namu, and most will have no idea where to find it, even if they walk past it every day.

Thus the strangeness of a foreigner bowing to such trees.

The attitude is markedly different in smaller cities and villages though. Here on the outskirts of Tongyeong city, our village holds a ceremony for the local guardian trees.

—

Coming from a neighborhood in the United States where people were mostly indifferent to such connections, I felt something shift when I moved to a place that has historically embraced them.

Though it wasn’t really a shift.

It was more like a nurturing of something that was always there.

Something that never knew it had permission to be expressed.

Practices related to Dangsan Namu in Korea, and Kami in Japan, both nurture this kind of permission in me.

In Korea, the relationship between people and Dangsan Namu is one of reciprocity that has continued generation after generation for a hundred, five hundred, sometimes more than a thousand years.

Can you imagine making a promise as a village or neighborhood, and keeping that promise for a thousand years?

It happens, though you might say is not in an exceedingly healthy state in many parts of Korea―or the world.

People have tended to these trees in Korea for centuries because they know, on multiple levels, that the trees tend them. A tree that weathers storms and droughts, that watches over generations of children through to old age, that all the while asks for so little and gives back so much.

Maybe a tree like this, is also a gesture and reminder, of another way to exist.

And perhaps these kinds of gestures, repeated across time―by the trees, and by the humans who dwell under them―are actually the most important infrastructure a place can have.

Every city, town, and village in the world depends on the plants, soils, and waterways that support life in that place.

We do not always acknowledge this.

I did not always acknowledge this.

An earlier version of this essay was originally published by The Nature of Cities as part of their roundtable discussion on What Does it Mean to be a Good Ancestor to the People, Places, and Things We Care About?

—

Question: What are some of the qualities you wish we could nurture more in our communities? What kind of cultural habit might help that?

Another Story: A sacred tree in Japan also makes a star appearance on a walking route called the “Oden Route,” in this story from 2023.

—

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But it’s in a city.

A small one of just over 100,000 people, but a city nonetheless.

From our position in this illustration, we are walking distance from bakeries, cafes, restaurants, book shops, a movie theater, a market street, shrines, temples, a main line train station, and well, most of the things that one would need in daily life.

Across the Pacific, the city where I grew up was home to over 1 million residents, and I couldn’t walk to any of those things.

Yet here, in this countryside-feeling neighborhood in a small Japanese city, you can walk to all of it.

To be more accurate, you must walk to all of it.

Locals might have scooters or mobility devices, but you can’t bring a car on this street. So up and down the narrow staircases, through close-knit alleys, you walk.

It’s a workout. But if you are okay with the calorie-busting elevation changes, this hillside town has more convenient access to daily necessities than most American cities.

And those necessities also include local, fresh food.

The Onomichi hillside is filled with small orchards and farming landscapes, intermingled with homes, restaurants, and cultural spaces. Sit down at one of those restaurants or cafes and there is a good chance some of the food on your plate came from that very same hillside.

Farm-to-table is not a hot trend here. Not necessarily fancy either. It’s just what makes sense. Cost-effective. Fresh. Growing right next to your restaurant.

This diversity of land use works remarkably well on many levels.

And yet places like this are not exclusive to Onomichi or Japan.

They tend to exist in various ways, wherever the human built world and the surrounding ecological world continue to evolve together, rather than in spite of each other.

Perhaps because of this, they require a touch that most modern development and political thinking does not have.

This kind of place comes from a willingness to pay attention.

To see the things in front of us not as obstacles to remove.

But as chances to connect.

We all know there are times when cities can feel distant from us, even though we’re standing right there in the middle of them.

But maybe it’s not really a distance between the city and us.

Maybe this feeling comes when cities are too distant from the landscapes they were built on top of.

—

What is under that city of yours?

Note: This writing is one of several that took shape during the Onomichi Writer’s Residency. More encounters from that time will likely find their way to The Possible City in time.

Question: Are there places in your city where nature reveals itself in beautiful or unexpected ways?

Another Story: I Illustrate 20-meters of street in two different cities, and it reveals something surprising about how cities work when people come first.

—

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Once inside, you will see that there is only room for three things:

— A small desk tucked beside the door, with various fresh breads on it
— A hole in the wall with a shelf, on which sits a calculator
— You

Everyone and everything else waits outside, on stools, with the street cats, listening to tunes from an old iPod mounted in a wood box on the wall.

From outside, you can see this is not a small building. To the left of that small customer area, the bakers enjoy quite a wide space for kneading, rising, and baking all the breads. Of course. They should.

It all seems to work fine.

On paper though, it would give the contemporary business planner a panic attack.

The shop is way up a hill, on a narrow alley. A car couldn’t fit anywhere near here. Even cyclists wisely leave their wheels at the bottom of the hill. There are four parking spots, but they are in the form of wooden stools, and they are explicitly for parking the rear end of a human body. A single customer can barely fit inside the shop. There is no set menu, just the day’s breads in front of you. Payment is in cash only, and when they are sold out, the bakers prefer to go home and relax instead of baking more bread.

But oh, the experience of being here. The soft, sweet, pungent, delicious little breads. The alley scene.

A friend standing outside once asked how they would ever manage to scale the business. Before answering, I looked around at the stools, the hillside cats, the tiny doorway, the bread — which was nearly sold out before 11am.

I wasn’t entirely sure this place needed — or wanted — to scale anything at all.

The bakers seem like happy people.

The customers seem like happy people.

The neighborhood calicos seem like happy cats.

How many businesses achieve those kinds of metrics?

The friend looked at me with one eye squinting. He chewed on a sweet red bean bread. Quickly swallowing, mouth still half filled, he said that maybe I didn’t understand the question.

Indeed.

Note: This writing is one of several that took shape during the Onomichi Writer’s Residency. More encounters from that time will likely find their way to The Possible City in time.

Question: Can you recall a place that was successful by its own measure, rather than everyone else’s? What was that measure?

Another Story: The bakery above is actually called a “factory.” The word carries a different meaning here, partly because small factories have become an important ingredient in some of Japan’s most vibrant urban neighborhoods.

—

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You could see it coming.

Pine trees move and change direction.

Slowly.

A twisting branch, reaching out for light, making its way at the speed of inches per year. Somehow, no one interfered with this movement.

Today, if one walks on the main route between the city and the hillside temples, shrines, cafes, and sun-bathing cats, they must duck under this sideways tree to continue.

Stupid. Is this a joke? Cut the tree. It’s blocking the way. I’ve heard such words. Maybe a foreign tourist. Maybe just someone having a bad day.

Fortunately, few living here seem to take this view.

The first time I entered a proper tea house, I thought it was a joke too.

The doorway to a tea house is more like, what? A secret passage in the back of a wardrobe? A children’s playground entrance? A garbage chute?

But there is an idea that everyone should humble themselves before entering a tea house.

No swords. No chainsaws. No egos.

Maybe people in Onomichi decided that they also need to humble themselves before entering the hillside.

