Finally it is becoming Autumn in Japan. Last year a Japanese friend wrote to me in piecemeal English around this time: "Now is beautiful. Leaves turn red. I will take you to anywhere." But I haven't been able to notice anything beautiful, or to reflect on anything beautiful since I have been taken here by someone else's hands to Wakayama Shity. Everytime I am amazed at being anywhere, this wonder turns on me in a breath and I am left unearthed and wilting. The other Friday I went to school hungover and sat at my desk doing nothing the whole morning but feeling the wind on my face through the window and thinking about a girl. Some people would say I was doing nothing. Or better yet, nothing was getting done. What a paradox anyways, but in the end or at the beginning too we find ourselves always not doing something. Well, the kaede (Japanese maple) in the school garden is still green and I have been going nowhere for sometime now--not spatially but in small ring of images that I have held to too fervently to notice much of what is going on in my life. Time to close this with nothing clear or final to say. That I am thinking of this friend of mine, and all friends like her whose presences fade slowly away like the sound of a train passing by a window. Tomorrow is another day to figure something out, or the attempt, in the enduring willingness to listen.