My dao to eternity

He did not cultivate for the first four days in his new courtyard. He walked it instead.

Morning and evening, he traced the wall's full perimeter, feeling for the way spiritual energy moved through the packed earth beneath his feet — thicker near the well, thinner along the eastern wall where a neighboring courtyard's own modest formation drew a share of the ambient current away before it could reach him. He studied the angle of the afternoon light across the workshop roof, the direction the evening wind came from, the particular quality of silence the high stone walls held against the lane outside. He had learned, across every home he'd ever built for himself, that a place gave up its usefulness slowly, to whoever was patient enough to actually look at it before deciding what to do with it.