Plai

Wake-up feel: 7.

Still dark. Light through the window — the moon over the ridge. Then gone.

The pillow was comfort. Awake again, still dark. Exercises. Coffee, the screen.

Then the dawn. Cloud, low and grey. The path up the mountain waiting.

The land and the beings on it seem balanced. No chaos. The sound of the stream.

Plai, the path is called here. I ask myself whether plai is more than a path — whether it is a pathway. Whether there is a difference. Still to be defined.

The track climbs the meadow, green and wide. Down its middle runs a narrower line, worn to the bare earth. Feet, over years.

On the one side the ground falls steeply to the stream. On the other it climbs — trees standing tall and steadfast, the spruce dark, the leaf trees beginning to yellow. The ridge above, waiting.

At the edge of the track a knapweed still open. Purple. Something small still at work in it.

The land living. Balanced. I among the living and the unseen — balanced too, it seems. One question keeps coming back, more often than usual. Being. Being present.

At one point I stop at the house. Logs gone grey, the roof fallen in, a window frame still standing in the wall. Elder grown over it, heavy with black berries. Decaying, left alone. The past — the present. Someone built here, lived here, walked this track to the door. And tomorrow — the owners have been coming more often lately, on their walks up here.

I turn around. Back down the path. Or the pathway. The same ground from the other side — below, the valley opening under the cloud.

I must be present. One wrong step — in the mud, or down the steep slope to meet the stream. The stream of life.

Today the root, as those who set seed by the moon kept it — what holds the tall trees to a steep slope.

At home, the rain is back.

Day 95
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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