“I hope to spend three days in Washington,” the tourist said of her itinerary to the United States with a heavy Australian drawl. “I want to see the Forest Gump bench and the Legally Blonde Lincoln Statue.”

We could hear him at night snoring through the thick cement walls. It was almost comforting, the soft rhythmic vibrations, but peculiar to fall asleep to the breathing of a neighbor you have only said hello to in the entryway but who lives and sleeps just a few feet away.
He would come home from an afternoon at the bar and play Pink Floyd on the stereo and sing along to it in a different key.
His apartment has been silent for a week. No snoring, no music.
The police arrived on Wednesday and found him dead on the other side of the wall separating his apartment from ours.
His black cat, who we nicknamed Bianca, continues to meow outside in front of his closed front door.

Hiking, Giacamo thought as he stepped up the granite stairs of the mountain, is a metaphor for life. Cooking, for him is metaphor for sex. He has many theories, but this philosophy of his on hiking is firm.
The mountain climb is a long one. His destination is a bivouac at 2100 meters, a crude shelter of three wooden walls and a corrugated steel roof where he will cook his dinner and soon after sleep.
The pace he has set for himself is his own slow rhythm. His feet move at a tempo set by the thudding heartbeat in his chest, like the large gear of a clock.
A man passes quickly on his right, in a slight jog, with white earmuffs blazing a rapid-beat music one hears in an aerobics class.
Hiking, Giacamo reassures himself, is a metaphor for life.

The sun drifts down into the trees of the horizon like a glowing hot air balloon missing its landing space in the green field of ryegrass.
A roaring echo of thunder rolls across the sky for too long. It is not thunder but a jet moving east, a non-stop to Istanbul, or a red-eye to Beijing. The inside of that plane must be lit up with a mix of the setting sun’s red and the overhead reading light’s bright amber.
Cool air blows down from the Alps and blends with warm from the south. Rain clouds form and the sky falls in sheets, buckets, cats and dogs.
The farmers welcome the rain, but not too much, just enough to prevent the setting up of irrigation systems for their hectares of corn and soybean. Those in town welcome the rain for its initial novelty, and this quickly fades into visions of puddles to be avoided and the windshield wipers blurring the morning commute.

“Whatever our gains in terms of scientific advantages or in our industrial economy, neither of these is very helpful in establishing an integral presence to the more profound depths of our own being or into the more powerful forces shaping both the universe and the planet on which we live.” – Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth