tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18820922600566337062024-02-07T05:09:43.054+01:00exercises in being hereThis is a safe haven for thoughts, ideas, images, try-outs, all the things that don't fit in my other blogs, the ones that are about specific projects.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger254125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-34344471228289627922023-10-09T13:39:00.002+02:002023-10-09T13:39:54.529+02:00Today's thoughts<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">Falling<br /><br />In a month in which nobody familiar died<br />Not much happened, which was a big deal<br />The rain didn’t fall but the leaves did<br />And when I tripped in the street one beautiful morning <br />Landing face flat on the pavement<br />I felt welcome almost<br /><br />This world is not a hostile place<br />I thought while lying there<br />Surrounded by splashes of red<br />And since it was early there was nobody to help me up<br />Allowing me to stay there for a bit<br />Blending in with the dead leaves<br />Feeling more alive than ever<br /><br /><br />As seen and unseen from the balcony<br /><br />I cheer the growing of the trees<br />Applauding silently in thinking<br />Branches stretching, multiplying leaves<br />The sun is out of reach, October pleading<br />To embrace the fall, the falling<br />Sitting on my balcony untouched<br />I watch the world go by in bursts of sound<br />Pretending not to listen<br /><br />Teach me how to live he said <br />When he meant teach me how to die<br />I held my breath, was he sincere?<br />I held his breath and kissed his eyes<br />With silent lips<br />I have to go I thought, just look at me<br />I’ll show you how it’s done<br />Breath in, breath out<br />Breath in, breath out<br />Breath in, breath out<br />Breath in-between the lines of life<br />Where love is hiding in plain sight<br />And when you leave, don’t close the door<br /><br /><br />Blue<br /><br />I don’t know the reason why there is always an urgent need to do some gardening after I painted my nails a sky blue, the urgency existing in my head only, the seeds can wait, the bulbs don’t have to go in the soil today, the clippings can be prepared later in the week, but oh this blue, this longing to grow, to go up, I can’t keep it to myself, can I?</span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-24295723514056461462023-10-08T13:29:00.002+02:002023-10-09T13:30:03.372+02:00Polaroid dreams <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinF08bF6hfXs71T36Pxr_1cX2IieKQdV4gl6jmH8ux6dxD9V2PfSm1akMdYSOYURjdNsefZbNKFuwJcp_du2jA3pI0tH1Ryy-7sLGKzN7eNDr2Fw8c4yI6CWqrFgfHBcuEo3RRoySQ4y6MCDZvrOkgVwiPn7MfJwGOdpgBlhY0RlKtZEoJue367-57_LhR/s1280/IMG_4018.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1042" data-original-width="1280" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinF08bF6hfXs71T36Pxr_1cX2IieKQdV4gl6jmH8ux6dxD9V2PfSm1akMdYSOYURjdNsefZbNKFuwJcp_du2jA3pI0tH1Ryy-7sLGKzN7eNDr2Fw8c4yI6CWqrFgfHBcuEo3RRoySQ4y6MCDZvrOkgVwiPn7MfJwGOdpgBlhY0RlKtZEoJue367-57_LhR/w400-h326/IMG_4018.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-87119162726076856382023-10-02T19:24:00.006+02:002023-10-12T19:29:07.584+02:00How to decide where to go<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_It9k5Mi25o-bp-w_twuz8RwFWuL52YM8aTE2t5s2GoxlPP3NTYliG-pztgLhzfPLd457t3tMr7ChpogaAn5ajM3sLHIU4D0IsyKbNQiaWoBe_pyfQfp9fSR6cQh-kPkx5eQr4u9os6Rlh9Yu7n4rIr0nzUTFuPtEq4KhsPpGE2e57x36GPHdMTVzaMLy/s640/IMG_3928.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_It9k5Mi25o-bp-w_twuz8RwFWuL52YM8aTE2t5s2GoxlPP3NTYliG-pztgLhzfPLd457t3tMr7ChpogaAn5ajM3sLHIU4D0IsyKbNQiaWoBe_pyfQfp9fSR6cQh-kPkx5eQr4u9os6Rlh9Yu7n4rIr0nzUTFuPtEq4KhsPpGE2e57x36GPHdMTVzaMLy/w150-h200/IMG_3928.jpeg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYKKM3yS1ogxHTU8IfXHp6Z1-E6Z8Rjgfak0MY6vi0oftS11RjqXiPDIknKEISWN91MZNeVFqpKB6TyJTlhoFBqxnKuQerFd9C478JucHmt4dEwQP0koGU4JzXLZfxrAj7d4IriHfDxb3CFdWD3lc_XZPy_gTL_xWknDBZ2yWp5F5wTc_rslxKKNyfl8PZ/s640/IMG_3922.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYKKM3yS1ogxHTU8IfXHp6Z1-E6Z8Rjgfak0MY6vi0oftS11RjqXiPDIknKEISWN91MZNeVFqpKB6TyJTlhoFBqxnKuQerFd9C478JucHmt4dEwQP0koGU4JzXLZfxrAj7d4IriHfDxb3CFdWD3lc_XZPy_gTL_xWknDBZ2yWp5F5wTc_rslxKKNyfl8PZ/w150-h200/IMG_3922.jpeg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx2I7G7vuBuUdfawVrw66Qr4VW4u9d2AMSCd86Wtpgy77_dC_KziPLn6JiSO23XTvVURXCNWAJpLcjDJF7LK4XgvHipDb_l9DE2kwgvGi37Qm4nsbjrKeFHrpzTsjS6X0WK3yCrXERaBXw_c3-Oht3IlnS7KabnITFO2nR3NOrm9hEggpMK9LucYW9M_Uf/s640/IMG_3925.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx2I7G7vuBuUdfawVrw66Qr4VW4u9d2AMSCd86Wtpgy77_dC_KziPLn6JiSO23XTvVURXCNWAJpLcjDJF7LK4XgvHipDb_l9DE2kwgvGi37Qm4nsbjrKeFHrpzTsjS6X0WK3yCrXERaBXw_c3-Oht3IlnS7KabnITFO2nR3NOrm9hEggpMK9LucYW9M_Uf/w150-h200/IMG_3925.jpeg" width="150" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-56895017451736596112023-10-01T17:25:00.005+02:002023-10-01T17:32:31.116+02:00Perceiving<p><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBJThBLWyrNac5lkTcktuf_O2pHkI3RC-Kz4UJsX63bZ7m6kkduNdNlsg6e4EX8NNqZBlcZo1PvAE3ubDv56ovZZa-2KnCavsyxjF3ZO8De3fwKYT42k5JTZvRO1vI0L-YD15CoPeLu4ARVCLUIjpuVk42e4TYIStzk5vr-pQKXECCgyzFSivDbYzBx9Fo/s640/IMG_3958.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBJThBLWyrNac5lkTcktuf_O2pHkI3RC-Kz4UJsX63bZ7m6kkduNdNlsg6e4EX8NNqZBlcZo1PvAE3ubDv56ovZZa-2KnCavsyxjF3ZO8De3fwKYT42k5JTZvRO1vI0L-YD15CoPeLu4ARVCLUIjpuVk42e4TYIStzk5vr-pQKXECCgyzFSivDbYzBx9Fo/w240-h320/IMG_3958.jpeg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">When
autumn starts my garden is predominantly green and I wait for the
purple of the monkshood that grows and blooms in the same place every
year. The first flowers opened a few days ago, and enjoying the
beautiful colour and shape, I remembered something I read in David
Abram's "The spell of the sensuous". Here it is alongside the flower,
the quotes in the text are from Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of
Perception": </span><p></p><p><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><span>"As I contemplate the blue of the sky ... I abandon myself <span></span>in
it and plunge into this mystery, it 'thinks itself within me,' I am the
sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to
exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue
...". </span></span></p><p><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><span>Read "flower" for "sky" and "purple" for blue.</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTIBXYigGNi1RgXJkxdEkGo3Fn6sDD4TJf7bvmZmmc4N15OESujUnzlTht0AtHyFVGzD_Ypz5VGsAuBV5zRZHt2ZZUp4IyqZiPgOka3yUcvLUi_KVjHzDBWAZs74lGi7IP6sMxvTf2ACkV3A4BXONf3YhirfzIZhwAIVqNS6mvwzXgMsC4AdXY7FlfRCsa/s640/IMG_3966.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTIBXYigGNi1RgXJkxdEkGo3Fn6sDD4TJf7bvmZmmc4N15OESujUnzlTht0AtHyFVGzD_Ypz5VGsAuBV5zRZHt2ZZUp4IyqZiPgOka3yUcvLUi_KVjHzDBWAZs74lGi7IP6sMxvTf2ACkV3A4BXONf3YhirfzIZhwAIVqNS6mvwzXgMsC4AdXY7FlfRCsa/w150-h200/IMG_3966.jpeg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOUx-izaB6XmN66qenjTGDBaqrB4faMaPESLghOL5NlIA6jYimnOErce1ul5ecuah9yUqDzJ4t4e_SYgtc51L8Jr_ebL6prlZt62gYeTYB4Hfy8M4tTBFAKR9cfOGBakBOTrzXHlkhBPXu8LAhn5pdKAwvq7NFTQCcVFW__BSslx5aEKhUb0xSCiNkzwJ8/s640/IMG_3968.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOUx-izaB6XmN66qenjTGDBaqrB4faMaPESLghOL5NlIA6jYimnOErce1ul5ecuah9yUqDzJ4t4e_SYgtc51L8Jr_ebL6prlZt62gYeTYB4Hfy8M4tTBFAKR9cfOGBakBOTrzXHlkhBPXu8LAhn5pdKAwvq7NFTQCcVFW__BSslx5aEKhUb0xSCiNkzwJ8/w200-h150/IMG_3968.jpeg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3qziKT9zyWV5L0Pislbi3yJwhAF6WmOlc0GApPt2E_DGeuRZfGO2F9rbkwMfGfahfT-WDIZmBqwyZ0ZFks_Gk91nxypoim_WbNXs7-BY-oCibyD482vGL9ng7j1xzKqTr77MscwEiabNi7uxWYhwDKvIdV4J1kPyQYr5L-QmmI3xIY8AZCtlD_8F6WMgA/s640/IMG_3969%20(1).