The story continues

I went to my favorite hairdresser yesterday, one of the small luxuries I allow myself. When I left for Barcelona in February he suggested giving me my next haircut on the beach over there since he would be coming over for the Primavera music festival. I won’t be there though, so I went to see him in Amsterdam and he will be my eyes and ears at the festival.

My hair has never been so short. I hope I didn’t loose all my wild hairs. Or maybe I lost my last tame ones.

One Saturday morning in April when I woke up after one of the great GLOVE parties organised and attended by a wonderful group of people who made me feel at home in Barcelona, I looked in the mirror and noticed that the glitter somebody had sprinkled in my hair during a moment on the dance floor and my grey hairs that have come with walking around on this planet for 42 year were shiny in a similar way.

Being here again in Amsterdam I realize that my happiness comes from a fluidity I achieved in my relations. Relations with things, with the world, but most importantly: with people. I talked about it with somebody who’s name I don’t remember or maybe never asked at an event in the mountains not too far from Barcelona, 250 Burners (basing their life on the principles of Burning Man, sharing, leave no trace, radical inclusiveness a.o.) spending time together, talking, sharing, dancing, connecting. Another family I became part of.

Tomorrow I will continue the journey that started on a bus at night in Spain last Monday. I am on my way to the Nomadic Village, where I also belong. Another tribe, people who wear tails, cook tasty food, think about wandering and wondering, build homes wherever they are, make the world their home.

On my way I will meet two Nomads travelling Europa in 'Mistress Enid Abbott', their converted mini-bus and home since several years . I will reconnect with a seamstress who uses her sewing machine to make music. I will visit a permaculture friend in the middle of a big city. I will cross paths with Jodi Rose who records the sounds of bridges around the world and like me was a BridgeGuard on the Slovak-Hungarian border once. I will see a Walking Artist I only know through Facebook and I will stay with a “DirtyDesigner” in a villa just outside Münich.

I miss my Barcelona friends but I am looking forward to meet old ones and makes new ones. New connections. Fluid relations. Walk. Think. Make art. Write. Set out new lines. Connect.

And again I am thinking of Craigie Horsfield (artist, photographer), like I did many times before, trying to understand what he is saying, having the feeling I'm on my way:

“As we read each of us experiences differently, we are within this, we place ourselves towards others, so that there is the story, here on the page, the story we bring as readers, and that which is between us: this complex of relation. We attend to this between, the story and ourselves, bring our experiences, our stories of our experience, recognise and in our recognising enter into our own lives. This is our engagement as audience, these tenacious, these “sticky” connections, the things we bring with us, understanding, enquiry, compassion perhaps...This is something which happens now between us. In this action is described art, and it could be said of a picture, an event, a gesture, a shadow; but it is in the between, and if this between fails there remains only separating detritus: information, document or witness, unrealised, inert, sterile matter. But this misleading is perhaps misleading as though it were space, distance, and separation, when it is rather place, our present being. This is how the world occurs, and not in parts but entire and presently, the way we happen.”

"Art as conversation, dialogue, and negotiation is, within the generative relation of thinking together, part of an attention to the world. These are the traces of an epic, of individual lives and of a people, ourselves. Taking place in the present, we are, in our acknowledgment of self with others, together in history, realized, becoming, through our conversation, through that very being together. The present, such as it is, is in our relation. In this is the confluence of relation as becoming together and relation as "telling".

(from the Introduction in "Relation")

Old clothes

I was lucky in the bus leaving from Barcelona. The vehicle was packed, all the seats were taken apart from the one next to me. I was looking forward to having some space and silence to be in my leaving. But just after we left a girl walked up from the front, started talking to the two girls sitting in front of me and asked me if I would mind if she would seat herself next to me so she could talk to her friend. My first thought was “yes, I do”. I like being on my own. But who am I to keep three friends apart on a journey home? So I said “yes” and smiled at her and she seated herself next to me and started talking, asking me all the questions she could think of. She chatted with her friends and I felt a bit disappointed about not being able to sink in my memories but I felt far happier about hosting this small encounter. I realized it is the people that shape me just as much as a I shape myself and I can be on my own whenever I want. I like their company more than I ever did. The hermit in me has found its place in the world.

