Morning Walk

My wife and I are about to make a big career decision soon. Naturally, my sleep pattern is kind of out of sync. The other morning I woke up unusually early and went for a walk around the neighbourhood to clear my head a bit. As I mentioned in a previous post, this area is zoned for mixed-use. There’s a recycling facility right next to old playgrounds next to some very nice houses next to rice fields. So I really wasn’t all that surprised when I discovered some other fun things in the neighbourhood.

The coolest thing I found were mini-bamboo forests, a good 5-minute walk from my building. Very Japanese. I continued to get lost and explore paths I’d never taken and found an isolated temple nestled inside a quiet wooded area. For a while it definitely did not feel like I was in Kurume. I followed my human GPS instincts towards another narrow path away from the temple, and lo and behold, I re-appeared behind my apartment!

This is one of the things I love the most about this kind of photography: just walking around with a camera with no aim. If you pay enough attention, you can find little surprising things in the everyday. It’s very zen-like to be walking around at the break of dawn with no purpose but to explore places you’ve never been to and document them. After passing by the bamboo forests I heard a temple bell ring, calling monks to morning meditation. This was my morning meditation, and it made this decision a little bit easier to think about.

Tools of the day: Fuji x100s + 19mm wide angle converter.