4.05 - Munich

It's raining this morning in Munich, and I'm huddled up in my top bunk with a book, under a fluffy comforter, freshly showered and dressed in warm, clean clothes. This is the nicest room I've stayed in so far. The three travelers with whom I shared it last night have all already left. Two cute German girls, consultants from other cities in town for a meeting, appeared younger than I: jobless.

The rain turns to sleet, then snow. The view out my window - a juxtaposition of rooves, of colors and textures - gathers the sky's moisture at angles, holding it in, or letting it run. Red-brick-pink-stucco, I do not know the words for most of what I see. My imageries have been the stuff of imagination.

I'm not sure if it's taking pictures, looking them over, and trying to figure out what works. Maybe it's just traveling, not speaking the language, when the sounds of a conversation seem more noticeable than the meanings of the words. Or maybe it's all the art I've been seeing. Anyway, sensory parts of me seem to be opening up in new ways, or maybe just forgotten ones. Image - colors and shapes: how they express themselves amidst a field of differences, and similarities - its alive, or lively, or changing in me. And I don't yet speak its language.

Eating breakfast this morning at a table by myself, I slowly bit into an apple watching the ways it bore the bite marks, spaced against each other around its core. Within thin skin it grew sweet flesh around its seeds, protecting them, offering them; appealing to the appetites of distance, and difference, for propagation.

Where do we - eating, interacting - stop? When we're no longer hungry? When the fruit tastes bitter? or we reach the seeds?