Maybe it’s more than this.

A bow. Under the branch of a living tree.

A moment of acknowledgment. Of grace.

A moment that decides something about a city, and what it will become.

Will it be more beautiful and alive over the years, or more emptied of life?

Each day, moving up and down the hill here, I feel like Onomichi’s answer to this question is firmly planted in more ways than one.

Note: This writing is one of several that took shape during the Onomichi Writer’s Residency. More encounters from that time will likely find their way to The Possible City in time.

Question: What kinds of inconveniences have you accepted, out of respect for something in the world?

Another Story: Another walk, through a different urban forest, this one outside Kyoto.

—

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It was a farm on an island, somewhere in the Seto Inland Sea.

A tiny private boat took the three of us there. The wind was active as we jumped through the currents. Everyone’s hairstyle in a constant tussle, strands of hair were waving — not like waving hello, but more like a goodbye, or a shaking off of something. My beard tasted of sea salt.

On the boat, our ambassador pointed to a tiny beige-green lump far off in the sea and explained. Their organization purchased the island around a century ago, before synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were common in Japan.

From the start, it was decided not to use either on the island.

Rare.

Must be the only place in Japan that never once used chemicals?

So far as we know, it is, they said.

The wind became lighter over the thirty minute ride. The island grew bigger. Clearer. We could see the outline of individual trees across the hills.

The tiny outboard motor quieted. The boat slowed up beside a wood dock.

—

Dinner that night looked like a luxury spread from a swanky hotel.

This, I knew only from a short stint years ago, throwing tech events at swanky Silicon Valley hotels.

This was not a swanky Silicon Valley hotel though. It was a humble private kitchen, on a small Japanese island where no one had ever sprayed pesticides.

And that is how I knew it.

With the first bite of melon.

I knew that the world was going to end.

Not the whole world. The world where food came from a package.

The world where that package came from a distribution center stacked with boxes of melons, tomatoes, heads of cabbage.

Where the melons, tomatoes and cabbage came from a regional sorting center.

Where the regional sorting center took arrivals from other national sorting centers, and those ones got the shipments from the farms, and those farms got their loads of fertilizers and pesticides to grow the foods from other distribution centers, vast dockyards with rows of cranes—from processing plants in far off countries that must have more oil extraction capabilities than we do.

Or more relaxed environmental laws.

By contrast, the distribution of food on this island was more simple.

—

We had walked through the fields just before dinner.

That was when the head farmer showed me the chart.

We were in an apple orchard, glistening green-yellow apples. Or maybe yellow-green.

It really depended on the angle of the light.

The chart outlined when to apply poison.

The farmer pointed his tough, thick finger, stabbing at the giant fold-out paper chart, sent to him by the agriculture association.

They send it every year. He said, gripping the chart, relaxing his thick finger for a moment.

He took in a deep breath. Looked away from the chart for a moment.

The air was not salty up here, but crisp. A breeze through the leaves carried the scent. Grass and wet earth.

He usually swears at the chemical spraying chart when it arrives in the mail. Then burns it in a personal ceremony.

A smoke signal.

But he saved the chart this year. Not to follow, but to show people like us.

Thirteen times in the growing season. You see? The thick, stabbing finger resumed its assault on the glossy card-stock paper.

Ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana … I looked at the chart, but couldn’t read the Kanji characters.

Ju-san. Thirteen times. You should spray.

Look. Here. This is the harvest date. And here. The last application of poison to the apples.

Right before harvest? I half-guessed.

Right! Yes! Right before shipping. For people to eat. You should spray.

He laughed.

Shook his head.

Folded the chart back up.

Did his best to flatten out the angry finger-jab-induced wrinkles.

We all took another few deep breaths.

Crisp. Clear. The smell of earth.

—

At the dinner table, the three of us commented on how good the food was. You always do this, for the benefit of the host.

But we also shot wide-eyed glances back and forth with every bite.

On the boat ride back the next morning, hairstyles were again in a constant tussle as we jumped through the currents. Strands of hair waved even more furiously.

A lot to shake off, I thought.

A lot of charts to burn.

Notes: This writing is based on a true story, of our visit to one of many natural farms during 3 years of filming Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness.

Question: What charts do you need to burn?

Another Story: If you enjoyed this short adventure, you might also like this story from 2023, inspired by another natural farm visit, in which I become a tiger radish hunter.

—

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By train and bike, they arrived at sunset, to a neighborhood park in Osaka with a small pond. We had with us, sake, pens, and pieces of paper.

As the moon came up above the treeline, we took turns writing poems, reciting them, toasting, and setting the poems alight in the pond. Within the prose were social rants, love letters, observations—

About how many billions of years
it took to produce this one moment

Cool breeze through the tall trees
along the water
a reflection

Softly glowing rock, rippling,
spinning around the sun with us.

Much time was also spent just being there—present in this precious life we share here, together.

There used to be moon gazing parties in cities around the world.

People called it the best show on earth.

Poetry exploding, wine drifting down streams, celebrations with fire, dance, music, food, and time for contemplation of our glowing rock.

I want to live in a city where sitting for hours at the park
and staring at the moon
is more normal
than sitting for hours in front of a television or smartphone.

But sometimes we let normal get away from us.

If we could swap doom scrolling
for scrolling our eyes back and forth
between the moon and the earth

If we could let the gravity of the moon
pull harder and stronger
than the gravity of the latest outrage

Something important would return.

And maybe, this moon-gazing city would be inevitable.

Notes: These moon-watching rituals still do exist, though they are quite rare. In times and places when they can not be found nearby, the only thing I can do is create a new one that relates to the lives of people around me, not something strictly bound by tradition, but certainly informed by it.

Question: When was the last time you watched the moon for a while?

Another Story: Coincidentally, the moon also appears in this one, published almost exactly four years ago, in a mountain shrine on the outskirts of Kyoto.

—

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Upstairs, the door to the coffee shop opens. Again the smell, this time with a hint of tobacco.

Two middle-aged women make their way down the stairs.

High on coffee, or tobacco, they giggle like schoolgirls.

Outside, they hop onto their bicycles — one electric-assist Yamaha, the other a beater with “Cabbage” written on it. Both carry child seats, front and back.

Then they pedal off in opposite directions. As the sound of spinning chains fades, the wind rests for a moment. I turn and walk up the stairs, past fading posters for music, arts, and a Godzilla dance. With each step, the smells and sounds swirl closer, condense.

It’s just a coffee shop, but my heart always speeds up just before opening the door.

**

Inside Minami Coffee, the mood is pure luxury.

Not luxury as in flashy and expensive — a coffee and toast set here costs all of five dollars. No, this is something else.

This is the luxury of joining something rare in the world.

For what this luxury gives you, however, it also asks something in return. There is a tacit responsibility to perform actions with a certain tenor and timing here. When done correctly, attentiveness and euphoria exist side by side in this old kissaten.