Here I am, in the house I once called home. The birds just woke up and I did as well. I wasn’t sure if my day has just ended or a new one has just begun. I smoked a cigarette and thought about all the people I met in the last 2,5 years since I decided I wanted to change my life and did as told by myself. I thought about the roads I walked, the things I saw, old and new friends, the men and women I kissed, the early mornings wandering silent Barcelona streets, the sea, the sun, the discovery of dancing. I thought of a country where there is one word for hoping and waiting. I thought of Calvino and Basho and Whitman and Perec and Thoreau. I thought of my suits, the one I arrived in and looks so worn out on the last photo of me in Barcelona where coincidentally the word “barcelone” is floating in golden letters over my head like a halo. 

I am embarking on a new adventure. I will return. And the adventure won't be in the time inbetween now and then, in the 10 countries I will visit for five seperate art projects, but the adventure will be in the returning. I will return to stay. I never did that before. So I don't know if I am able to. But I've got an old suit I can wear. I wear it now, while writing.

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.”

- Henry David Thoreaux, Walden

when here is always somewhere else

I came home. 

I didn’t like arriving in Amsterdam. It isn’t my city anymore and it never really was.

I realised I didn’t know where my house keys were. Normally I make sure I’ve got them when I travel back but this time I hadn't thought about it for a second.

The same tram, the same street, the crowds of people. 

I found my house keys and I wondered if everything inside had changed now I “officially” left. When I sent a message earlier today about what time I would be back, I almost wrote “19.30 I’ll be home”. It is what I thought but when I had written “be” I wondered if “home” was the right word. I wrote it down anyway. Twice. The last one with a question mark.

I opened the front door and the first thing I saw were the Buddhist prayer flags I hung in the living room once. They were in the hallway now. Maybe inside all my traces would have been gone.

But they weren’t. It was as if I had never left and it was a good feeling. All my books were there and the collections of odd objects Albert and I collected through the years. I saw the c.d. I had received as a present a few weeks ago and to which I’d been listening all my way back here. We had been listening to the same c.d. in the last weeks.

I walked outside into the little garden. I saw the failed clay objects I made a long time ago lying where they had always been lying. The plants Andrée gave us, because she knew about what lives in the shade, were doing well. The blackbird was singing. I said hello to my four big snails. I imagened they had grown but they couldn’t have after their wintersleep. The chestnut tree had new leaves and the lilac had already bloomed, I had seen the flowers standing inside.

It is a nice little garden, I always liked it but never put a lot of energy in it. And now I thought “So many things I ..... “ but I stopped before the “could”. I don’t want to use those words anymore. Could have and should have. You can’t change the past and I don’t want to change the past. I’ve got a beautiful past and it was a good time in this house. I refused to call it home for a long time but it has been my home. And in a way it still is.

Because I am here. 

I am good at being here. You have to be when you are always leaving and when here is always somewhere else.

reading life in barcelona

the beautiful game of life

Today is my parents wedding anniversary. They would have been married 43 years today. I never have to search for the number because I am as many years old as they have been married. It was because of me they had to promise each other to stay together forever. They were both children from big families, living in a small traditional village in the east of the Netherlands. When you got pregnant, you got married. You promised each other to stay together through good times and bad times. And they did. For more than 42 years. "Until death do us part." They raised three daughters, gave them the best childhood possible. I am unendlessly grateful for that.

Sometimes I wonder what their lives would have been like if they wouldn’t have had me, if they wouldn’t have been “forced” to get married. Would they have still married each other at some point? Would they have made completely different choices? I know there is no use in thinking like that. Things happen and you go from there and at any moment you are free to do whatever you want. You can make your own decisions. And I am fortunate to have been raised in a way that made it easier for me to make my own choices than it has been for them.

8 september 2012 I wrote a post on one of my blogs. I was in my first 3-piece walking suit, walking from one side of Belgium to the other side, together with a big group of artists. That day I quoted a line I had read:

 
“The greatest sin a man can commit is to not be happy.”

I wrote “I agree, but it's hard. And maybe it should be. I've been a sinner myself. Trying to change (I'm in the right direction!). And in the meantime being comforted by the knowledge that I'm in good company. Here's Borges:

Remorse

I have committed the worst of sins
One can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Take and engulf me, mercilessly.
My parents bore me for the risky
And the beautiful game of life,
For earth, water, air and fire.
I failed them, I was not happy.
Their youthful hope for me unfulfilled.
I applied my mind to the symmetric
Arguments of art, its web of trivia.
They willed me bravery. I was not brave.
It never leaves me. Always at my side,
That shadow of a melancholy man.”