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3qziKT9zyWV5L0Pislbi3yJwhAF6WmOlc0GApPt2E_DGeuRZfGO2F9rbkwMfGfahfT-WDIZmBqwyZ0ZFks_Gk91nxypoim_WbNXs7-BY-oCibyD482vGL9ng7j1xzKqTr77MscwEiabNi7uxWYhwDKvIdV4J1kPyQYr5L-QmmI3xIY8AZCtlD_8F6WMgA/w200-h150/IMG_3969%20(1).jpeg" width="200" /></a></span></span></div></div><p></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-42182151135340929992022-10-15T17:46:00.004+02:002022-10-15T18:14:20.444+02:00Weaving thoughts<p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8feIZ0NhWghguOsRW_BW_zHo_n4wmkPO99QetNsI_3AfiS9Emxg6-mPWhR8lCrivodeg6lycYDtjotovyNdx2jqsvgHzzL4ueODCY9Xj19tJLMJwT0uc9A-6Uq6HMG7IuKEe3z1wfmrB0-u3Y8peyYMo4JY6qKP8oPQn0dOh2-6saIbWyjqJQTvtm5g/s320/IMG_2310%20(1).jpeg" width="320" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEjiTRLPOQaFXiy-cFp03xrrdO2npgz-itAz4f7SVuU_ee7NCbeQYc6RORC40yuvTBDdKb8V0SyNsYwmB9t22W1W7aKMwjD8sOWtaxAW5mL2zT2FW2jz_rO3XCbdoUYcQ46TRryM1_g0O0LWrx8YBPUMoY44QG6IzAvz5KsPGTZNW5Hk9s2OPWzGH2ZQ/s640/IMG_1809.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEjiTRLPOQaFXiy-cFp03xrrdO2npgz-itAz4f7SVuU_ee7NCbeQYc6RORC40yuvTBDdKb8V0SyNsYwmB9t22W1W7aKMwjD8sOWtaxAW5mL2zT2FW2jz_rO3XCbdoUYcQ46TRryM1_g0O0LWrx8YBPUMoY44QG6IzAvz5KsPGTZNW5Hk9s2OPWzGH2ZQ/s320/IMG_1809.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I like to tell myself I got as close to thinking like a sheep when I became obsessed by apples, but I don’t know if that is true. For weeks I walked with them and no walk was the same. It was the best part of the day, the two best parts of the day, the hours after sunrise and the hours before sunset. I never knew what would happen, where we would go. They didn’t know either, but they were in charge, as long as they didn’t try to go where they weren’t allowed to go, which weren’t many places. I counted them now and then, to make sure they were all there, 19 black and 21 white ones, but they themselves didn’t perceive each other as coloured differently. The lambs randomly approached ewes of any colour and appearance until they found the proper scent. I sometimes tried to bleat like them if I wanted their attention and it sometimes worked, but just as often they ignored me. Now and then I wondered what they were thinking, but the only moment I had the feeling I knew was just after I let them out and they started running. “Apples!” While I observed them eating, listened to them chewing, I ate an apple myself. Afterwards, in the wide open fields, I collected their favourite plants of the moment. While they were grazing, I was picking: wild plants, tree leaves, grass, the same things they were eating. Apples were their favourites though and wherever we went, there was always an apple tree close by. At home, a yellow house we kept warm with a wood fire, I turned everything into ink: different kinds of green material, plums, the charcoal from our stove, giving me a whole range of colours.</span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEies2vEGQYTLMNqU4FYMUj2N0U7SMvFDVc6Vi91PqJH-IrhF-gt7lOEbp5byIe436zAxhESl2wvY9DxgxduMFvx3WAt6-Hy0dMsRKmHUa8RBb31AqT-7cMLKI28kjYfsJF6yuVRwQWS6aO8MDdfxzuTyASlrawOi-Jt0fAgPSoFsyjV2wEgPMIdaltKJg/s640/IMG_8950.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEies2vEGQYTLMNqU4FYMUj2N0U7SMvFDVc6Vi91PqJH-IrhF-gt7lOEbp5byIe436zAxhESl2wvY9DxgxduMFvx3WAt6-Hy0dMsRKmHUa8RBb31AqT-7cMLKI28kjYfsJF6yuVRwQWS6aO8MDdfxzuTyASlrawOi-Jt0fAgPSoFsyjV2wEgPMIdaltKJg/w150-h200/IMG_8950.jpeg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWOszcjnQVJ61FNUzGhCa7CZpJ6F7N5UuZhJwhZrgZRM_IbMAACOhauz07p4vZXDJfmmv5nv6FLUl1xP8xcxVjW1Zb-cHPrZiY0OHRpywedi-E4gnKG7tcwTnN3VsGyeUkSuqhJLazRerhZ1d2zEnbLLVgxPOURDQ9dDwg2PcalE6bHhF6xQqfZ7Kbkw/s640/IMG_8948%20(1).jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWOszcjnQVJ61FNUzGhCa7CZpJ6F7N5UuZhJwhZrgZRM_IbMAACOhauz07p4vZXDJfmmv5nv6FLUl1xP8xcxVjW1Zb-cHPrZiY0OHRpywedi-E4gnKG7tcwTnN3VsGyeUkSuqhJLazRerhZ1d2zEnbLLVgxPOURDQ9dDwg2PcalE6bHhF6xQqfZ7Kbkw/w200-h150/IMG_8948%20(1).jpeg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaocuI3zxZHoFsIs0jRhSXVpAGa3lGzQBCiEnUlgghmGvNMzRzCZsh5k2twBl-4icg35tGR8k-QjpSng3fPtZ2PztnpMxtK8OipSnxSiUTjgQspTnFhmmtBPwzy7AhaICW2mTQayIXJBO2M6FyeF3hGvGkj_78-IbdkHHGuLQpvUnlvS60AVfroeEG-A/s640/IMG_9402.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaocuI3zxZHoFsIs0jRhSXVpAGa3lGzQBCiEnUlgghmGvNMzRzCZsh5k2twBl-4icg35tGR8k-QjpSng3fPtZ2PztnpMxtK8OipSnxSiUTjgQspTnFhmmtBPwzy7AhaICW2mTQayIXJBO2M6FyeF3hGvGkj_78-IbdkHHGuLQpvUnlvS60AVfroeEG-A/w150-h200/IMG_9402.jpeg" width="150" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></div></div></div></span></div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The best teachers don’t tell you what to do. They make you wonder, question yourself and your actions, they don’t give you the answers, they just show you a way to move through life. Literally, in this case.<br /><br />Does spinning thread out of wool from sheep you herded bring you closer to them because your fingers sense something about the specific sheep the wool is from, or does it - even when it is necessary and first of all for their own benefit to shear them - widen the gap because you are turning something that was originally, before they were domesticated, meant to keep them warm and protected only, into a human product? I didn’t know what was the right answer, I just knew it was another way to be in the moment, like walking with them was. When I was spinning wool, my mind stopped spinning. I spun for hours at length and even considered spinning a thread as long as the distance between the sheep’s grazing grounds and the gallery where the artist-shepherds would present their work, until I realised spinning an 18 kilometre thread would take forever. <br /><br />Apples were everywhere, it wasn’t just the sheep eating them every day. I made apple sauce, apple compote, dried apple slices and since there was no oven I could only dream of apple pies. When visiting local events, there were baskets of apples to welcome people. The trees around the house carried big yellow apples and smaller pink ones, sturdy green and cute little red crab apples for which the sheep broke through the fence one afternoon because they were irresistible, perfectly sheep bite-sized. Sour apples and deliciously sweet apples, most of them not perfect enough to be able to make it into a supermarket, but even the ones that didn’t taste great had the potential to turn into a whole new tree. Sometimes when I thought I was drawing an apple, it turned out to look more like a planet.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1eAl4uBsYVcIiHO7uX95t6rZkdXByfC4kTF66BIs2xXm-1VW6MLNuJ3jT1qDcGfOcZeOZgX6cDPHSoJhpPy1BP-op5h8mBEjtt2r-6pP42gLuu2iSXnKWDhJ1CJglNfvT5rm8Gz_nja0CRE8wLBbkuUfgsPJEBWVc2TL-NwUZ4Be4Jdalq-qav6kVWw/s640/IMG_9390.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1eAl4uBsYVcIiHO7uX95t6rZkdXByfC4kTF66BIs2xXm-1VW6MLNuJ3jT1qDcGfOcZeOZgX6cDPHSoJhpPy1BP-op5h8mBEjtt2r-6pP42gLuu2iSXnKWDhJ1CJglNfvT5rm8Gz_nja0CRE8wLBbkuUfgsPJEBWVc2TL-NwUZ4Be4Jdalq-qav6kVWw/w150-h200/IMG_9390.jpeg" width="150" /></a><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGE4ja40H4ZCQa1NfgzqtW3B-4I-rM_pUZrQhRT2i3z3kcrN1nR6gL1_6jk6_gD2uZ2IdWsCD_UhxlOAWi9ETLzdz72WpWdvEO2chbz03nM-44kLVdP0hFRYC8TK3Ei5tr9Ou5aqQn38235nDJdjw_njzYDk2-J6UvMNzUbq1x74imS1vRa95km7vwKA/w150-h200/IMG_8289.jpeg" width="150" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQiEDFj1ZxDNjv1rv2nTPzm0A2bQFYKxVVvWDVJhkHZ-cG_BagBdGlDcjC37kmWVZnwZZgsIUyWrDu6xeg0QFVb1XLFmZ4irPm2PP_syXeQCrMNQOQnIn_wfgxTfJrcTOiHPWv3FO64cKzKK_AuVbijlFj4y0MmZmg8_I9lg34oJICD4Aiww9X9FIEuQ/s640/IMG_9495.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQiEDFj1ZxDNjv1rv2nTPzm0A2bQFYKxVVvWDVJhkHZ-cG_BagBdGlDcjC37kmWVZnwZZgsIUyWrDu6xeg0QFVb1XLFmZ4irPm2PP_syXeQCrMNQOQnIn_wfgxTfJrcTOiHPWv3FO64cKzKK_AuVbijlFj4y0MmZmg8_I9lg34oJICD4Aiww9X9FIEuQ/w150-h200/IMG_9495.jpeg" width="150" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">If I didn’t hide the balls of thread I had spun, the little cat that had entered the house as a wild creature a week after I arrived, stole them and unspun them under my bed. I was delighted the first time I found the result of our collective actions. In my mother tongue, the purring sound of a cat is called spinning because it sounds like a spinning wheel. She sat on my shoulder whenever I was typing on my Apple computer, which wasn’t very often because I preferred the apple world I was sharing with the sheep.