Then again, that feeling could just be the intoxication of coffee and cigarette smoke.

There is no need to yell — or even whisper — sumimasen here.

The staff see the actions. Everyone, sitting at a window table, or bar seat, or pondering alone in the back corner, displays them.

The floor manager takes orders. Yet, to order you need not look at her — it might be considered rude anyway if you did.

There are other ways to know an order is coming than to stare into someone’s eyes.

Everyone here gives off signs they do not know about, and the floor manager — with her graceful awareness, her kind, gently-moving, focused eyes — notices.

Back in the corner, in a plush old leather seat, an old man takes the cigarette from his mouth, places it in the ash tray, and looks up from the menu.

The floor manager was already moving before he had a chance to look her way.

She leans in as he whispers. His cigarette still resting on the ash tray, the smoke blends with the sound of his voice, the clanking of fine porcelain coffee cups.

She nods and leans away, translates the man’s whispers into the shop shorthand.

TOAST ONE DESU!

HAI. TOAST ONE.

There are only two people in this coffee shop who are expected to raise their voices. One is the floor manager as she is returning from a table. The other is the coffee master, as she repeats the order from the floor manager.

They speak just loud enough for their voices to travel through the chorus of clanking of cups, silverware, and the low murmur of conversation.

These two women are conductor and soloist.

You and everyone else are co-composers.

Co-performers.

Everyone makes their own score.

And somehow, everyone seems to know the timing.

Note: The kissaten in this piece is in Takamatsu, Japan. I learned a lot from its rhythm, visiting often during two summers spent on nearby Megijima.

Questions: Can you remember being in a place where everything just seemed to come together not by control, but by something unwritten and unspoken?

Another Story: There are several kissaten stories in The Possible City archives. This one from Kyushu is a favorite:

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Twenty minutes later we pass a 12th century wooden lighthouse. Previously at the ocean’s edge, today it stands several kilometers inland from the coastline, thanks to slow and continuous land-reclamation that started around 1610 and continues now. The lighthouse is no longer lit, but it is open to visit on certain days. Looking out from the top, I imagine it still working, its light shining not into the ocean, but into a sea of buildings.

Our destination however, is the well-forested park, just across the street from the lighthouse.

Once a week, we make this short morning trip to say hello to one of our favorite trees in the city, a towering, sprawling Camphor. The tree is just two centuries old—much older ones live across the tracks in the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine precinct—yet it has nevertheless captured our affection since we first came upon it. On that first meeting our bikes halted in unison at the tree. The broad canopy of the most vivid and alive green was mesmerizing. Two trunks danced, creating a sprinkle of shade and light that a hundred people could easily picnic under. When the weather is good, they do.

Since that day, we’ve brought many friends to meet this tree: artists, farmers, and even a botanist from the United States who remarked “That’s a Camphor alright. Golly. I’ve just never seen one so huge.” Golly was a pretty strong word for this man.

In our weekly visits to the tree, we normally bow and smile, touch the tree, and often sit against its trunk with a cup of tea or coffee. Sparrows, crows, and turtle doves actively chirp, caw, and rustle above and around, and the Nankai Line train, on the opposite side of the park, rattles past with typical punctuality, shuttling people in or out of the city center every three minutes and thirty seconds.

Yet time has a habit of slowing down here. Sometimes those three minutes and thirty seconds stretch into the unknown.

But one year, a massive typhoon hit Osaka. The damage was not light. We woke up to the second floor of someone’s house, sitting on top of our garden.

After the storm, seeing the wreckage around us, both of us were afraid to visit our favorite Camphor tree. Afraid of what its second floor would look like. Eventually, we made the bike ride, dodging boats washed up in the street, pieces of metal roofing, and crumbling houses along the way.

Upon arriving, we had no words.

An old woman was under the tree, biting her lips. With an audible sigh, she turned away from the tree and walked toward us, then slowed her steps, stopped, and looked up to meet our gazes. “It looks bad. But it will grow back. Maybe in ten years.” We looked at her, then back at the empty space where the tree canopy had been.

Just a year before Suhee had met this same woman for the first time under the Camphor. The woman was with her husband, who talked about the grand tree, touching its trunk, looking up to the twenty meter wide canopy, recalling how it was the oldest in the park.

I looked at the ground. Still wet. Caution tape. Branches strewn everywhere. The three of us now stood in silence until the old woman spoke again.

“It’s seen storms before. It will grow back.”

—

Though large urban forests are not common in most Japanese neighborhoods, old trees are many, found variously in the small parks occurring every few blocks, or in the Buddhist temples punctuating the urban landscape, nearly all of which prominently feature at least a few large old trees.

In the sacred spaces of numerous Shinto shrines in Japanese cities, trees are often honored with entire complexes, torii gates leading up to thousand-year-old trees, and regular visitors who stand in awe and pray to these tree elders.

“Two bows. Two claps. Pray to the tree kami.”

This is what an old man once told me as I approached one of the old enshrined trees at Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine in Osaka. The word kami, which the man used, is sometimes translated as god with a lower-case g. Perhaps more accurately, Shinto priestess Toukyo in Osaka refers to kami simply as “sacred presences found in nature, people, and places” also noting Motoori Norinaga’s definition of kami as “anything awe-inspiring or beyond the ordinary.”

Even where not explicitly stated, Shinto shrines often play the role of guardians of urban forest in Japan. More than this, they are spaces where urban dwellers can connect to something older and grander than themselves, whether it’s through tradition and ceremony, or by simply walking through these spaces on a regular basis, and slowing down, as many do.

Some will call this an antiquated thought. Perhaps it is.

All I know is that when I stop and pay attention to them, big old trees—regardless of what country or city they are in—induce a sense of awe more often than not. I have thus adopted the habit to bow to them.

Is there room for such “old ideas” in the future of sustainable cities?

—

With this question in mind, perhaps you can think of a curiously beautiful tree in your own neighborhood. Any species or age of tree will do, but it’s best if it’s a tree in a place nearby that you can remember clearly. If you cannot recall one, I might recommend to put this essay down for a moment, and have a look around your neighborhood for such a tree before continuing.

Now, with the image of that tree in your mind, imagine that you wrap it gently with something beautiful, give it a wooden sign to signify its birthday, species, and perhaps some interesting fact it might have witnessed during its lifetime. Now, imagine further, making a permeable border—not a chain-link fence, but an area of acknowledgment—around this tree.

Now imagine that these small signals help people in the neighborhood to also notice the tree in a new way. Perhaps they also develop some manner of friendly affection for the tree, giving a nod, a bow, or even simply a new awareness of this tree’s existence. Imagine further now, that every year you and a few of these neighbors gather for a celebration in this space, together with the tree.

And finally, imagine this happening at the same site, with the same tree, long after you and your neighbors are gone. In time, it would be highly improbable that some deep relationship had not been formed between the community and this tree.

If such small acknowledgements were more common, more accepted as part of the way we move through the world, what would our cities look like next year, in twenty, a hundred?

