Stressed about work? Go for a walk. Miss someone far away? Go for a walk. Think about your father too much? Go for a walk. With each step, feel the stone that sits on your heartspoon lift. Consider this fragment: "I remember too / the poet said, it is more important / to walk across a field now / than to revisit the sorrows." (David Rigsbee, from “January”)

Sometimes you encounter what you begin to think of as koans. An old man pauses to chat, watched by his patient dog; he grins and says he has lost two front teeth. A little girl sings as she runs along a trail leading to Neolithic tombs. A hare leaps across a copper field, away from the road. Maybe these encounters show you how to approach the present. In the ditches, water remembers its way home.

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