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZaUp4vAcTk6i_D12lJCjCmCWmAhMSOiaEGuFOqNG1mSYB_gud7iiEKlWF21CejJ81bnF_T0az5ybABKtZoLCbVKkZEpG1kdywJf2zHTmNztdIjYgzUpcav0SYQdfw_b_VmzHMY7VvYUwahmpLpnVtO02ZfSTCH5X02moNzky1qTrW9SvtyF-XabatHw/s640/IMG_1098.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZaUp4vAcTk6i_D12lJCjCmCWmAhMSOiaEGuFOqNG1mSYB_gud7iiEKlWF21CejJ81bnF_T0az5ybABKtZoLCbVKkZEpG1kdywJf2zHTmNztdIjYgzUpcav0SYQdfw_b_VmzHMY7VvYUwahmpLpnVtO02ZfSTCH5X02moNzky1qTrW9SvtyF-XabatHw/s320/IMG_1098.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3MOImWx_dk_6ZV2O8SlWyrIxNEnOAETCgabJiNXBoapBXudW3Xzxrg7FHzqDSIS0m0ubFoTACidjLzzAM8C5OwTWchwDniEhw-Hb_bn4cMtJ9WD3JZrt_lfppGsAR10VqFPE1EAaXUu9LigqO0Bv1OUgowPWlyV2jeRprDXqVmiuh2BWpq4CrT60KDQ/s640/IMG_9975.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3MOImWx_dk_6ZV2O8SlWyrIxNEnOAETCgabJiNXBoapBXudW3Xzxrg7FHzqDSIS0m0ubFoTACidjLzzAM8C5OwTWchwDniEhw-Hb_bn4cMtJ9WD3JZrt_lfppGsAR10VqFPE1EAaXUu9LigqO0Bv1OUgowPWlyV2jeRprDXqVmiuh2BWpq4CrT60KDQ/s320/IMG_9975.jpeg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: arial;"></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">My apples are for human consumption only. When you look at them, remember that they contain what the sheep ate and what remained of the wood that kept me and everybody else in the house - my fellow shepherd, our host and our guests - warm. Feast on them with your eyes. They are not perfect but they are not supposed to be, they are the complete harvest - some unripe, some rotten - of the last two days I was in Kabeliai. I didn’t draw them to resemble apples but “to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination”, as John Berger wrote so beautifully about the act of making something visible through drawing. I don’t know what they are, only that they are just as much sheep and shepherd as they are apple.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikwuUsz-Nb0NYzhejMYyGCiRLihj0Be8NJPWiqlQAs5AKnYdn24EA8plTQi62Ml9V1piq4MxtPgS_QPkaus5Hglai31L4Ivb2lePYqelKnSt7RWDBUc-XWcNfW8WmqJzKrY5mWNjpQhQmRMaZbCueIvxInJzoERIzbxO7ysZKdd6On7J17CQsmCyEwCQ/s640/IMG_9501.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikwuUsz-Nb0NYzhejMYyGCiRLihj0Be8NJPWiqlQAs5AKnYdn24EA8plTQi62Ml9V1piq4MxtPgS_QPkaus5Hglai31L4Ivb2lePYqelKnSt7RWDBUc-XWcNfW8WmqJzKrY5mWNjpQhQmRMaZbCueIvxInJzoERIzbxO7ysZKdd6On7J17CQsmCyEwCQ/s320/IMG_9501.jpeg" width="240" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwwkS6ULZD9FUyoVRXeHKeGh4mPAmDPVlObfgNOb7C1tpi0tNVDAtsxRAjfL4zDitafxbaqQH5bZqWnthvyTNCwkqnddwdwFNDG538fFQipTb6AiJhcJYZ_NFwMKqS_GIc3DoJx5KL_fVRQfzU9WKzUz0jyt-Hgb0O6vMpHuPjDK1ovWuIIbRj9-jn3g/s640/IMG_9345.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwwkS6ULZD9FUyoVRXeHKeGh4mPAmDPVlObfgNOb7C1tpi0tNVDAtsxRAjfL4zDitafxbaqQH5bZqWnthvyTNCwkqnddwdwFNDG538fFQipTb6AiJhcJYZ_NFwMKqS_GIc3DoJx5KL_fVRQfzU9WKzUz0jyt-Hgb0O6vMpHuPjDK1ovWuIIbRj9-jn3g/w240-h320/IMG_9345.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBxd7-FmdTUmDF94t2_PJ4MKjSjDQh-t9kpkSGqEIMEfVI_0RyEd5P7FIgwUroNvpmdjKkXUhpDasvKvb4QQJRUVAb8FgvCzlFBkLZcb1g1m-TufkT97PIHoyOKzMTUy9tWnMneheXLoprBiR06dUDhhqcYpbosP_gVKDn-14uKrn5PRA2qpZ188BiDQ/s640/IMG_2509.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBxd7-FmdTUmDF94t2_PJ4MKjSjDQh-t9kpkSGqEIMEfVI_0RyEd5P7FIgwUroNvpmdjKkXUhpDasvKvb4QQJRUVAb8FgvCzlFBkLZcb1g1m-TufkT97PIHoyOKzMTUy9tWnMneheXLoprBiR06dUDhhqcYpbosP_gVKDn-14uKrn5PRA2qpZ188BiDQ/w150-h200/IMG_2509.jpeg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLYYCqHdLbG_RZqqucP-mBlw_TiTwqE5IDrMU7rbeRlVJ9SWOSYI8U0ZCIcidLAPlGKF5qRFxmYb3lffk31CP9fDTr9Qrz8IZ7cQ0TvgLYUh8dQPpT9W5_tElYBzxsCDljO0iSamyU-Fcjn7Xrv2AYKFdW9TyoA05novWF8riD9DLC_pGEzcJoHNVCXQ/s640/IMG_2449.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLYYCqHdLbG_RZqqucP-mBlw_TiTwqE5IDrMU7rbeRlVJ9SWOSYI8U0ZCIcidLAPlGKF5qRFxmYb3lffk31CP9fDTr9Qrz8IZ7cQ0TvgLYUh8dQPpT9W5_tElYBzxsCDljO0iSamyU-Fcjn7Xrv2AYKFdW9TyoA05novWF8riD9DLC_pGEzcJoHNVCXQ/w150-h200/IMG_2449.jpeg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHh66azQ6_wUys7a9a6A8RL5hs9FzzWEAa5LMoONCMj4GtvlcQlxKyw4dTlob9dnL13QAuWoOyNh9pF89S30ACWLwGeN5DxJOXsO0-DFfAYjCKwag6DJP_3MGurzcHFVq2OnXbBIYdCpxZyN46FIOhJZm6A2U9JPwqb6X7aN_aSC_jKl3yidmQT3utLg/s640/IMG_2421.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="481" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHh66azQ6_wUys7a9a6A8RL5hs9FzzWEAa5LMoONCMj4GtvlcQlxKyw4dTlob9dnL13QAuWoOyNh9pF89S30ACWLwGeN5DxJOXsO0-DFfAYjCKwag6DJP_3MGurzcHFVq2OnXbBIYdCpxZyN46FIOhJZm6A2U9JPwqb6X7aN_aSC_jKl3yidmQT3utLg/w151-h200/IMG_2421.jpeg" width="151" /></a></div></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />Title: Gravitating (natural inks on paper) <br /><br /><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">we think we own what is inside the skin<br />we store the heaviness within us<br />whereas the lightness of its being<br />could easily repair us</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ydlOnxyLQ_RDlFuFyRDsfm6cCY9p-ybUWkO2VIQz-e3Badbvkx7xmCS85G4fG29DCRCxnP24irlY2_sKZypnjuM1vC4brWR6T3XBBAy3PVgAi_rn9ZneHl5lbxqBew91AZ7-vdshGx7sfI8wCy8B5inFK7BH51H0TdqgEl6bM7B92k71kqumZmXuWg/s640/IMG_8953%20(1).jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="640" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ydlOnxyLQ_RDlFuFyRDsfm6cCY9p-ybUWkO2VIQz-e3Badbvkx7xmCS85G4fG29DCRCxnP24irlY2_sKZypnjuM1vC4brWR6T3XBBAy3PVgAi_rn9ZneHl5lbxqBew91AZ7-vdshGx7sfI8wCy8B5inFK7BH51H0TdqgEl6bM7B92k71kqumZmXuWg/s320/IMG_8953%20(1).jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQws_KqE7A-qlKJOGc9Jdr006L-_EDvJeXq9HpAM94bH-RDmf8BtGbRvqKXvlkluxfxITjeQI_MGyn2p3CKvslVMyMoxbocxXWkU6lyZBmuCLM2vcXYOgPpNfAGN5YoYLzZcvgcEp4RB_716Tc0wmugveXDjuq6s7_3tKVz5w8DTha6hl3Zsc0PARdvA/s640/IMG_8952%20(1).jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQws_KqE7A-qlKJOGc9Jdr006L-_EDvJeXq9HpAM94bH-RDmf8BtGbRvqKXvlkluxfxITjeQI_MGyn2p3CKvslVMyMoxbocxXWkU6lyZBmuCLM2vcXYOgPpNfAGN5YoYLzZcvgcEp4RB_716Tc0wmugveXDjuq6s7_3tKVz5w8DTha6hl3Zsc0PARdvA/s320/IMG_8952%20(1).jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><p><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Title: Gravitas (birch bark, black and white sheep wool, red thread)</span><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrmSr5LEQOZoA6LUc96iaq2f9JKaywZfXGcIeZi-T6ATjkk_kTNY3OTlaxtTC7_tVaB3nQ_Q-v3Zbu5SEfujpGIhRVBvZVUkILDA9da1iq_sOC8tQKiNul1bluSTe1ZLWFAcn4TrW6zIegWtsaWFFPa7C7aJ2yZ7I05m5Ilp7lkelVlIx3Inu9T_ChGw/s640/IMG_1583.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrmSr5LEQOZoA6LUc96iaq2f9JKaywZfXGcIeZi-T6ATjkk_kTNY3OTlaxtTC7_tVaB3nQ_Q-v3Zbu5SEfujpGIhRVBvZVUkILDA9da1iq_sOC8tQKiNul1bluSTe1ZLWFAcn4TrW6zIegWtsaWFFPa7C7aJ2yZ7I05m5Ilp7lkelVlIx3Inu9T_ChGw/w200-h134/IMG_1583.jpeg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYSNKnSkMHaFlmepwiUHZsktYzw9rTUcKePWqHh-Ii-CCY0EcBzA77ejO65_X0LGEB_665yP6xR_uO5iOnZI-NfcYLjErebEGEy5htT6ZtEWRwORHWRrPMaJ3ZeP-G_CcaCzJ_mM7loAjuSspJ3LhtCQH_3K17DdkD_DM1gp6fYIH2kkcaYW7XHHWUdg/s640/IMG_8396.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYSNKnSkMHaFlmepwiUHZsktYzw9rTUcKePWqHh-Ii-CCY0EcBzA77ejO65_X0LGEB_665yP6xR_uO5iOnZI-NfcYLjErebEGEy5htT6ZtEWRwORHWRrPMaJ3ZeP-G_CcaCzJ_mM7loAjuSspJ3LhtCQH_3K17DdkD_DM1gp6fYIH2kkcaYW7XHHWUdg/w200-h150/IMG_8396.jpeg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmz__MNtO2cN9J7vOSnHTqGDHMR_4NgAvnlq9JwNtOl0IVZ-aGczIxSixJseNqxGEichXUFwFNWpJkdqzROo81grw2fCRgV3JWtoEQZLsC3D_bnzM6OJ7rl_3lOpRglpd7y5bJ2Ijx8srbLDj5-CgP_Y82IpCTMCu2VlKgrk8OL25wVe3jjCXW12i3Qw/s640/IMG_1574%20(1).jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="427" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmz__MNtO2cN9J7vOSnHTqGDHMR_4NgAvnlq9JwNtOl0IVZ-aGczIxSixJseNqxGEichXUFwFNWpJkdqzROo81grw2fCRgV3JWtoEQZLsC3D_bnzM6OJ7rl_3lOpRglpd7y5bJ2Ijx8srbLDj5-CgP_Y82IpCTMCu2VlKgrk8OL25wVe3jjCXW12i3Qw/w134-h200/IMG_1574%20(1).jpeg" width="134" /></a></div><br /></div></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-68733381928845925362022-04-14T14:00:00.007+02:002022-04-15T14:11:54.784+02:00A random day<p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTP6sjjRLM8n7Aw1D4-fMNf8xpV4JmW5bXzUccVv7dXln43eEJuSOJH6ZF3T2R-mtRqYwk-rWgx-iJeJbblprFikesOXFABIXJYxjpkx6_yj1o7JTpJ2KVl5N7orGLq6GhVt7E1tlAvJzA46DttVsLVoNO5xQ2praNHEKHDOfQabVsywnyct4ACQsgw/s1280/IMG_2988.