Would they look more sacred, more alive, more biodiverse?

Would they feel less divided?

It’s something I think about—and make art about—a lot.

Although this story may not be familiar to many of us, it is probably somehow easy for many of us to imagine. Easy, because it is not an isolated or new story. It is a part of the story of humanity.

Looking across global cultures and long stretches of time, the act of seeing trees as sacred is not an anomaly. The real anomaly is how the systems we’ve built have gradually separated so many of us from this fellowship.

When I imagine the city of the future, I imagine scenarios such as those involving the elder trees in so many Japanese neighborhoods. I imagine sacred spaces where one feels closer to the real world in which our cities are built—the world present long before a city was there. I imagine more urban spaces where one can feel respect and reverence for the living world we inhabit. I imagine cities growing not brazenly in spite of trees, but gently morphing over time together with them.

We don’t necessarily need a tree shrine, an eco-artwork, or municipal code to do any of this—though these things likely won’t hurt. All we truly need is a person, a tree, and some intention.

Though we no longer live in Osaka, whenever Suhee and I visit that Camphor, or any old tree, it gifts us something that is very rare in this fast-paced world. Muscles relax. The brain calms. You feel in a place rather than at a place. Some kind of reassurance enters your being. If this tree has weathered the storms, maybe it can teach us to do the same.

If you’ve lost your connection to nature, just start again. It too, will grow back. Visit a tree. Touch it. Learn about it. If there is no tree, plant one. Bring a friend along. Ask your city how to protect and honor your trees. Bring a bench. Start a neighborhood event under a tree canopy.

These small actions, at least, are within our capacity. They will matter when you do them, and they will still matter—perhaps even more—two centuries from now.

An edited version of this piece was originally published as “A City Designed by Trees” in The Nature of Cities (September 2018) and Kyoto Journal (Issue 95, 2019).

—

A note on my publishing rhythm:

Over the past months, publishing of The Possible City has been a bit more uneven than usual. This winter carried a few heavy chapters—personally and professionally—and I found myself needing to move at a slower pace.

I continue to dedicate time each week to research, drawing, and writing for TPC, though that work does not always result in something ready to share. For the time being, I will publish roughly one or two stories each month—sometimes more, sometimes less—when I have something thoughtful and considered to offer in return for your time.

Thank you for understanding, and for being here with me.

—

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They say that it has to do with the gentle sea breeze coming in off the strait, or the way the sun spreads along the old buildings and gardens, or the fact that, for 800 years a shrine and Camphor tree have grown together just over there.

Of all the things one can experience in Onomichi, maybe the purest distillation is just the act of walking a bit — strenuous, up the stairs, closing in on the clouds — and then sitting down, breathing deeply, and taking in the view.

At that moment, there is a high likelihood that you will feel something.

It may be the wind, or the sun, or a recognition of how this town was built mindfully, how it was later shaped over the centuries. Or it may be the scent of one of the flowering trees — in late winter that is likely the Sazanka or another member of the Camellia family — bursting with color or fragrance.

Or that feeling may also be something more active.

Demanding, even.

Yes, if you sit, or even so much as kneel down here, there is at least a twenty-three percent chance that a cat will end up on your lap.

Now, there are plenty of urban places in the world that make enemies of cats. And it is true, they are not always the most quiet neighbors, or the most respecting of a patch of soil.

Yet it seems to me, that making friends tends to be far better for everyone involved than making enemies — cat or otherwise. The people who live here in the hillside of Onomichi, and plenty of those who visit, seem to be of this latter mindset.

The cats here, have many friends.

You are one of them.

Sitting.

Cool breeze on one side of the face.

Warm sun on the other side.

Purring lap warmer, settled down on your legs.

You breathe in everything beautiful. Breathe out the thing that was bothering you just a moment ago.

Yes, they say something strange happens when you sit down in Onomichi.

Is it strange though, or is it simply what happens when we embrace the world around us, instead of trying to chase it down?

This writing is one of several that took shape during the Onomichi Writer’s Residency. I am thankful for the time it gave me to walk, write, and sit with cats, in the alleys of this seaside town. Hopefully, other encounters from that time will find their way here as well.

—

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—

It all began with a small death. The kind that most people would overlook.

A Sparrow lay still by the riverside. The city had just built new glass walls there. They were beautiful and modern. They were also invisible. To the birds who had long known the sturdy edifice of stones lining the banks, that shiny beautiful glass must have seemed like air.

By the time our friend Boyoung had found the fifth grounded Sparrow that week, she lifted it gently from the pavement. This happened in front of a local museum. Boyoung walked inside. She asked if they had a small spade. The old bearded man who ran the museum found one and then the two of them — strangers before that moment — said a short prayer and buried the bird beneath a tree.

**

Two weeks later, Suhee and I were in the city of Gongju, listening to Boyoung tell this story over coffee and cookies in her small shop. The air smelled of coffee, bread, and books.

“You must see the exhibition at that museum,” she said. “Nature art. Very beautiful.”

So we went.

I knew the curator’s name — a legend in the nature art world, and someone I’d once studied in Scotland a decade earlier, on the other side of the world. Still, I didn’t expect him to be there, standing at the door of his gallery, greeting visitors. His silver beard and smile caught the light in a way that put me at ease.

We talked for a while about the exhibition, our lives in Korea, and the strange paths that bring people to where they are. Then, as people do in this part of the world, we exchanged cards and bowed goodbye.

A day later, Suhee got a call. It was someone from Nature Art Museum Ko. Apparently, that same bearded man wanted to invite us for a residency and exhibition, in just a month’s time.

At the moment, we were deep in the mud of rebuilding our home. We were exhausted, lost in the seemingly endless work of gutting and trying to rebuild this place before winter arrived. The invitation from the nature art museum felt like a seed landing in the right patch of soil, so we said yes.

We called the exhibition “Weeds Pharmacy.”

The idea of this exhibition, was to invite visitors to meet four common weeds, to learn how they heal the land, and also how they might also heal us humans. We chose four humble, common weeds: Clover, Broadleaf Plantain, Mugwort, and Dandelion — the kind you can find growing through the cracks most any sidewalk, or the edges of most any road.

Many people hate weeds. We have built a whole industry around attacking them. Yet if we get to know weeds closely, we find another story.

Weeds thrive in the most obliterated of landscapes. Yet to do this, one needs to give back more than they take.

Weeds do. They are nature’s healers.

Can they also teach us how to do the same?

Whatever we might think of these plants, thousands of years of traditional wisdom across nearly every culture has known their strength, not only in healing the soil, but in healing people, too.

Surprisingly, Suhee told me that, when dried and blended, these four common weeds actually do make a gentle, delicious, restorative tea.

Around this idea, the two of us got to work building a small world in the gallery, with four shrines, each one devoted to a single weed.

