Three Days in Kyoto's Temple Gardens

Kyoto has more than a thousand temples and most visitors see the same five. Go early, go to the smaller ones, and go for the gardens rather than the buildings, and the city opens up into something quieter. The gardens are composed the way a piece of music is: a rock here, moss there, a single maple placed for October. Nothing is accidental and nothing is loud. You are meant to sit, and there is usually a veranda for exactly that, worn smooth by centuries of people doing so. Three days is enough to stop photographing and start looking. By the last morning, at a moss garden with a dozen stone figures and no other visitors, the point of the trip had arrived without announcing itself.