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTP6sjjRLM8n7Aw1D4-fMNf8xpV4JmW5bXzUccVv7dXln43eEJuSOJH6ZF3T2R-mtRqYwk-rWgx-iJeJbblprFikesOXFABIXJYxjpkx6_yj1o7JTpJ2KVl5N7orGLq6GhVt7E1tlAvJzA46DttVsLVoNO5xQ2praNHEKHDOfQabVsywnyct4ACQsgw/w400-h300/IMG_2988.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">At 6.30 the darkness starts to lift and the blackbird sings his song. I don't know if it is the same one, the song sounds the same every morning and the bird looks the same but they might take turns and maybe they think the same about the person sitting on the balcony at that hour. I also wonder if I am the same person I was yesterday when I was sitting here, waiting for the black to turn into a deep blue. The streets are still empty at this hour, the first cars start to drive by, people walking the sidewalk to get to work, dog walkers, a sleep deprived father with a baby on his chest, two young girls coming back from an all night party, laughing just a little too loud, underdressed for the early morning temperature.<br /><br />My route is the same every morning. Across the street they call the new Soho, along the triangular square with the church I never entered, past the stairs where later in spring the steps will be covered in little yellow flowers and later on in the morning a man will throw bread crumbs out of the window that will attract dozens of pigeons. The fountain under the trees where a multitude of little birds chirp and chatter, through the street with the homeless man sleeping under a soft brown blanket on the windowsill of a shop window, along miniature fenced off gardens carefully planted around tree trunks. The sky is my favorite shade of blue now, a melancholic blue, warm and cold at the same time. Street cleaners pass by now and then, the streets are wet, not because it has rained but because they desinfect the city every day. <br /><br />It gets busier close to the train station but the little ally next to it is devoid of people. The hole in the earth, where parts of the Roman wall still stand, is empty. Sometimes little improvised bedrooms are installed in the far away corners, matresses and shopping carts with random belongings, picked up from the street. Grafiti is covering the walls, colourful tags, the Catalan flag, three windows have been covered for ages in the letters VA GI NA. Every time I pass it I wonder what on earth was going on in the mind of the person who sprayed it there. Was it meant as an offensive word? Some obnoxious kids who said "let's write VAGINA!" Or was it the opposite, somebody who thought it is a word we shouldn`t be afraid to use? Probably not. I feel the urge to add another body part. Earlobe maybe. Or hippocampus.<br /><br />The last stretch goes through Barceloneta, the former fishermen`s quarters. These days there aren't a lot of fishermen living there. The beach is not a natural beach, it was constructed before the olympics, to make it more attractive for visitors. Nowadays, tractors straighten the beach every morning. Cleaners pick up the pieces of nature that are annoying for bathers. Driftwood, jellyfish, but also the endless amount of trash that is left by the tourists. <br />The sun is about to rise from the waves, there is a small audience spread out across the sand, the view is slightly spoiled by little figures on paddle boards. I prefer the days when the weather is less glorious and there is nothing on the water surface apart from the big fishing boat in the far distance surrounded by hungry seagulls.<br /><br />On my way back I cross the Plaça del Poeta Boscà, for a while I thought it had something to do with a poet from the forest, bosque, until I realised it was his name, Joan Boscà There is a monument dedicated to him on the corner where I always drink my coffee. It doesn't look like a monument, more like a weird construction part of the underground garage one can enter just next to the monument. <br />The regulars are not there anymore. Some of them are still around, the younger ones, but the two sisters, always meticuously dressed, wearing red lipstick and looking as if they were ready to go to a party, have not been around. Jordi - I only know his name because the woman were always greeting him when he walked up from the newspaper stand - who used to be there at exactly five minutes after nine, seating himself at ¨his¨ table next to mine, has not been around. Maybe they didn`t survive the pandemic. Or maybe they moved out of the city. Others have been absent as well. These days I seem to be one of the last regulars at this terrace.<br />A man with a plastic cup in his hand asks me for money. I don`t have any coins on me and I say sorry but he doesn`t mind. He smiles and takes my hand and kisses it and wishes me a good day. I can`t help thinking that it is still unsafe to let a stranger kiss your hand but I deem it unhealthier to live with these conditioned responses to unexpected affection and let him hold my hand a bit longer. He continues his little journey, still smiling. I smile as well, order another coffee and search for Joan Boscà’s poetry online. <br /><br />Amor es todo quanto aquí se trata;<br />es la sazón del tiempo enamorada;<br />todo muere d'amor o d'amor mata;<br />sin amor no veréyes ni una pisada;<br />d'amores se negocia y se barata;<br />toda la tierra en esto es ocupada;<br />si veys bullir d'un árbol una hoja,<br />diréys que amor aquello se os antoja<br /><br />Love is everything treated here;<br />it is love's season;<br />all dies of love or kills for love;<br />without love you'll see hardly a footstep;<br />with love, you trade and barter;<br />the entire world is thus occupied;<br />if a tree's leaf buds<br />you will say that love tickles your desire.<br /><br />Joan Boscà (1490-1542)</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-51771552566155135762022-02-12T18:15:00.003+01:002022-02-12T18:29:13.730+01:00Here now<p> <span style="font-family: arial;">It has been a while since I've been here. March 2020. I realise it is when we went into lockdown. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDQf9Sd8YPZ_JDgucXOXRh-SFyPpcpyNbHMQ93A2FOpwMlFPMOv9rvxZdtl2tq9e3KFZgPFb1zpyHZzbCPhcrRfAHNkhq6weHWIVXPkqIIzU-Z7T5YSRCtd1yNLXE5gqJR9LvTNhxx5QLaMTrRIYoNbtW5IEe6ivE0PQV3j4E4QjA66IMCbx2hvO8zbg=s640" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDQf9Sd8YPZ_JDgucXOXRh-SFyPpcpyNbHMQ93A2FOpwMlFPMOv9rvxZdtl2tq9e3KFZgPFb1zpyHZzbCPhcrRfAHNkhq6weHWIVXPkqIIzU-Z7T5YSRCtd1yNLXE5gqJR9LvTNhxx5QLaMTrRIYoNbtW5IEe6ivE0PQV3j4E4QjA66IMCbx2hvO8zbg=w400-h300" width="400" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDQf9Sd8YPZ_JDgucXOXRh-SFyPpcpyNbHMQ93A2FOpwMlFPMOv9rvxZdtl2tq9e3KFZgPFb1zpyHZzbCPhcrRfAHNkhq6weHWIVXPkqIIzU-Z7T5YSRCtd1yNLXE5gqJR9LvTNhxx5QLaMTrRIYoNbtW5IEe6ivE0PQV3j4E4QjA66IMCbx2hvO8zbg=s640" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDQf9Sd8YPZ_JDgucXOXRh-SFyPpcpyNbHMQ93A2FOpwMlFPMOv9rvxZdtl2tq9e3KFZgPFb1zpyHZzbCPhcrRfAHNkhq6weHWIVXPkqIIzU-Z7T5YSRCtd1yNLXE5gqJR9LvTNhxx5QLaMTrRIYoNbtW5IEe6ivE0PQV3j4E4QjA66IMCbx2hvO8zbg=s640" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDQf9Sd8YPZ_JDgucXOXRh-SFyPpcpyNbHMQ93A2FOpwMlFPMOv9rvxZdtl2tq9e3KFZgPFb1zpyHZzbCPhcrRfAHNkhq6weHWIVXPkqIIzU-Z7T5YSRCtd1yNLXE5gqJR9LvTNhxx5QLaMTrRIYoNbtW5IEe6ivE0PQV3j4E4QjA66IMCbx2hvO8zbg=s640" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgPKbplo6cNG2DeKoDhG3xHSZzRfCUl0bo6K0EOr10PKXT_2Ndc_wyW_rhbyGTIgyvMyODhDIJ3TpHP45v-gg4vvHHLsb9Ut_YDJBjrHAXOlXEsBxyE2rP4kFHMKNEcu9gGXmPr8Nuhpk6LCPj8yXklCkKQouCKbip3eLl2YpW9wTcxgpSP1NtcDv_Ng=s640" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="640" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgPKbplo6cNG2DeKoDhG3xHSZzRfCUl0bo6K0EOr10PKXT_2Ndc_wyW_rhbyGTIgyvMyODhDIJ3TpHP45v-gg4vvHHLsb9Ut_YDJBjrHAXOlXEsBxyE2rP4kFHMKNEcu9gGXmPr8Nuhpk6LCPj8yXklCkKQouCKbip3eLl2YpW9wTcxgpSP1NtcDv_Ng=w200-h134" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgzsHpPFfxJsAlWaWqWcAEVUvJzQFC5R-uDGd6eIgVQGsVifJFgCCiVe_4V9X27sz_2HbVtAIJHygf0joAsGdgEe8ZX5gLanTCl_-gPu3KZ0BCdLFWr79yqTCeIs0X-HQL0nqVRIfMr0R_j1_ObcLWzO9vf6l0UErkAmG5ADEpMg-ibgQHDMqOxtyfCUQ=s640" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="640" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEha33GQvik_fD-GYPYl4NCqC7H--Y8U0eOIh6J_ENHdJjSnN4VJrxNdVgI7NKqdN6wAPuUpDLJtHOSkzpRcaN_sQb8ipR5qzsrWkEtn1ozBDn90BCZuU30OJVBSUSQJHfBpKY_1N2oDQQsAbpBUH6y7-qv9f9D3965smsBIz0slF4PE1PWbf_mC1N4HyQ=w200-h134" width="200" /> <img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="640" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgzsHpPFfxJsAlWaWqWcAEVUvJzQFC5R-uDGd6eIgVQGsVifJFgCCiVe_4V9X27sz_2HbVtAIJHygf0joAsGdgEe8ZX5gLanTCl_-gPu3KZ0BCdLFWr79yqTCeIs0X-HQL0nqVRIfMr0R_j1_ObcLWzO9vf6l0UErkAmG5ADEpMg-ibgQHDMqOxtyfCUQ=w200-h134" width="200" /></a></div></div></div></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /> </span><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-54844585396439359822020-03-14T17:26:00.004+01:002020-03-14T17:58:25.735+01:00To believeDe lamentatione<br />
<br />
Incantation of tempest<br />
Interplay<br />
Oblivion<br />
A new doom<br />
Purple noise<br />
<br />
Teardrop<br />
Old ocean<br />
Nostalgia<br />
<br />
How I learned to earn rewards<br />
<br />
Wrap your troubles in dreams <br />
Climb that mountain<br />
<br />
<br />
(the poetry in the titles of my Spotify New Releases weekly song list)<br />
<br />
This song title didn't make it in the poem but sort of says the same thing in sound: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/2mUOpzjjdsc8caCYWv5sHp?si=bJrKtui0QVuIB_BplLdTuw" target="_blank">Ben Lucas Boysen, Medela</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-40529229469057166702020-01-11T15:02:00.000+01:002020-01-12T18:00:17.585+01:00Letter to a dear friendDear Larry,<br />
<br />
It has been a while since I wrote to you. The last time was November 15, 2019. It was a cold beautiful night and I was sitting outside on the terrace at Sanilles, the place where we finally met, in 2016, after having corresponded for years. My friends had organised a Natural Farming course there, in the Spanish Pyrenees and had invited you to cross the ocean. It was the first time you were teaching a week long course about Natural Farming and a lot of people had gathered from around the world, you were a hero to some of them but when they met you and listened to you they also realised you were the most humble person, dedicated to being in service to others, to nature. Not only wise but also very funny and fun to be around with. I think true heroes are like that. People who subtly and slowly, with a lot of care and dedication change the world. And show us that we can all be heroes. There is no big or small.<br />
<br />
We met there again in 2017. This time I didn’t participate in the course but I helped out in the kitchen. In the breaks or in the evening we would sometimes sit on the bench outside drinking a glass of wine while staring at the big mountains, talking about how we were all each others teachers but that the forest around us and the big mountains in the distance were our main teachers really. Of course I thought about you when I sat there again last November and the moonlight lit up those mountains beautifully. I wrote you straight away but I never got an answer. I received the sad news a few days later. I don’t know if my words ever reached you but it doesn’t matter really. <br />
<br />
The first two things I wrote down in my notebook from that first Natural Farming course in 2016, were the words you started your teaching with. <br />
<i><br />“Soil is my entry into the kosmos. I’ve been madly in love with it all my life.”</i><br />
And something Fukuoka-san said: <i>“We can’t understand soil but we can become it.”</i><br />
<br />
After I heard about your passing, alongside the gratefulness I felt for having been able to spend time with you, to have learned from you, to have laughed with you, I felt sad about not being able to share words and thoughts with you any longer. I knew you would always be my friend and teacher, like you always had been, in presence or in absence but something had changed now. It took me a while though before I realised that my last letter to you, on the 15th of November, doesn’t have to be the last one. I can still write you letters, I can still share things with you and ask you things. But I will have to walk through the forest now to get an answer. Sit on my balcony and look at my plants or at the sky. Climb mountains. Stick my hands in the soil. You’ll be there. <br />
<br />
Once, when you were working on your book, you wrote me about your struggle with words. <i>“Words can only take you so far”</i> you wrote. <i>“Even for poets like my favorites, William Blake and Walt Whitman. And Sensei had the same frustration”</i>. Words are useless in a way. But I still don’t know what I would do without them. And I wonder who I would be if I wouldn’t have read The One Straw Revolution, which led me to you and all the other books and words for which you were responsible. Words that will continue to spread an important message.<br />
<br />
We have all that. We have amazing memories of you. I am tempted to write about the boat club in Barcelona as well where you pretended to be a genuine captain and boat owner, putting on dark sunglasses to make it more convincing. And the look on your face when we stepped out of the metro, babbling and joking and you turned around and stood in the shade of Gaudi’s magnificent unfinished cathedral. But this letter would become too long then. And I have - well, have …. they’re not mine so I am happy I can share them here, the words you wrote me when we were talking about a recent death: <i>"Life is a constant unfolding. Always, things come into existence, grow, mature and die. It is all happening at once, all the time. We are part of it and cannot become attached. Well, we can, but at risk of sorrow ….. I’m no guru or anything, but the simpler life becomes the closer to reality you get, and to my way of thinking, that's a good thing. But still, in times when you are struggling with loss you just have to, I don't know, get through it and let time heal. ….. Gotta go for now!</i>" <br />
<br />
Gotta go for now. I like that last line, even when it gets a different meaning when I read it again now. And I like those words. I did become attached though and I guess everybody who knew you became attached as well. How could we not have. And we are sad. But equally happy. Because loosing somebody makes you aware of how much you gained. Still I would have given something very dear to me to sit on that bench with you once more. But who knows, maybe we are there still. Like you might be in all those places with all your friends where you are in their memories of you.<br />
<br />
I imagined how much fun it would be if you would walk around your own memorial service today incognito. I bet we would have recognised you by your arm gestures. Or maybe because you forgot to take off your Mu Landscaping sweater. Or because we recognised your jokes. <br />
<br />
Take care, dear friend. I’ll go on a little walk to the sea now to hear your reply. There are many trees on the way and not too much soil in sight but I know it is everywhere under the concrete of the city.<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-87175873239429429002019-12-01T15:46:00.000+01:002019-12-01T15:46:20.179+01:00At the heart of things<br />
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<br />
First the world appeared and then it disappeared. Sometimes
because it covered itself in darkness or hid in low hanging clouds.