Stepping into the gallery, a looping video glows, welcoming you to the Weeds Pharmacy. Tapestries which I printed using hand-carved woodblocks (each one celebrating a different weed) hang above old pieces of timber. In turn, each piece of timber holds a jar of dried herbs and a spoon. Visitors kneel, give thanks, and collect a small portion of dried weeds in a Korean pharmacy envelope marked Weeds Pharmacy.

Everyone who comes is given a user’s guide, to help them through the gallery. Later, at home, it invites them to steep the herbs in water — an invitation to “be the weed” in their daily lives.

The exhibition culminated with a workshop: a table full of herbs, the smell of earth and boiling water. People blended teas, stamping envelopes with the wooden blocks I had carved. Within an hour, herbs, laughter and joy filled the room.

Afterward, we gathered for dinner at Boyoung’s shop, Teumssag (틈싹) — appropriately, the name of the shop means “small plants that grow through the cracks.”

This shop is also the same place where the story of the Sparrow had first been told. The food was warm and fragrant, conversation easy, and it was clear that new friendships were taking root here. It is always miraculous to be in the midst of such a gathering.

Boyoung retold the story — about the Sparrows, the glass walls, and the bearded man who had stepped out of his museum that day. The same bearded man now sat across from us, raising a glass to the opening of another nature art exhibition.

**

And it all began with the death of a Sparrow.

A small bird.
A thoughtful woman.
A bearded nature man.

For us, that seemingly inconsequential moment is a reminder, of what the world can be when we offer it our gracious attention.

That night, back at home, Suhee and I raised our cups:

to the Sparrow
to the weeds
to the birds, and the teachers of resilience to whom we are all connected

to the hope that our cities might one day learn
to give their own
gracious attention, to this living nature that we are part of

may we also be the weeds
that the world needs

—

For a slightly more immersive experience, we put together a short video tour of the exhibition:

You can explore more about the exhibition at:
https://www.pmlydon.com/weeds-pharmacy/

Thank you to Boyoung, to Ko Seunghyun and his Nature Art Museum and YATOO organization, who commissioned this exhibition and in doing so, invited us into this new world.

Also to that little bird, may their next life be more long and beautiful.

Parts of this exhibition were previously commissioned by the Nara Machiya Arts Festival HANARART, curated by Chie Uchida.

—

Thanks also to you, for letting me into your world. It has been difficult to be regular with writings here the last few months. I apologize for that. Feel free to leave a comment below. Or, to help this project grow, think of someone who might like it and click the magic button below.

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—

The city of Gimhae is known for its diverse population and growing number of multicultural families.

That is one of the reasons why Bomnunbyeol feels at home here.

“It feels like traveling without having to travel.” He laughs as he takes us for a walk around an ancient royal tomb of the legendary King Suro. Making our way slowly through the forest surrounding the tomb, the woods glisten with light and shadow, and a Daurian redstart looks on curiously from a branch. There is a sense of calm here, but also, something mysteriously different from other Korean tombs. In 48 AD, King Suro is said to have married a princess from India. Whether the legend is true or not, both of their tombs are situated here, embraced by lush urban forest.

Coming around the front of the tombs, I bow once each — to the King from Korea, the Queen from India, and the orange-breasted bird we saw in the forest. We walk back to Bomnunbyeol’s shop.

—

Bomnunbyeol is a musician by trade, and can often be found traveling the country on a tiny motorbike with instruments strapped to his back. His choice to settle here and eventually open a small studio and shop was a big decision. He opened 없는집 (the name literally means House That Isn’t) in part, to kick-start his life in a new direction.

I asked Bomnunbyeol what advice he might have for others who are thinking to open their own such space. He says:

“First, find a space that you think can serve as a turning point in your life. Then, give it an atmosphere you can’t experience at home.”

Bomnunbyeol sees the space partly as a way to push himself beyond the comfort of his own home. For him it is more than a place to conduct lessons or to sell the instruments he has collected over the years, he reflects:

“… think of it as a place for the moments and stories in your life to meaningfully accumulate [and] a space where you can focus on the work that you want to bring to the world.”

Walking from his shop, through the town, past the old tomb, I wonder if King Suro’s multicultural-bridge-building energy had a hand in luring him here. After all, Bomnunbyeol’s music does build bridges between cultures, in its own way.

Kalimba. Tongue Drums. Native American Flutes. All of the instruments that Bomnunbyeol plays are from places outside of his home country. When performing these instruments, his soft and caring style feels healing. Yet something larger also seems to move through the music — healing not just for the personal daily stresses we accumulate in life, but also touching upon the shared tension that exist between cultures.

We all know this kind of tension, even if we don’t realize it. Passed down through generations, it is the result of antagonism and wars that were not started by you and me. Nevertheless, it builds within our minds and bodies as we see, hear — and sometimes participate — in the global theater of us-versus-them.

This tension needs healing, too.

So it is that each time we share something between cultures, learn something about another culture, practice honestly a custom of another culture, or even appreciate music from another culture, we are entering a process of healing the most ancient of wounds.

If deeply knowing our own cultures tells us where we came from, then deeply learning about other cultures shows us where we might go.

Individually — but also as a species.

Bomnunbyeol’s music then works at two levels: locally through his tiny shop and intimate performances, and globally, through his dedication to music and instruments from beyond the place he was born, from that wider homeland we call Earth. Surely King Suro, Queen Heo Hwang-ok, and even that bird from the forest — who migrates effortlessly across political lines — can all attest to the importance of that.

Is not the Earth our homeland?

If you are curious to hear Bomnunbyeol’s music, his name in Korean is 김봄눈별 which makes it easier to find. He has a YouTube Channel and an Instagram @bomnunbyeol

Also, here is a film we did of him playing in a metro station in Seoul:

—

Coming Up Next: Did you enjoy this look into a tiny shop? Maybe we can make it an occasional series, illustrations and interviews about little shops.

Another Story: There was a neighborhood coffee shop by our old house where, from 6am-10am you could get breakfast for $4 while smoking a cigarette — until noon when smoking hours finish. Not the healthiest breakfast, but it was a beloved spot for locals.

—

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The hand-drawn illustrations below depict two cities I have lived in, and are drawn to the same scale. Spend a few minutes wandering around them with your eyes if you can. At first glance, we might notice that one place is built around cars, the other around trains and pedestrians. But I want to take us deeper than this dichotomy, into one of these places, to observe how something called a ‘shotengai’ connects people, and to think about why that connection matters today.

You may or may not know, that the drawing above on the left is a relatively normal Japanese ‘suburb’ in Osaka, Japan. Neighborhoods like this are often built around a train station, a shotengai (aka: Japanese style commercial street) and a pedestrian-focused residential neighborhood.

Rather than being engineered primarily to move and store vehicular traffic, neighborhoods like this grow from a series of intentions — for the lives of the people who live there. From these intentions, the form of the place grows over time.

[For more on this topic, you can read about The Importance of Neighborhood Factories in Japan or about why So Many Japanese Neighborhoods Have Farm to Table Cafes.]

