The plum rain, heavy throughout the morning, now lingered, tapping an idle rhythm on the rusted metal awnings that hang like so much tetanus over Taipei’s sidewalks. I walked, umbrella in hand, toward the park and a reprieve from the claustrophobia of the neighborhood. You forget how clean air can be until you’re walking among trees in the rain.

I take the well-manicured path that winds through the banyan and mulberry trees, and as the path ends and another begins, I see a tiny old woman in red, wearing calf-high galoshes, kicking at the water as she walks through a puddle. I can’t help but smile, and she turns to see me and smiles as well.

This year I’ve found the park, accompanied by a leisurely pace, to be an ideal place to read. I can walk a good 15 kilometers with the right book. Most recently, that book has been Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, a book that goes both nowhere and everywhere, and is as much the hagiography of a naturalist as it is poetry.

“I wonder how long I will be permitted the luxury of this relative solitude. Out here on the rocks the people don’t mean to grapple, to crush and starve and betray, but with all the goodwill of the world, we do—there’s no other way. We want it; we take it out of each other’s hides; we chew the bitter skin the rest of our lives.”

It’s hard to describe this book. Put together, it’s an old lady kicking puddles in the rain, a child turning over stones in search of wriggling treasures, and a monk wandering the wilderness in search of God.

Unlike most books of this sort, which are written by those later in life, Dillard was in her 20s when it was published. This gives it a feeling all its own—a feeling of someone who still feels hope and wonder in the manner of youth. Yet, she also has an eye for things that rarely comes without a lifetime of experience and self-reflection.

“…he says that if you really want to find arrowheads, you must walk with a child—a child will pick up everything. All my adult life I wished to see the cemented case of a caddisfly larva. It took Sally Moore, the young daughter of friends, to find one on the pebbled bottom of a shallow stream on whose bank we sat side by side. ‘What’s this?’ she asked. That, I wanted to say as I recognized the prize she held, is a memento mori for people who read too much.”

While there is no real story here, it’s not needed. It’s not a book one reads with urgency. Instead, you might put it down and take a moment to let it sink in. In that way, it’s very much like poetry—in the way it challenges you to reflect.

At the same time, much of it is light and playful, and makes you feel as if you’re down in the dirt observing grasshoppers or half-napping in a grove of aspens, watching the fall leaves rattle off their mottled brown and amber melody above you.

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?”

In some ways, it reminded me of A Barn at the End of the World, by Mary Rose O’Reilly, yet it’s less linear in its approach. Both of these books are beautifully written, and both seem embody stories of women woman coming to terms with the world. Yet, Dillard’s work differs in that it made me feel more than think, and humbled me more than it did inspire. It took the smallest of things and made connections to, well, everything.