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2011.10.15

April 18, 2009

These days you are low on self-responsibility. Only last month Asamayama erupted, throwing lava bombs a kilometer from the crater. A four-kilometer exclusion zone has been declared around the volcano, a perimeter that barely excludes the highway and the shrine of Onioshidashi-en to the north. Climbing it now would be, as with so many of your plans, a bad idea. This does not make it seem any less attractive. Whatever holds you back, it is not self-responsibility. 

  

Circle Fall. 

you learn no longer to think of catching yourself, to lose yourself in a dark loop of falling and falling, feeling at every turn a pair of hands to pick you up and put you into the hands of someone else. 

it occurs to you that you like being talked out of these volcano-climbing adventures, a reassurance that someone is looking out for you, has your welfare in mind, if not at heart. 

  

There is also the matter of the snow. Climbing a mountain in the face of sudden fiery death has a certain romantic pathos to it, but slipping on ice and ending up in pieces at the bottom would just be embarrassing.

A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire
  1. March 13, 2009
  2. March 15, 2009
  3. March 16, 2009
  4. March 17, 2009
  5. March 21, 2009
  6. March 26, 2009
  7. March 28, 2009
  8. March 29, 2009
  9. March 30, 2009
  10. April 1, 2009
  11. April 8, 2009
  12. April 9, 2009
  13. April 16, 2009
  14. April 18, 2009
  15. April 20, 2009
  16. April 21, 2009
  17. April 22, 2009
  18. April 23, 2009
  19. April 24, 2009
  20. April 26, 2009