Osaka, Japan

It’s 5pm and the traffic is intense.

I join the flow. It’s a different kind of rush hour than the one I am used to in the States.

A quiet tick-tick-tick of bicycle chains.
The occasional ding-ding from a handlebar-mounted bell.
An absolute bevy of conversation between people.

This is a main street. Narrow as it is, it carries the highest volume of people of any street in the neighborhood, and it does so without cars.

In the middle of this busiest of streets, women are chatting about kids. Kids are chasing each other and debating about pencil cases. Old men in front of an outdoor community television are arguing about baseball, while young men at a takoyaki shop look over someone’s new tattoo.

I cycle slowly into all of this, reminding myself that this is not a main tourist attraction, nor the city’s main shopping district. Far from it. This is a local neighborhood commercial district. Scenes like this play out in neighborhoods around Osaka every day.

As I near a fruit shop, an elderly man suddenly stops his bike — right in the middle of traffic — to dismount. Obstructing traffic, he then starts to chat with an old woman who is pushing a walker full of groceries. This old man seems to be getting insider information. Several people are now stopped on the street behind him. One by one, we lean our heads in to listen. Apparently, tangerines from Ehime are on sale, and they are very delicious.

None of us are outraged at having to stop our bicycles. Most of us walk our bikes to the front of the store to check out the tangerines. Though one woman — already carrying a basket of citrus from another shop — shakes her head. “Oh well. Next time.”

On paper, an urban planner might write this entire scene off as a traffic jam, plan a wider road.

Yet a wider road would delete every moment of connection that we just experienced — the bustle of conversation, the playing kids, the shops that rely on word of mouth, and the ability for an old woman to safely walk from her home to the store with a walker.

As I place a bag of Ehime tangerines in my bicycle basket, I can still make out the old woman in the walker, now headed down an alley, probably to her home. I nod and thank her silently for the insider information. In doing so, I think of my own grandmother, who spent her last years in the suburban setting of San Jose — the right side of the map drawing that introduced this series.

She lived across the street from a shopping center, but the road was too dangerous to cross with her walker. She passed away last month, still not being able to visit that shopping center — in a world where people like her are cut off from their own cities. I once brought that fact up to the city’s director of transportation during an interview. He laughed, agreeing that the road was dangerous, but that in a world of speed and efficiency, there was little to be done about it.

As the sun sets here on the shotengai, a brilliant slice of orange light spills out from a side alley. For a moment, I picture my grandmother walking into that light, with those tangerines in her walker — one last walk, on a street made for her.

Speed and efficiency aren’t everything. They often end up pushing us further away from the world most of us want to inhabit.

For my grandmother, and many Americans of her generation, the Japanese shotengai might actually seem strangely familiar. It should. The shotengai ironically shares a lot of what made the Main Street America of old so special:

• the smell of food drifting onto the streets

• small, owner-run shops

• easy public transit access

• a feeling of safety and community for all ages

• festivals, events, and neighbors meeting and talking

While amplifying these Main Street ideas, most shotengai also remove the things that Main Street harder to love. Namely car traffic, exhaust fumes, and parking headaches.

It’s hard to overstate just how well this all works. If we speak of quality of life, a shotengai is truly an almost perfect urban planning outcome.

Both shotengai and their surrounding neighborhoods are interconnected places that purposefully slow us down. They draw us into the richness within that tiny corner of the world where we live, and then propel us gently us into moments of interaction, of smell, taste, and sights that most cities deny.

They enrich our daily life, health, and strengthen culture and connections between us, helping us to see, greet, and interact with our neighborhood during the course of our daily routines — even if that routine is just walking to the train station on our way to work.

While doing this, shotengai also prove that ordinary people, simply by tending to their own streets and shops, can hold true power and autonomy in their work, for their local economies, with their local communities.

Convenience, without sacrificing social fabric.
Money, without domination by it.
Movement, without being in a hurry.

In all of this, the shotengai is also a form of resistance, against forces — regulatory, capitalist, speculative, or otherwise — that strip health, community, autonomy, and beauty from our lives while simultaneously convincing us that streets do not belong to people.

But they do.

You and I paid for those streets.

Perhaps now is the time to take them back — the streets, and those old main street ideas — to reimagine them as tools of connection and prosperity in our own neighborhoods.

Perhaps the humble shotengai can help show us the way.

The illustrations above feature multiple locations in Osaka, Japan, near my old neighborhood, some of them fused together into single drawings. The locations include: Kohama Shotengai, Kagaya Shotengai, and Kitakagaya 2-Chome.

—

Questions: You have a chance to redesign your neighborhood streets, what are the top ‘intentions’ behind that redesign?

Next Week: I’ve been under the weather for a few weeks now. Thinking to do some more simple vignettes for a while as I try to recover my energy.

Another Story: What does density really mean in urban planning? The difference between that term in Japan and elsewhere is pretty unbelievable…

—

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—

This tree does not exist.

The city behind it does not exist, though the buildings likely do, in a place we visited, or one we did not visit but imagined we might.

I have been here, in my dreams. My mind tells me that there is a tree in this place, and that I stood under it. Or else, that I stood under a tree like this one, in a forest that might have been a city. Or in a city that might have been a forest. Or in a world where a city is always part forest, part green tea bar, part office with a view. Part playground, part microbrewery, part dance club.

Whatever it is, wherever it was, it was here, for a moment, even if only on a page. One with very detailed instructions, on how to get from here, to there. And if it did exist on that page, if someone wrote it down, then it must still be here, and there, for once an idea is paired with an action, it becomes a reality.

The reality of this tree then waits for us, like the wind waits to blow through your hair as you turn the corner of a tall building. It hides from us, like the worst hide-and-seek player, laughing from behind a tree. It plays with us like a kitten, eyes wide, curious without judgement, at the flickering shadows of leaves and branches on the ground.

You see, it is not so difficult to find the things that do not exist.

The hard part, is remembering what to do once you do find them. To stop and feel the wind. To wink at the laughter behind the tree. To accept that the being who does not yet know how to judge might be a good teacher.

This tree does not exist. Though it could. And it will. And it does.

Next Week: I’ve been working on a map-related story about a special place in Japan. It is taking time to be beautiful enough to share. Perhaps next week.

Another Story: This week’s story might have been a little bit dreamy and fantastical. If you liked that, you’ll probably enjoy this story from four years ago.

—

Thanks everyone, for letting me into your world. I think a lot of us have really been enjoying the comment section lately. I know I have. If you have never commented before, feel free to chime in below, or to introduce yourself. Also, you can help this project grow by thinking of someone else who might like this work, and clicking the magic button below.

Not yet signed up yet to get these stories to your inbox? No problem, you can do that below. You can also join our supremely awesome club of paid subscribers who get a handmade artwork sent to them from my studio here in Korea. Exciting!

We rush across the intersection and the sun beats on us twice — once from above, and once from below, as stored heat radiates up from the asphalt and concrete.