Sometimes because my gaze was directed inwards instead of outwards.
Nature does that. It draws you in. And when you withdraw into yourself
it is only because you are nature as well. In your smallness you are a
world in itself. A world within a world. Moving through both at the same
time. In matching speed sometimes, slower or faster in one than the
other at times. The stones in my pockets rattling in the rhythm of my
steps.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-63783279726570884192019-11-24T09:48:00.004+01:002019-11-25T22:51:17.931+01:00Morning song<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Sunday morning. The starling is doing its daily broadcast from the
neighbour's antenna. Old tunes and new ones. We are listening.<br />
<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-12064091474059331632019-11-24T09:47:00.001+01:002019-11-24T09:47:26.851+01:00always the sea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-3522090167050030322019-09-09T14:27:00.001+02:002019-09-09T14:30:04.781+02:00BirdwatchingI call this work. To sit under the trees - not in the chair I usually
sit in, because it is occupied - and look at the tiny bird, sitting on
the back of my usual chair, almost a perfect ball with its fluffed up
feathers. The deep black when he opens his beak to sing, the bright
orange or red - in my mothertongue he is called the redbreasted one,
roodborstje -, the movement of the head when he stops his singing and
listens attentively to the other birds. His song is beautiful.<span class="text_exposed_show"> It makes me think of spring, even when I can smell the autumn in the air. A birdsong is a beginning. <br />
He sings for ten minutes maybe. He looks at me. Robins are curious
creatures. They come up to you when you work in the garden, drink your
coffee, paint the windowsills of your forest house in a pale sky-blue. I
hardly ever see them in the city but I hear them at night, when I am
still behind my computer after 4. Just after the hour of the wolf. They
are the first birds to welcome the day, even before there is daylight.
They are calling it in. And then when it is there, they celebrate it in
their song.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-44867413361440007212019-08-28T09:22:00.000+02:002019-08-28T15:23:52.594+02:00Cookie overload<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Some days even while starting the day with a walk through the city
instead of opening the computer one can be confronted with cookie
overload.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-9989482984814733092019-08-27T10:47:00.001+02:002019-08-27T10:52:03.803+02:00seedsonce, as a child<br />
when i ate an apple and swallowed the seeds<br />
i panicked<br />
imagining the seeds would sprout inside of me<br />
a tree growing from my stomach<br />
the branches piercing through my skin<br />
until i would burst and die <br />
and the tree would live on<br />
<br />
my mother found me <br />
in tears and held me<br />
and told me i would live<br />
she told me the seeds remain in the body <br />
too short to start a baby tree<br />
and explained how the acids in your stomach<br />
kill the seeds anyway<br />
somehow that made me sad as well<br />
<br />
when i die<br />
bury me under an apple treeUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-4614674584765311762019-08-08T16:39:00.001+02:002019-08-08T17:58:29.584+02:00Identifying seeds<br />
I often wonder what the use is of writing about a walk
after you made it. It is kind of a walk in itself but much harder (or
harder in a different way) than the actual moving through the world that
is the starting point for this new adventure. The lingering, the
waiting, the not knowing how to proceed during a proper walk is more
enjoyable. You know you will finish it. You know you will reach your
goal. You know the boring or tough bits will lead to wonderful
experiences. Because it always works like that. Actually you also know
it works like this when you are writing. You just have to continue and
things you could not have foreseen will happen. When writing fiction, it
happens when something new and unexpected comes out of your hands, your
head. When a combination of words expresses something in a way you
weren’t sure you would manage to achieve. Or you didn't even know you
wanted to say. When writing non-fiction, which is usually partially
fiction as well, it sometimes happens when you research and discover
things you didn’t know when you walked into what brought you that
knowledge later. Sometimes it even connects with your present state in
mysterious ways, sitting behind a desk staring at your computer and
taking breaks now and then on your balcony, drinking coffee and staring
at the statue of Rafael Casanova on the other side of the street, the
same statue the writer you bumped into during your walk was standing
next to when he was arrested because of his political activities.<br />
<br />
I
sometimes say I walk to find stories. I sometimes wonder if that sounds
silly or pathetic or sounds as if I’m trying to go with the current
popularity of storytelling. But even if I would call it differently,
that is what happens. Maybe it isn’t the main goal, I still haven’t
figured that out. And anyway, it isn’t that important to have a main
goal.<br />
<br />
I only walked for three days. I've been writing
about it for many more days now. Making detours, watching old episodes
of "Planeta Azul', Blue Planet, not the recent BBC series by David
Attenborough but black and white movies, made by "the father of Spanish
environmentalism" Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente, wondering what he would
be doing now if he wouldn't have died in a plane crash on his birthday
in Alaska in the 80's. (It is said that his last words before he got on
the little Cessna were: "This is a beautiful place to die). Diving into
the history of "Els Pastorets", the
little shepherds. Looking into the drystone huts that are all over the
Catalan countryside. Remembering small conversations with people on the
road. Thinking about laws and rules and ownership. Identifying seeds.
Both literally and metaphorically.<br />
<br />
Here's a little bit:<br />
<br />
(Day 2)<br />
<br />
What
was the connection between all these memorials dedicated to completely
different people in the middle of a forest? The virgin Mary, the Catalan
writer Josep M. Folch i Torres, Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente - the
Spanish David Attenborough - and the unnamed victims of the third
Carlist war? And what about the stone dinosaur? And the personification
of the sea? Was it all a personal project? Who had been in charge here?
Was there some sort of youth movement involved? Like the wooden building
(clubhouse?) and the recreation area at the end of the strange driveway
suggested? One of the monuments was constructed in the “Any de la
Juventud 1985”, another in the “Any internacional de l’infant 1979”. And
Folch i Torres became famous as a writer for children. Were camps being
organised here yearly or every couple of years and did they build a new
memorial every time? When I googled “Juventud” and “St Llorenc de
Savall” I found something completely different. An announcent from 2018
about the destruction of “el orfanato encantado del general Franco”, the
haunted orphanage of general Franco. Apparently in this small community
a huge building was constructed during his dictatorship that housed 200
young children, some without parents, some just “difficult children”
who couldn’t live at home. Unsurprisingly, the regime was very strict
and from the beginning on, there were rumours about strange apparations
and inexplicable sounds, defined as paranormal activity. On YouTube
there are videos of people who lived there as kids and claim they saw
nuns standing at the end of their beds at night, silent and motionless.
Which inspired inquisitive young men in more recent years to spend the
night at the abandoned building, wandering through the endless rooms
with shattered windows, filled with broken furniture, sheets of paper,
toys, filming with their GoPro cameras. But that is a different story.
There are always so many layers, so many pieces of history in every
village. Maybe they are connected somehow, maybe the only connection is
that it happened in the same area.<br />
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<br />
<br />
(I am still trying
to figure out why this odd monument has a penguin on top of it.
Rodrigues de la Fuente was especially known for his love of falcons and
falconry and his struggle for the survival of the wolf. It can't be
because he died in Alaska. Unless the maker made the mistake a lot of
people make, thinking that penguins live wherever there is snow and ice.
There are no penguins in the Northern hemisphere though).<br />
<br />
The
road turned red, ochre. Became wider. Suitable for cars although no car
passed me. The stones on both sides had the same colour. A striking
contrast with the yellow flowers and the green bushes and trees. It was
this ochre that once inspired Picasso, not here but not so far away, in
Gósol, where I was during another walk. The cycadas in the pine trees
were so loud and their sound was so rhythmical I stopped walking and
stood still for a while to listen to them. The blue sky was turning grey
again. Another summer storm coming up. This time I wasn’t so lucky as
the day before. No proper shelter and the first drops of rain turned
into a continuous flow quite quickly. I chose some big trees inbetween
two fields to keep me dry. They barely did, it was pouring down and the
wind was so violent it turned cold. Nothing my rainponcho couldn’t
withstand though. I hid in it as if it was a tent, waiting 15, 30, 45
minutes …. then it stopped and I walked into the field only to see that
the sky was pitchblack and even heavier with rain. I inspected the other
side and found a cavity in the rocks where a big piece had broken off
and fallen down on the ground just in front of it. It was barely big
enough but with my legs bend I just fitted in there and the rain didn’t
reach me. It was odd to sit in this space where a rock had been and
stare at the rock lying just two meters away from me. Lightning,
thunder, more rain. It lasted forever. It was beautiful though. I
stretched a limb now and then and looking at the rock I tried to imagine
I was the rock but you need to spend more time on it if you want to
achieve that. A lifetime maybe. An hour passed and then it was over. No
wind, the sky a shy blue again and then the sun, so forceful that the
wet layer evaporated and everything became shrouded in a silvery mist.
