To love the world, you have to walk it.

When walking, you see the small things—the things that keep it all standing: plants and flowers, trees and fungi, bees and wasps, beetles, ants, and grasshoppers. You don’t see any of that from a speeding car, let alone from an airplane. Nor do you see it when moving in a herd to the places you simply *must* visit to be cool. To love the world and life, you have to walk through them. And if you can do it in silence, all the better. That is how you come to love and understand the life of even the smallest creature. Walking the world, you discover villages and can smell—though less and less these days—how the scent of bread fills the air from early morning on. You can hear a shop shutter rolling up, a broom sweeping a doorway, two old men talking as they sit on a bench. The world isn't about the spectacular. The spectacular is almost always empty. The world is made of many small things happening at once—things so small we hardly ever look at them. We look upward, toward the big, the loud, the dazzling. We look at the airplane, the skyscraper, the Ferrari. But we almost never look down at ground level. Yet, at ground level, the things that allow everything else to happen are taking place. Without trees, there are no airplanes. Without insects, fungi, roots, bacteria, water, and soil, there are no Ferraris. No cities. No us. We ourselves are an accumulation of tiny things: atoms, cells, bacteria. Small things making something larger possible. Without bees, there are no Ferraris. Without Ferraris, there can still be bees. Perhaps that is what walking is: returning to our own level. Lowering our gaze. Stopping the constant upward stare and looking instead at what is happening right in front of us and beneath our feet. Because that is where we belong. On the earth. We walk *on* it. Not *above* it.