After crossing, a rush of cars whirs along that asphalt vein between the city and its river, and then finally, we arrive. Squeezed in between the street and the river, is a narrow strip of land, planted thickly with bamboo.

At the entrance to the bamboo forest, we notice, not only does the heat of the sun lessen, but the ground itself radiates cool, too.

Sitting on a bench, we take off our shoes because, that is what you do here.

On baking hot asphalt, you wear shoes.
In this forest, nearly everyone walks barefoot.

In most parts of a city, you move from A to B as quickly as possible.
Here, the barefoot people move slowly.

Except me.

I walk at my normal city pace. It takes several minutes of this, until a different inertia nudges me. Several minutes until I finally slow to the pace of the others around me. In doing so, some strange kind of lightness occurs.

What strange kind of lightness?

You could say there is a subtle-yet-tight grip that holds us, in the normal days of working and stressing. We rarely feel it directly, this stress. The tightening of a particular kind of grasp is usually too gradual to notice, until its too late.

But here, feet connected to the clay soil, light and wind flicking through the bamboo, we notice it, by its absence, by the loosening of this grip.

We notice it also by the sheer quickness with which these giant hands — usually busy wringing our bodies of energy like water from wet laundry — suddenly let go.

We notice it, a loosening of muscles, and lightening of the mind.

There is a different sensation of being here that occurs, throughout your whole body.

This is the lightness.

After this experience, which lasts perhaps forty-five minutes, I wash my feet at a conveniently located set of water faucets built expressly for this purpose. This also, feels good.

—

In this world, there are many acts of slowing down.

Here however, the slowing does not feel like an act.

It is not a trying, to purposefully move slowly.

It is more like a different pulse, something that one feels, and then gradually, slips into, without effort.

It is something that happens in a small urban forest, walking barefoot, joined by fellow humans and other living beings, who are also a part of this pulse.

Together, we slow into a kind of lightness where, even the city herself seems to breathe more deeply.

Question: When and where was the last time you walked barefoot in a city, and how did it make you feel?

Another Story: Years ago in one of the world’s most dense cities, I walked to work, for an hour, through a forest. This photo essay from three years ago takes us on this unlikely commute route in Seoul, Korea.

—

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—

Sitting under a tree in Kyoto, I watch two kids play in a stream. They walk with surprising care, as the younger one hangs onto the sleeve of the older one. Both are wide-eyed however, observing signs of life in the tiny flow of water. Every now and then, they laugh or scream in amazement.

This kind of thing makes a person feel a little bit better about the world. A little more connected to it when, right there in front of us, two humans are deeply into the world in a way we adults rarely are.

Through the wonderment of those kids, I can remember what a miracle it is.

This little bit of water, moving by gravity from one place to the next, supporting all kinds of life in the process, including ours.

This little bit of water, inherently connected to those kids, to me, and to everyone and everything else.

And yet I wonder, besides myself, where all the adults are in this scene.

Of course, the people living here are mostly at work.

And the tourists — who double the population of this city on days like today — are more attracted to the shops and buildings, escaping the humid heat.

Understandable. It is 40 (104 F) degrees outside.

The hottest day in Kyoto’s recorded history.

Sitting here in the shade though, it seems a city with more trees might be a better long term climate plan than a city with more air conditioners.

—

Kyoto does have the bicycle thing going for them though.

My friend lent me her bicycle today. On the rear fender is a sticker that is over 30 years old — it identifies this as the bicycle of a high school girl. Though I am slightly embarrassed by the sticker, the bicycle works fine, and even on this hot day, I join a fairly large number of other bicycling people on their way from one place to the next.

After ten minutes of gliding on this trusty machine through peaceful side streets, eventually, another river.

The big one. Kamo-gawa.

I find them here. The other adults.

Also, a group of girls with the same sticker as me on their bikes. They giggle.

On the river are people of all ages. They sit and chat. They dance. They run. They rest on the grass. They jump gaily across stepping stones in the water.

That’s more like it.

Dancing and jumping across a river can probably fix more things than we know.

—

Speaking of dancing, later that night in Osaka, a few thousand people come by train and bicycle to a city park. They dance and sing and shout, clink cans of beer and highballs. Though I am different, and though I do not know any of them, I also do not feel like a stranger. We dance together.

Leading us is a minstrel on a stage with a gigantic fabric flower sewn to the middle of her dress. She sings and dances like a beautiful idiot. She and the band spread some kind of contagious energy to everyone.

Meanwhile, the moon looks on and two crows glide across a deep blue evening sky. They land on a tree with a good view of the scene. They must take some kind of joy from this group of wild humans, because they stay for a while.

Taking part in this scene, listening, dancing, smiling, singing, I suddenly feel tears well up — soon they roll down my cheeks, and I laugh.

In this park in the middle of this busy city, there are differences, between people, physical objects, living beings.

There are differences, but there is no real division.

Maybe there is no real division anywhere.

Maybe it just takes the right music, or the right art, or the right social conditions, for us to realize this.

To take action accordingly.

—

After the concert, I walk though the park to catch the Keihan Line train. On the way I pass sweaty joggers, old people with walkers, cyclists, and wildly dressed girls enjoying the night together. The trees sway with a breeze that tumbles gently along the moat, and through them Osaka Castle is lit up like a birthday cake.

There is some proverb somewhere, about how, sometimes the people who seem like idiots, are actually the most wise. Maybe at our best, we are all beautiful idiots, dancing through this life?

Another Story: During another kind of gathering among the trees, we learn another lesson about acceptance — growing food in ways that accept the inherent value in everything.

—

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Below, I share three new illustrations from this morning routine, along with some notes and thoughts — on how what we value shapes our cities.

—

Some things are untouchable. In Japan, the local coffee shop seems to be one of those things.

You open a coffee shop in 1957. On opening day, working people from the neighborhood come by bicycle or on foot. In the hours before they open their own shops, they enjoy a cup of coffee and toast. They read the morning edition of the daily newspaper — on actual paper.

Now it is 2025. Yet from what I can see, the scene unfolds as it did nearly six decades ago. Same location, most of the same people, the smell of dark coffee, buttered toast, and newspapers still on newsprint. A few newcomers. Rent is still cheap enough to sell a morning set — coffee, toast, egg, salad — for 350 yen, and still get by.

This kind of old shop is still common in Japan. In some ways it is made possible through a rent control law that requires a clear reason and consent of the tenant before any rent increase can happen. Also, Japan’s zoning laws help a bit, too.

While a law exists to enforce this, such issues are mostly mediated outside of it, directly by the people who live in a place, who work in a place, who own the buildings in a place — by the people who share a responsibility for each other’s well being, and who are encouraged to put that well being on a higher pedestal than money or power.

There are multiple kinds of social hierarchy in Japan. Perhaps the most important one is the one where a supportive community is the highest form of wealth possible.

