Fasten your snake ears to both sides of your head.
Your ears measure heat, detect movement. You may hear
a secret in your ear. Warm sounds may enter your ear
and melt the snow; may you drink its waters.
You cannot know the value of this until you thirst.

Put your shapeliest cheeks on your face.
You can’t think without cheeks.
Your face needs a place
for your hands to rest upon, if you are to daydream. You’re to reflect
upon all that you see as long and as deep as it commands.
You cannot do this without cheeks.

Place your stomach in the center of your body.
Your stomach is the strongest part of you. So primitive and beautiful it is
because it has reached you unaltered from your ancestors.
Your stomach is deep and powerful as the skies that rain upon us.
It is your beastliest, most human part. It prevents you from being
more human than necessary.

Take your youngest feet.
You need feet that pay no attention to themselves.
Your feet mustn’t think about themselves at all, but be flexible and strong.
Your toes reveal the beauty of movement.
They mustn’t look at the roads they’ve trodden and show off, but always
mourn
those they don’t reach. Your feet should be young
but wise. Still, your toes must remain unaware of these states—
mustn’t form sentences.

Take your weariest, your noblest mouth.
Your lips must move only what utterly needs to be said. This
mouth of yours shouldn’t slaver after the slightest extra sound.
Choose the loneliest, hoarsest sounds and put them in your mouth.
You are not to attract anyone’s attention. You may only
take your mouth that cannot boast.
Know your place vis-à-vis the path and the truth.
You are not among the talkative.

If you’ve finished packing, it’s time to go now.

Go on! Now, take your first step towards yourself.

II. MEADOW

The Explorer Encounters the Virtues in the Shapes of Animals

Butterfly

I saw something upon my first step.
He moved.
A purple insect. In a great hurry. He scurried
obsessively to his target, didn’t dawdle with the grass or earth.
Judging from his gait, he was an important personality in the insect
kingdom.

One must take all the signs seriously.
A person on a journey which seeks its own path
must know the value of everything they see.
And for the map-less, ill-timed explorer,
what could be truer than to follow
an insect with purple armor?

He was certainly an important man of the underground.
Judging from his sparkling purple armor, all the bugs
bowed down to him in greeting, inside the earth’s
dark corridors. He surely knew the odor of crowded ant colonies
rerouting merely to receive his salutation—
when one observes the revolted trembling of his leg hairs
at the slightest contact.

His gigantic purple armor was suspiciously spotless.
So, he must have left several carcasses behind.