Almost two weeks after I wrote this, after I quoted Borges, I turned 40. Already a while before, I had decided some things had to change in my life. I had decided that when I turned 40, it was time to be really happy. As far as possible. Not a neverending state of bliss but living in the feeling I was doing the right things, that I was enjoying life, that I made sense to myself and other people.

I decided I wouldn’t stop walking. Walking made me happy. By being slow I added meaning to the world, it made me meet people, it created opportunities for new connections, opportunities to become aware of the things happening around me and to create awareness. To make a difference in a small way. To be in relation with the world. To fall in love with the world and the people in it.

It worked. It is a slow process but I am in no hurry. I like slowness. And 2,5 years after I decided to be happy I can actually say I am. I am happy, I am at the right place at the right time. Today it is Barcelona but in two weeks it will be somewhere else. And who knows where it will be a year from now.

I will be in the same body though. My soft armour. Walking on my two feet.

Today is a happysad day. Sad because I can’t tell my father how happy I am now, here. Happy because I spent 43 years with him. And happy because I can tell my mom.

Thank you so much! I love you mom, I love you dad.

a golden day

it is always sad when love ends

but i believe it doesn’t disappear

it remains somewhere until somebody else embraces it

today was a monday and i decided to wear the gold i had found on the streets

golden tights, a golden sweater, a yellow dress, a glittery scarve and my favorite jacket, embellished with golden frinches and buttons

a golden monday, a day to sit on the golden sand and listen to the waves

i brought the cup somebody gifted me in the weekend on a party

i brought wine and cheese and olives

and a book, the haiku master Matsuo Bashō’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.”*

on my way to the sea i found a grey sweater with a red heart in a garbage container

“i love barcelona”

but there was a big hole in the heart

i wondered if the wearer had gotten tired of the sweater or of the city

i love barcelona

i don’t really need a sweater to show that

and i like how the city gives me gold to wear and a cup that makes me think

i sat in the sand on the sweater and drank wine from the teacup

reading the Oscar Wilde quote on the inside of the rim

 “a dreamer is one who can only find his way home by moonlight”

the night i was given the cup i was dancing with friends

we had glitter in our hair, it was a new moon night

and since we are all dreamers and there was no moonlight we realised there was no way we would find our way home in the dark

so we waited for the morning birds to guide us

in the far distance i saw the barcelona casino

a golden building shaped like a wave

and i wondered if today, this golden day, i should take myself in my golden outfit to that place

i wondered if it might be my lucky day

and i realised it was

so i stayed where i was

when the sun set behind my back

and the sand turned from golden to beige again

i walked home slowly, bashō on my mind

when you find true love

take it to a golden beach 

sit on it in awe

* haiku is the shortest among the traditionally acceptep forms of Japanese poetry. It consists of seventeen syllables, divided into three sections of five-seven-five. Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) is recognized as the greatest master of haiku. An ardent student of Zen Buddhism, he wrote a lot of his poetry on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment.

running to be slow

“I wonder how it is that people's philosophies have come to spin faster than the changing seasons.”
― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

It is the first time since long I woke up with the uneasy feeling. I tried to escape it by staying in the state between sleeping and being awake but something was nibbling on my guts. A presentation tomorrow and an exhibition on Saturday. Only two weeks left in Barcelona and then on the road to do projects and attend meetings in 12 countries in the next 5 months. There is a shipload of planning to do. Trains and planes and walks. What to bring. What to store where. Meditations about skipping travelling fast through air which involves even more complicated planning. Where to be when. What to do and why.

When you don’t know the best thing is to sit still. So I sat on my balcony and erased all the thinking. One thing came back in my mind. Masanobu Fukuoka’s words. “The best planning is no planning”.

I almost forgot about the One Straw Revolution, about “the Fukuoka Method”, a natural way of farming based on the recognition of the complexity of living organisms that shape an ecosystem. Fukuoka saw farming not just as a means of producing food but as an aesthetic and spiritual approach to life, the ultimate goal of which was "the cultivation and perfection of human beings". To grow people by growing crops. To achieve the most by doing the least. By listening and observing.

I want to grow things.

I forgot to be slow by being slow. I am running around to plan opportunities to be slow.

I could plan being really slow from October on but who knows if I am still alive by then? On the other hand: if I am not it doesn’t matter what I did the five months before. As long as I enjoyed them.

Let’s see. First today. Then tomorrow. 

                                         (snail running)