A daily walk on the creek

When I moved to San Antonio, I wanted to learn about the place.

There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand — so many mysteries I couldn’t explain.

“Mystery” is not a fact of life. It’s a prevailing condition. I take William Harvey’s famous saying “All we know is still infinitely less than what remains unknown” as the first law of the cosmos.

We just don’t understand most of what goes on around us. Somehow responding to those mysteries — the vast number of things we don’t know about and don’t understand — is what makes us.

Instead of learning about the entire cosmos, I set myself to learn about a piece of pubic land on the West Side. It was a place to start.

I didn’t have any better plan than to walk along Zarzamora Creek every day and try to pay attention.

Earlier in life, I began to keep a journal. It was based on the notion — a whim — that if I paid attention, the cosmos would give me (or share with me) a little gift. Note the big if. If I paid attention, if I noticed, I would see that something remarkable, perhaps something wonderful, had indeed crossed my path that day. So, like William Carlos Williams, I had a standing heading in my notebook: “Things I noticed today that I had not previously noticed.” I was about paying attention.

And so I go on a daily walk, trying to pay attention to what crosses my path.