The word magnificent is in place here. I unrocked myself, it was six ‘o
clock already, three and a half hours left to find a place to sleep
before the evening would fall.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-62623674483662141592019-07-31T13:02:00.000+02:002019-07-31T13:14:14.662+02:00A stone protruding from the ground<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There was a small stone in my mail box. It was sent to me all the way from Serbia. Freya Gabie had passed it while walking into Čačak and picked it up. It was dark grey, although that might not have been the original colour. It could have been brown or more blueish. Four centimeters long, flat at the base and narrowing towards the rounded top. The kind of stone I like to hold in my hand. It was light as a feather.<br />
<br />
I googled Čačak. It is located in the western part of central Serbia, within the region of Šumadija. Once densely forested, today the region is characterized by its rolling hills and its fruit trees. It has around 75.000 inhabitants and is near the Ovčar-Kablar Gorge, which houses 12 different monasteries. The original name of the town was Gradac, which means “little town”, used when it developed around the Moravski Gradac monastery but in 1409 it was mentioned in an official document as Čačak. The word has disappeared from the Serbian language today but dictionaries from the 19th and 20th century and works from major linguists mention the word čačak, meaning lumps of frozen or dried mud or lumps of stone protruding from the ground. I don’t know if Freya knew this when she picked up this stone.<br />
<br />
The stone was there already, maybe not in the same location but in existence, when the refugee Pavel Kiprianovitch walked from Bulgaria to France, carrying a Nansen passport. They were internationally recognised refugee travel documents, used inbetween 1922 and 1938, first issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees. They got their name from the polar explorer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen who promoted them. It was the time after the first World War, four world empires had been destroyed: the German, Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian and many people were displaced. Around 450.000 Nansen passports were distributed, famous holders of Nansen passports include Robert Capa, Marc Chagall, Vladimir Nabokov, Sergei Rachmaninov and Igor Stravinsky but most of them were people like Pavel Kiprianovitch, whose name is only known because his passport is still there. He was 34, of normal constitution, average height, he had brown eyes, blond hair, an oval face, no moustache or beard. Profession says: ouvrier, worker.<br />
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Freya Gabie, an artist from the UK, retraced his journey with the help of his passport. His route, from Bulgaria northwest across Europe, is the same that many displaced people today are making from the war-torn countries of the Middle East, a further reason for Freya to explore it. For those current displaced people, sadly, there is no Nansen passport to help them cross borders and make their journeys easier and safer.<br />
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It is unknown what Pavel saw when he made his way through Europe. Freya took photos while travelling and I looked at them on her website. A lot of things must have been different when Pavel was on the road but some things haven’t changed. The stones were already there then and have been long before Pavel and other refugees moved around, trying to find a new home. Silent witnesses, drawn with care and attention and sent around by Freya while she was travelling. <br />
<br />
I don’t know much more about Freya then I do about Pavel. I know what she looks like in more detail because I saw her photo on Facebook. There is no photo of Pavelon on his passport, just a description. I never met Freya, she reached out to me when she was preparing her journey, one artist keen on building bridges between the past and the present writing another artist who is doing something similar. I thank Pavel Kiprianovitch for that. I am honoured to have received this stone. <br />
<br />
More about Freya’s project Hold the Line here: <a href="https://www.freyagabie.com/hold-the-line">https://www.freyagabie.com/hold-the-line</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-79593982731879446432019-07-25T14:35:00.000+02:002019-08-01T14:39:43.319+02:00One way to (not) enter home<br />
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<br />
I am a book addict. I taught myself a long time ago that when I fall for a book in a bookshop, I go home without buying it and if it stays on my mind long enough I will go and get it. Or order it online. But it is better to go back to the bookshop and hold it in your hands again. Maybe put it back once more but if you return for it again, it will be yours. <br />
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There was a book once in the bookshop next to the CCCB, the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona I broused through every time I came there. It was the title that had attracted my attention. And the small drawing underneath it. Modos de (no) entrar a casa. Ways of (not) entering home. A drawing of a house that was a rain cloud, an umbrella holding the house or catching the rain. I wanted to buy it the first time I saw it but I didn’t. And I didn’t all the other times it winked at me. If it would have been in Engish I probably would have but it was a few years ago and my Spanish was not sufficient and I told myself that was a good reason to buy it because I could use it to learn but I also knew there were still a couple of unread Spanish books on my shelves I had bought with the same excuse.<br />
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After a while I forgot about the book. <br />
<br />
Today was a hot day. I wanted to leave the house. I didn’t want to leave the house. It is often like that. I wanted to be elsewhere but I didn’t want to go. There was a performance by a writer and visual artist I like. I don’t know her work very well but I read her last novel, Brother in Ice, originally written in Catalan and I liked it a lot. Before the book there was a series of exhibitions in which she explored the explorations of people who were obsessed by the poles. The cold and white far south and north. The book is a mix of stories and facts. Science and fiction. But really the opposite of science-fiction. Heading into the other direction. Not out there but deep down. Inside. Into a similar unknown. Dark as a black hole. Or bright as a white one.<br />
<br />
I went. This time it was closer to science-fiction. A performance about the possible relationship between a woman and a non-person. About Artificial Intelligence. A woman in a bed and a drone flying over her head, landing next to her. Her soft back almost touching the cold metal of the machine. In the gallery space there were drawings that looked like scientific drawings. Wormholes. A text as a drawing in a circle. <br />
<br />
<i>There are tiny black holes<br />their whole event horizon fits in your hand<br />If you enter, they tear you apart</i><br />
<br />
There was the documentation of her communication with the gallery owner. <br />
<br />
<i>“Asi que a la gente como yo, que nos dedicamos a la minería de metales precioseos del alma, no nos queda otra que meternos en zonas difíciles, tratar con metales pesados y presenciar o vivir ciertas colisiones. E incluso entrar en ese horizonte de sucesos que parece lanzarnos de una dimensión a otra. Deberían existir esas lineas tan claras de los manuales de ciencia que delimitan donde están las fronteras de las cosas y nos dicen su nombre (por ello me gusta tanto el dibujo cientifico, porque hace el mundo tranquilizador y comprensible, aunque las lineas sean tan humanas y ficticias).”</i><br />
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<i>“So for people like me, who are dedicated to mining the precious metals of the soul, there is no choice but to get into difficult areas, deal with heavy metals and witness or experience certain collisions. And even enter that horizon of events that seem to throw us from one dimension to another. Those clears lines that are in science manuals that define where the boundaries of things are and tell us their name should exist (that's why I like scientific drawings so much, because they make the world soothing and understandable, even if the lines are so human and fictional).”</i> *<br />
<br />
After the performance I went to get a beer at the entrance of the gallery. And there was the book. Modos de (no) entrar a casa. By Alicia Kopf. Of course. I asked the woman handing out the beers if I could buy it. She told me they had only this one, it was not for sale and as far as she knew, it wasn’t in the shops anymore. <br />
<br />
Next day I went to the place where I had seen it first. Nothing. I checked online. Sold out everywhere. Maybe it will be reprinted one day. Or I will find an old one somewhere. Until that day I’ll enjoy longing for something I could have easily had. Or maybe not. “If I would have known …. “ is useless. Politicians misuse it often: “With the knowledge we have now we wouldn’t have …. “<br />
<br />
It is often like that in life, timing has to be right. There is nothing you can do about that. You can look back and regret but it is better to look back and smile. <br />
<br />
* my own translation in EnglishUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-36300464079336987452019-07-23T14:53:00.000+02:002019-07-23T14:57:41.017+02:00High time to build a dragonfly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I read a beautiful text by a friend on Facebook yesterday. We never met. But five years ago she sent me a big envelope. I never replied to it properly but I take it with me to every new home. I took it out today and broused through it. I put on the ring and maybe I will wear it until she is where she belongs. Soon it seems. In the meantime I will write an answer to her questions as if they are my questions. And in a way they are. Her answers are on the other side of the paper. I didn’t read them yet. <br />
<br />
It will be time to build the dragonfly soon. It has been waiting for five years.<br />
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<br />
Here’s Mimi’s text:<br />
<br />
my kind of people dance<br />
read write eat walk talk<br />
light candles<br />
but not 50<br />
every night<br />
they know how to tell stories<br />
how to look out of windows<br />
how to spot a poet<br />
they don't do too much for you<br />
& because their occipital bone is soft<br />
they're ok with you not showing up<br />
but keep telling you they want you to<br />
because they want you to<br />
no other motive<br />
my kind of people are different<br />
without needing to be<br />
they do things because they want to<br />
not because they think they have to<br />
they know you are their best audience<br />
they aren't waiting for something<br />
better to come along<br />
they sing & know the words to songs<br />
they know how to whistle but rarely do<br />
they go out walking alone<br />
& when you are out walking alone<br />
you find them again & again<br />
as if you were in orbit<br />
my kind of people<br />
keep inviting you<br />
we'd love to see you<br />
come<br />
they make old family recipes<br />
they eat with their hands<br />
they always say something before they drink<br />
& they look you in the eye<br />
without it having to be a game<br />
they save things<br />
& can show you them<br />
things you sent them long ago<br />
my kind of people<br />
don't bring their phones to dinner<br />
or out walking or to bed<br />
my kind of people aren't rushed<br />
or bathed or newly shod<br />
they all own folding knives<br />
& crossdress without question<br />
& stand close enough to you<br />
without it being awkward<br />
hugging them is never awkward<br />
my kind of people grab the bottle<br />
& pour yours first<br />
they smile real smiles<br />
they don't bounce when they walk<br />
they aren't mesmerized by you<br />
they are curious & glide<br />
as they ask about your art<br />
because they want to know<br />
but objects never trump the moment<br />
the moment is fit for real exchange<br />
goodbye is a big deal with my kind of people<br />
whole faces light up & go out<br />
<br />
- mimi allan<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-5310674477715076812019-06-01T15:05:00.000+02:002019-07-23T15:06:03.517+02:00ElsewhereIn June you can find me in the Middle of Nothing: <a href="http://themiddleofnothing.blogspot.com/">http://themiddleofnothing.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-71249048279509776292019-05-21T13:04:00.000+02:002019-05-21T13:04:01.538+02:00this is where the clouds grow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-21618123676799878662019-05-20T14:25:00.001+02:002019-05-20T22:35:13.390+02:00When we had wings<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span data-offset-key="d7cd7-0-0"><span data-text="true">Sometimes
the name of things, people, animals, are exactly what you see. I was
reminded of that yesterday, when being asked: </span></span><span data-offset-key="d7cd7-0-0"><span data-text="true">What is that black bird roaming around under that tree?" by somebody who grew up in a city. I sang the first line of a Beatles song.
