Pink directions

The city I live in is generous with her gifts. The plants I found on the street together with their naked guardian angel (she appears to be half woman, half plant, a soilmaid) a few weeks ago have been producing pink flowers ever since. Yesterday a notebook, pink as well, still in its original wrapping, saying "Do what you love". So I did this morning, I walked to the sea and on my way there I thought about a proposal for a long distance walking project I have to hand in today. On my way back I found a pair of shoes. Pink. Not sure if they would be suitable for a long walk. Or maybe I should read it as a sign and change my proposal accordingly.

True

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination

Braindust

The hour of the wolf. I sit on my balcony. Silence and birds and the occasional car. I love these quiet nighttime moments. The small supermarket across the road is open all night. The owner sweeps the dust out of his shop like he does every night around this time. Like I do every night around this time.

polaroid days

      

Attente

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours," she told him, "when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window." But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

- Roland Barthes, A lover's discourse

A world compressed in a walk

At the start of today´s morning walk: a young girl, maybe 4 years old, wearing a knitted white cap with two pointy white rabbit ears on top, dancing through the streets behind her mother, with every step lights flickering in the heels of her shoes. At the beach: a young man coming out of the sea fully dressed and wearing his shoes, completely soaked, noisily joining his three laughing young friends who give him his jacket after which they wander along the boulevard, make fun of one of the sandcastle builders and get into a fight with him. On the market square: the woman I see there almost every morning, her snow white hair perfectly styled, bright red lips, manoeuvring around the tables and chairs with her wheeled walking aid to join her friends. A second version of her appears from around the market building, blond hair, lips in the same shade of red, the same eyes, the same nose, a similar walking aid. They are both in their eighties, if not older. They start shouting at each other from a distance and I am not sure if they are arguing or if this is how they always talk to each other, the result of a lifetime spent together. The one seated gets up and very slowly joins her sister. Fifteen minutes later they appear again, now both carrying a small supermarket bag. They walk across the square silently, the sun lighting up their hair.

Reverie

"I have never believed that man´s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do, and that is the freedom I have always laid claim to, often preserved, and most scandalized by my contemporaries about. Because, as for them - busy, restless, ambitious, detesting freedom in others and not wanting any for themselves, provided that they sometimes do what accords with their will, or rather, that they dominate the will of others - they torment themselves their whole life long by doing what is loathsome to them ..... "

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Sixth Walk