Rainy days remind me of the sound and lakes around the city called by the name of Seattle, the sloping roads draining a simple, measurable flow of the sky into the sea.

These days remind me of Tokyo, and I hope they could possibly drag on, and on, seemingly endless days of bored focus, charging into the sudden moment wherein a necessary errand can no longer be delayed - the dash to a normally immemorable shop requiring a full dress of slicked armor, umbrellas held high and shaken before binned at the door.

The mood on these days helps me feel human, more real than the clinical square boxes of our era. As my fingers pad around sqares inside a metal square beneath a shining square, on a squared-off desk on four square legs, and each sharp edge of our language reinforcing this as righteous, that 90 is the only permissible degree wherein sanity can be found.

Odd, no?

The 90, this four-square slice of 360, is an homage to the philosophers of greece from aeons long dust, philosophers who cared deeply for ideas and communication, and care nothing for the home you designed as a perpetually diminishing blend of a parthenon or athena's temple.

In Tokyo, a holiday means seeing a shrine, serious labor of legs and laces for such a young age. Those shrines held their place for hundreds of years, through the bouncing pressure of many millions of pilgrims plodding through. Many thousands of rainy days, when the typhoons pounded for a month as reliably and unbreakingly as the sea onshore.

I can embrace my memories, on rainy days, the moments of reckless negligence on a ship I scarcely could handle, moments after escaping harbor in the Chesapeake, no plan or reading of the weather to prepare me for the sudden onrush, of sky into sea, and there being me in the middle, hugging the sail that asked to rip through me, that spent the dark hours curled beside me in bed, both of us dripping the fresh drops of dense cloud.

Commotion is in my core, is the lesson I embodied more than any. Expedition is the calling I ache to respond to, if our chosen social leaders could call us any place aside from the office desk or into the path of munitions.

A desk causes me anger, causes me pain and the aches of age. Send me to a dojo to shake free of those holds. Send me on a long road to find connections to a place, to a people, to a land.

How do you suppose we should manage our current crises? The burning Boreal ash in the air, some including some small pieces now drying in my hair, is supposed to be remedied from your desk? The complex boundary zones of shoreline and basin and levee, or the insensible flush of landslide, are supposed to be mapped in real time, and barely addressed in real space?

I took a class for dance yesterday, because the burden of days at desk had me sinking. I long again, now, for motion - for a chance to honor the body I occupy, after 34 years of memory gradually has persuaded me that my body is most excellent in the frigid cold early-morning damp, or the rush of a close-held grip on a cliffside, as I ease through a hazardous path for a purposeful aim.

Architecture has been held up as an honorable hobby, or career. The honor has all fallen on the arches; the tectonics simply a challenge of quarrying, a plunge of hand, or spade, or blade, or drill into soil. A pull and push of perilous loads, craning higher as all of us chase closer to the sky.

As some go up, many sink. Those radios that keep us on air require minerals to read the frequencies we seek; the lines of communication demanding a fractured labyrinth, chiseled by bloody hands, unmapped to the the public eye, whose air is recycled again, and again by the mouths and lungs of those who go their to take up their place, their spades and drills, the managed combustions and explosions an unpurgeable echo in their memories, though unheard and no alarm to those whose pay calls them forth.