It’s the Winter Solstice, a big reminder that every day is not like the other.

It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt. Four days a week I commute to the grocery store where I work, one block away from City Hall at the very heart of the city of Philadelphia. There’s a lot going on in these few blocks, a crossroads of a city with lots of spirit and lots of struggle. The neighborhood is ruled over by a giant statue of Philadelphia’s original grid creator and Pennsylvania’s namesake, William Penn that stands atop the gothic behemoth that is City Hall.

(Public statues often have hidden humor, a standing homage couldn’t ever be a simple thing, be it a subversive sculptor or payback from a political foe)

To get there I ride from West Philadelphia, an original suburb of Penn’s grid, shown below in an early imagination/illustration. I always ride except when it’s icy or slippery. Weather and atmosphere change all the time, with bicycle riding in particular it’s important to pay attention to the conditions. Astronomically, it’s dark in the early morning, with variously visible sites of the solar system and the universe. In the quiet of morning you become more sensitive to the different phases of sunrise, from the barest of light to the bursting line of color on the horizon. Astronomical sunrise, nautical sunrise, civic sunrise etc. Venus rises first, and the playful moon is always a surprise. As science and knowledge increase, there seems to have been an overall decrease in the common knowledge of stars, but the feeling of context and being part of something beautiful is there, when city lights don’t overwhelm.

Growing up in the Bay area, we often refer to microclimates, which are so pronounced there. From valley to valley, moment to moment, particularly with the fog cresting into steep and narrow valleys, give climate a tangible, constant and uniquely changing feel. The experience is different here in the East, the land flatter and less dramatic to my bay area eyes, but clearly it’s the same Nature, just more broadly seen and slower changing. Our eyes seem to tune at a certain age, maybe around 8 years old, and that becomes deeply set into a sense of being for most people. This landscape of the mind can be expressed abstractly in music. Ultimately, any terrain is wild, whether you tunnel through it, climb over it or cut it into the squares of a grid.

The route I take is relatively intuitive and natural, roads and borders often grow out of this nature. Rivers are the same, including the confounding zig zag that I’m sure great industrialists found infuriating.

Heading due east, twelve blocks of suburban grid from my home to the beginning of Woodland Walkway at the corner of the Woodlands cemetery, a former estate on a physical promontory over the river, fallen on bad times and long ago ceded to the cemetery (high ground was once a place of the dead, now seems a pretty darn smart place to actually live). It remains a relatively wild place in central Philadelphia.

Heading northeast, the Woodland Walkway is a mile-long, car-less diagonal, through two university campuses ending at the iconic 30th St. Station. Though once a piece of King’s Highway, the one road going up and down the East coast, a major artery of power, it is now a walkway and bicycling route, only intermittently interrupted by the laws and boundaries of power and modernity. Overlays of bureaucratic and capitalistic control can always be something to navigate, as with life. Superficially, it is mostly manicured and lit to brochure-perfection by the schools it runs through.

It’s a logical, natural, and even gravitational route that follows the landscape, the terrain from West Philadelphia to Center City Philadelphia. Joel Fry, late historian at Bartram’s Garden (another time-capsule natural oasis just South of the Woodlands) described this section as a busy artery of movement for native people in and around the Philadelphia area, the Lenape and others who lived here for thousands of years until the first Dutch, Swedes and English trickled in in the 1600s. To the south lay meadowlands (now SW Philadelphia on down flanking the Delaware River), fertile for cultivation and agriculture, to the West, forests. Artifacts of multiple tribes have been found along this path, indicating thousands of years as a steady settlement and hinting at the advanced cultural exchange that occurred among indigenous people of pre-European America. The pathway was ultimately incorporated into the King’s Highway, the main route connecting colonies along the Eastern seaboard. All this history, and it probably started with a deer path along a forests edge.

A trolley ran and rang its bell along this section of Woodland Avenue for 65 years before going underground and becoming a walkway again, post-WW2 urban renewal projects combined with destructive zoning laws and the ever-expanding Penn and Drexel University campuses.

Some mornings I imagine the history lingering in the air, or in the invisible lines that shadow my own. At the early morning hour I ride, it’s simply a quiet and safe line to town. Until the trolley went underground, the ringing bell of the trolley was a fixture of life on campus. Ringing the bell in zen says ‘wake up!’, I wonder if this changed things for the students when the trolley disappeared below.

The enormous columns of 30th St. Station are at the end of the walkway, where Market Street crosses the Schulkyll River, decoratively lit with twinkie lights. I squint my eyes often and just pretend I’m crossing the Seine. Everything feels like the world is miniature at that time of morning. The lack of relatively small humans trick the brain, and the effect is more pronounced the larger the buildings get.

Heading east across the river from the station, I enter the grid that is the original Philadelphia. I ride the opposite direction down JFK Blvd. to the store, a straight shot.