I am, in stillness, walking in the quiet of early morning.
So it is that I am necessarily startled by the hacking of overhead blades,
ferrying people across the miles that I find myself,
one step at a time,
exploring.
The din and chop slice through silence,
no less jarring than a knife disrupting flesh.
I have never commandeered one of these contraptions
in order to sweep over this beloved land.
I have never thought the money required was worth the gamble.
The noise, for one thing.
And God forbid somebody should try to narrate a place to me
that I myself have scoured, one foot placed in front of the other, over twenty years.
I will make my own observations, my own deductions,
my own conclusions, if any might be made.
I can’t insist you do the same.
I would only ask: how does one come to know the land in this way?
Or maybe this is not the goal
in a society trained on rapid consumption on all fronts.
To imagine we can comprehend a place from the sky
as we might with feet on the ground
dismisses the slow perusal of the walker.
I would always feel as though
my observations were coming up short.