Craig Mod - Things Become Other Things

13 Oct, 2025

On Nature

Here, the water forever scintillates in the corner of my eye. It feels good to be near the water and good to see ships heading out, to feel a town work the water and pull life from the water, ready to accept whatever may come.

Silent morning, abundant sunlight, abundant life. Thinking about this care. Water in the fields rippling in the wind.

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On Health

To walk like this is the best way I know to show gratitude for the health and privilege authorizing this primitive dance, permitting this day of walking and all other days, too.

On Hanko

Like a hanko seal shop. There are basically no signatures here, only “seals,” “chops,” “stamps.” A small, unique, thin, cylindrical piece of wood or stone or bone with your name etched into one end. Originally from China (like so much here; writing, art, religion, seals—all Chinese in origin), first created some 3,500 years ago. Brought to Japan around 2,000 years ago. Originally just for the emperor and trusted vassals, but eventually spreading out to the ruling classes, samurai, and toward the end of the nineteenth century, society at large. Kind of amazing: a technology fundamentally unchanged for over three millennia.

This seal is just a tiny thing, weighing 108 grams, one inch by one inch square on the bottom, and not even an inch tall. And yet: This petite package from a.d. 57 bestowed Japan with a formal name. So much power in such a small object.

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On Iron Frogs (which Mod sadly didn't include photos of)

He turns on the lights. Before me: a universe of tiny iron frogs. Each just inches tall. He has welded hundreds, maybe thousands. Frogs playing tennis and frogs climbing the Tower of Babel (so he explains). Frogs meditating and frogs performing judo moves. They’re all so precise. You immediately know what the frogs are intending to do. Yet he walks me through, one by one, all the frogs. A lifetime of frogwork. Like this, he takes an iron rose off the wall and hands it to me. For you, he says. I try to give him money but he laughs, shakes his head, says he’s as rich as he’ll ever need to be.

On Copper

But that old metal, pulled from the ground by these Peninsula hands, it lives on around the world in many things, the walls of many homes.

On Possibilities

At the beginning of a big walk the end seems implausible, a million years away, like imagining the last day of an elementary-school summer. In those first hours of the break—hopping onto the bus, the last bus of the year, sitting side by side—the possibilities felt limitless.

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