When this holds true, rents become more stable as owners, renters, and workers realize they are playing for the same team. Then, it becomes common sense that locally owned and run shops are critical parts of a neighborhood — they enrich the community, just by being there.

Questions: Is there a beloved local shop that you frequent? What is it about this place that brings you back, and how might you explain that value to someone who has never been there?

Next Week: There are more illustrations from this most recent trip to Japan. I will work to share them nicely with you.

Another Story: What is up with Patrick and ‘kissaten’? This illustrated essay from 2022 explores some of the other benefits of the old neighiborhood coffee shop.

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After class I usually stay to read, write, or draw in the library. Last week however, even though it was hot and humid in the streets below, something nudged me outside for a walk.

A few hours in the hot afternoon sun made me realize that there are only two main ways to escape summer heat in this city.

There are many ‘other ways’ to cool off here than relaxing in a forested park, but I’ll save those for another time.

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Questions: What are the ‘other ways’ of staying cool where you are?

Next Week: We have been working hard on the house here, and I might try to find a good way to share what we are doing, and how it might apply to other places. Or more illustrations of ‘cooling down’…

Another Story: A crew lops off the tops of urban street trees and an old woman dies, creating a moment for a city to re-invent itself in the name of shade.

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5:00PM — A single heron stalks the currents. Nearby, two otters move like shadows through the reeds. Their heads pop up, eyes shift to the shore as three humans cast their lines into the deep part of the river.

Meanwhile, our recurring heroine — the woman from previous entries in this series — sits there taking it all in with a glass of rice wine (makgeolli).

Some places on this river are special because of a dramatic landform — a cliff, a waterfall, an orchard. This particular place is not special in those ways, but in a way that is harder to name. Whatever it is, this must be what attracts the fishers — human, otter, and heron alike.

This summer afternoon scene is technically illegal.

Few seem to mind the illegality, but it does bring up a question:

Do we still deserve the right to fish and barbecue on the river?

In one sense, this is a city.

The riparian zone that ecologically belongs to the river has dwindled. The space required for a healthy river has been rarefied — taken hostage under layers of cement and asphalt. Today, the life-giving flow of water is an endangered resource. Our urban lifestyle habits created this situation, and so in that sense, perhaps we do not deserve the right to fish on the river.

In another sense however, humans have probably done the riverside barbecue in one form or another since we knew how to start a fire. This is a part of who we are — and it has been wrestled from our grip, rapidly, over the past century, usually in the name of progress.

A River of Contradictions

On this particular river, there is a broad rule that says you can’t fish and you can’t light any kind of fire. But there is also an old rusty sign posted here, that says residents are allowed one fish per day.

We call the city to check on this seeming conflict.

Indeed, they admit to us, somewhat cryptically, the following:

Yes, fishing is illegal.
But also, it’s not.
One fish per day. No synthetic bait.

It is unclear how this works. Maybe autonomy — a local ordinance taking precedence over a higher authority.

Walking or riding a bicycle the length of Daejeon Stream reveals a long list of such contradictions. Some parts of the river are restored with ecological sensitivity. Wildlife and plants are allowed to grow as they will in various spots. Intentional plantings are sometimes done to help this along. Water is also strategically released from a mountain reservoir during the dry season to maintain a year-long wetland.

These human acts of engineering — though sometimes imperfect — are also acts of love. They are the reason why heron, ducks, and otters make a year-round home here, and why so many pedestrians, cyclists, yogis, mugwort pickers, and fishers spend time along the river to enjoy the bounty of it all.

Meanwhile, there is still a highway along parts of the river bed, and whenever roads are congested above, cars are routed down, onto the riverside walking path and pedestrians are banished. Allowing cars here feels convenient. It is also technically illegal, in the same way that fishing is. Meanwhile, heron sail over the places with cars, and otters don’t hang around when they can help it.

Nature does reclaim the road at times, but only on the rare occasion that a flood happens, they say every ten or fifty years.

A rare flood is happening as I write this.

Last year, a rare flood happened four times. In two months.

There is a balancing act going on along this river, and every river in the world — and humans are often found pressing very hard on one side of the scale. You can see it clearly.

When we are compelled,
to move too fast,
to seek too much benefit,
to compete too fiercely —
our rivers turn into highways,
concrete canals,
parking lots.

Yet there are other times,
other places.

When we lend our eyes, ears,
and hearts to the water,
and this water then helps us slow
to the speed of the land —
highways become wetlands,
canals meander again,
parking lots bloom into wildflowers.

The river flows wider, slower.

Nature’s purpose is revealed.

In these times of slow listening to the world around us, benefit also flows, and it flows far beyond the self — blooms like that bed of wildflowers along the river, telling us that yes, there is yet hope in this place.

Hope looks like a city that is in love with its waterways.

From that love blooms a long-term relationship — one that benefits everyone.

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The illustrations in this series were originally commissioned by the Daejeon Sejong Research Institute.

Questions: If you could re-imagine a local waterway as a place for both people and nature to flourish, what elements would you include? What would you do away with?

Next Week: Something different is coming this way.

Another Story: We used to have our studio along Daejeon Stream. I bicycled to work every day, and it was one of the first times I noticed this phenomenon…

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If not, it is at least one of the more interesting ones.

According to the eldest woman in the village, the highway has been here since anyone can remember.

In fact, it is among the first things mentioned in human historical records, and those go back a few thousand years in these parts.

Like any highway, there is traffic here day and night, but ‘rush hour’ comes as the sun rises, and then again, as the sun sets. According to the people who live here, this rush hour is the most beautiful time.

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How can a highway can last for a few thousand years?

And how can a rush hour be beautiful?

In this highway, there is no concrete. No steel. No asphalt.

It is composed instead of three inter-related happenings:

1. The landform — A narrow pass along a small mountain ridge, between the ocean and a small inner valley.

2. The wind — Riding that landform, it flows from sea to valley during the day, and back again from valley to sea in the evening.

3. The birds — Mainly seagulls, heron, and crows, but also sparrows, warblers, magpies, redstarts, bulbuls, cuckoos and dozens of others. It is the commuting birds who make this ancient air-highway visible.

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This is not a unique phenomenon. There are many natural highways in the world, for various other living beings.

Most humans used to have them, too — ways to walk safely and peacefully from place to place. To move in step with this Earth. Closely. One foot, then the next.

One step.

One chance to notice — who we are, where we are going.

Where, are we going?

Questions: What kinds of non-human highways exist in your part of the world? Are there still natural ‘walking’ highways for humans where you live? If not, where would you want to make one? Take that idea to your city council.

Next Week: We get back to the Urban River series one last time, for some fishing.

Another Story: Can a park be a commuting route? Yes it can. On a walk in San Jose, California, I explore the meaning of a ‘parkway’ with Juanjuan, and his magical ideas from Barcelona.

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Thanks everyone, for letting me into your world. If you have never commented before, feel free to chime in below, or to introduce yourself. You can help this project grow by thinking of someone else who might like this work, and clicking the magic button below.

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