And today, remembering it, and smiling about it, it reminded me of a
friend. She was called Marybird once, I don’t know if she still uses
that name but I do when I think about her. Sometimes you don’t see with
your eyes. And sometimes you do with different eyes. She once took a
photo of me walking through the mountains with a backpack. When I had
wings. </span></span><br />
<span data-offset-key="d7cd7-0-0"><span data-text="true"><br /></span></span>
We lived with goats, harvested corn, watched eagles fly, recorded
windmills crying, we measured things with our body and lived a story
that has never taken flight but traces of it are caught by our cameras. <br />
<span data-offset-key="d7cd7-0-0"><span data-text="true"><br /></span></span>
<span data-offset-key="d7cd7-0-0"><span data-text="true">Remembering good things is a bit like flying.</span></span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-47444579754463600142019-05-19T17:53:00.001+02:002020-04-19T15:18:21.557+02:00On the edge of the middle of nothing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I failed. I was supposed to be at a beautiful city garden at 12.00 to watch a silent movie with a soundtrack made by a dj and drink vermut afterwards. I had reserved a ticket a long time ago. <br />
I left in time. I skipped the first metro entrance because it involves a long walk through underground tunnels to the tracks. I wanted to take the second one but it was closed. I was redirected to the next one and I just saw the metro drive off but there would be another one in 4 minutes. It wasn’t. But it was there in 6. I would be a little bit late but with some luck not too much to be denied entrance. The metro was crowded. At the next stop more people entered. And more at the next one. Verdaguer. Verdaguer? No. That wasn’t right. I got out just in time. Wrong direction. Where was my mind? A soundtrack started in my head. The Pixies.<br />
<br />
Up the stairs, around to the other platform. It was almost 12. I would be very late. Too late. I took the tram back to where I started. Go home? The sun was shining. Maybe there would be an empty table at the square next to the church. Coffee instead of vermut. Watching the real life movie in vivid colours instead of a silent black-and-white one.<br />
<br />
There was an empty table. And there were books in my iPad. A good day for Christian Bobin, The Eight Day. <i>“The eighth day is the day that follows the Jewish Sabbath when God rested from creating. It is thus beyond time.”</i> It is a collection of essays, starting with “The eighth day of the week”. It is one of his early texts and all his principal themes are already present: childhood, nature, death, time and timelessness, the role of writing in the life of the writer, and that of the writer as translator and interpreter of what he sees. <br />
<br />
<i>“Unable to write, and living out a penitantial time that sheds its hours as a tree sheds leaves, I read. I devour books, and not a word brings succour. It’s a common enough experience: this gulf between weighty knowledge, as embalmed in books or moral laws, and the breezy mood of life as it passes. One can be a mine of learning and spend one’s life in total ignorance of life. It is not the books that are to blame, but the meagreness of our desire, the narrow limits of our dreaming.”</i><br />
I looked up, just in time to see a small boy walking over from the table next to mine to his neighbours or more specifically: to their big old golden retriever who was lying on the floor. The boy kissed the strangers’ dog on its forehead. His parents waved him back but he refused, got down on his knees and hugged the dog as if he would never let go of him again. His mother tried again in vain so his father walked over to pick him up. He didn’t want to let go of the dog and was about to start crying but when he heard the magic word, the dog was forgotten. Patatas! As yellow as his sweater. The waiter had just put them on the table. And his excitement got even bigger when he discovered that he hadn’t finished his pineapple juice. The sounds he made while drinking it became my new favorite soundtrack. After the patatas and the juice he wanted his father’s glasses and looking through them he laughed as if the whole world had turned into a carnaval. Then the empty chairs had to be dragged to the middle of the square so he could sit next to the fountain. I thought it was a splendid idea. His parents didn’t.<br />
<br />
I continued Bobin because I suddenly remembered how it ended. I read the pages too fast to get there quickly: <i>“To a child who asked me, ‘what is beauty?’ - and it could only be a child, for that is the only age that hankers after lightning and frets about what matters - I should answer: beauty is in all things that move away after once brushing your skin. Beauty is in the radical instability - a loss of balance and of voice - that the passing touch of a white wing provokes in us. Beauty is the sum of those things that pass through us, unaware of us, and suddenly intensifying the lightness of being …. I would tell him that a book is like a song, that it’s nothing, that it’s for saying all that can’t be said, and I would cut up an orange for him. We’d carry on walking late into the evening. In the silence we’d discover at last, he and I, the answer to his question. In the luminous vastness of a silence that words caress without disturbing it.”</i><br />
<br />
The sun was still shining but when I got home I heard thunder in the distance, even before the sky turned grey. My plants were cheering. Then the rain started falling down. A message popped up on my Facebook saying that the other thing I had planned to go to, an outdoor music event, was cancelled. So I stayed inside. Everything seemed to be failing today. But beautifully. I made more coffee. Liquid happiness. And even more so when drank from a handcrafted ceramic cup, rough on the outside but after you’ve enjoyed your coffee you see it is smooth and shiny on the inside. Like life itself, from time to time.<br />
<br />
While I was wondering if this last line wasn’t too tacky, my computer screen turned black. It wasn’t the first time. A few weeks ago it stopped warning me when it was running out of power and was in coma for two days, just until the moment I was about to screw it open to see if I could revive the battery. I am trying to keep it plugged in now but sometimes I forget. On days like this apparently. <br />
<br />
It restarted, the programs reopened, I held my breath but the freshly typed words were still here. Time had moved backwards though, Thursday 1 January 2015, 01.14. It took longer than normal to reconnect to the modem and in the minute or two it lasted, I tried to remember where I had been at that time on the first day of 2015. It wasn’t hard to remember. The first hours of the day I was supposed to be in Barcelona to start a new life in a new year but had failed to leave the Netherlands. On a white plastic chair in a forest staring at the stars, drinking my father’s wodka. But that’s a whole different story and I already told that one here elsewhere. How he failed to live, one of the rare circumstances in which you can’t tell somebody that it is ok to fail and, like Samuel Beckett said, try again, fail again, fail better.<br />
<br />
The computer switched back to Sunday May 19th, 16:04, later than I wanted it to be but lingering in the past sometimes does that, it catapults you further into the future than you would like. <br />
<br />
Bobin writes: <i>“We fail our lives. We fail everything. What is strange in fact is that grace still gets to us, when we do all we can to render ourselves unreachable. What is strange is that - thanks to a wait, a look, or a laugh - we sometimes gain access to that eighth day of the week, which neither dawns nor dies in the context of time. It is in the hope of such things that I live, and it is under that light that I write, savouring the beauty of each passing day. Writing is doubtless vain, and there is no guarantee that it prevents the night from coming, none whatsoever, but, after all, it can seem just as vain to love, sing or pick the first periwinkles - pale and tender as though emerging from a long illness - to bring them into the empty room.”</i><br />
<br />
I often have the feeling I am wasting my time writing. But sometimes I don’t know what else to do and then I just write. Today, or actually yesterday or last week, but latest today, I was supposed to finally write a text for my new blog, to explain about “The Middle of Nothing” which is the title I chose for the project I will start next weekend. I can’t get my fingers around it. Which in a way makes sense:<br />
<br />
The middle of nothing<br />
Doesn’t exist<br />
Unless you know where the borders are<br />
But you don’t<br />
When you are in the middle of it<br />
<br />
Maybe today I have been writing from there. Maybe I failed well.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-26535623660227199242019-05-18T18:00:00.002+02:002019-05-18T18:09:54.239+02:00wor(l)ds<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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writing inkless words here but painting memories with the natural inks we made at Estudio Nomada yesterday at the same time<br />
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(colour samples by Nadine Rauterberg)<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1882092260056633706.post-38559909025285245212019-04-24T14:37:00.004+02:002019-04-24T14:37:50.735+02:00The sea and the sky were restless today<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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