Walks around my neighborhood have been extra-good lately. After declaring it art, I decided this Budweiser can needed its own museum label:
The text is from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium:
My method has entailed, more often than not, the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight from human figures, from celestial bodies, from cities. Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language….
When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.
Calvino is talking about writing and reading, but he could also talk about my approach to walking.
If I go for a walk, the day never feels like a waste. Each walk is a little adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. On your walk, you never know what you’ll find or who you’ll bump into. This week I met Cindy Schiffgens, who was on the sidewalk painting one of my favorite houses:
Many are disenchanted with this city we live in. I find that a neighborhood walk is a method of re-enchantment. “Outside lies magic.”
