walking-talk
WALK 1 (from Laís to Analu)
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Walk from the place you are now until the nearest place you consider sacred.
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Position yourself in such way you can be observed and observe.
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Remain immobile in this position for the time that feels like immensity.
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Do not register the experience until you come back to the initial place.
The sacred closer to me
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It is cold and cloudy outside. I put on a coat, a scarf, and sneakers. Took only my keys, left the house, and went for a walk to the nearest sacred place. The path seems usual: I go down the stairs of the house where I rent a room, those very narrow ones, typical of old houses in the Netherlands, open the front door, and walk somewhere. This time I went to Sonsbeek Park here in the city of Arnhem. I like to go there to get lost while running. The park is so big that I always end up somewhere I do not know. But it is not like I know where I am and where I am going in everyday life. I made my peace with that. Not always.
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During the walk there are those decisions that occupy your head without you even realizing: "At what point do I cross the street? Do I look at people and smile or just keep walking? Do I step in front of the car or wait for it to pass?”. While my brain automatically bothers itself with these decisions, my mind goes far away. I start to think about my room and the process it was to feel at home. I remembered when I lived in Campinas, where I went through the same issue that is to enter a room with no furniture, feel the emptiness and, at the same time, the possibility of making that space a little piece of the world that looks like me. The same issue that is to deal with the fact that the floor is uneven, the walls are all white and I do not have the money to reform. The same issue that is to learn again how to dialogue with the housemates and with myself when it comes to tidying and cleaning the common spaces of the house. You create bonds of friendship and build a community that is fleeting, but you always want to make it last forever. What comes to my mind while I think about all this, while I remember when I was assembling the furniture in my room, is that human beings are somehow adaptable, moldable to spaces and situations. Likewise, we also create those spaces and transform situations.
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In between these thoughts, I realize I am already inside the park. My feet go through space and I go through my mind. It is as if I am walking in my thoughts and the surrounding sounds are the soundtrack of this film that mixes memories and conversations with myself. I imagine miniatures of myself meeting in the brain mazes inside my cranial box. Synapses. The crazy thing is that when I contemplate this thinking process, it seems like the brain expands and unites with the space around it. The synapses go beyond the cranial box and reach a certain immensity that I am not able to see, only to feel. Faith. Spirituality.
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I usually do not notice the noises around me, they are there in the same way that the decision to cross the street is. There is so much going on in my headspace, and in the space where my feet travel through, that my brain decides what gets foregrounded and what gets backgrounded. Actually, I think there are several strata of the same situation that are interconnected forming one thing, just like white light is formed by all the other colors. This metaphor with the refraction of light by Isaac Newton seems interesting to me, but I will leave the deepening for another moment, or it may be a reflection for you who is reading me to do "with your own legs".
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I start to leave the part of the park that is most influenced by the architecture of the city and find myself surrounded by nature. It is winter. March winds make the trees dance naked while the foliage creates an orange carpet on the ground. Spring is approaching. I remember an episode of The Crown I watched with my sister. Third season. While questioning his faith, Prince Philip is fascinated by the whole “men walking on the moon” thing in 1969. The old Western dichotomy between science and religion. I cried a lot in that episode because, in the end, Philip is having a deep conversation with some priests about the complexity that is to exist. Life. I get emotional again just thinking about it, even though I cannot remember the details of the episode.
What intrigues me is to comprehend that the power of religion, in the case of this series and my own experience, is to provide epiphanies regarding our existence. If I write about life, it is because I began to reflect on it within the church. On the other hand, I feel disgusted by some ideologies present in this Christian space. Tears are what fill this conflicting place I have with church. I cry because it is cloudy. Because a cloud of experiences of love and violence covers this region of my life. I continue walking with tear-filled eyes and, when I look to one side, I see a dog defecating. I immediately start to laugh. In an instant, a poop can take me out of the clouds and bring me back down to earth. Crying and laughing are the same thing. I think again of the ground on which I walk, I think about my feces. The same body that defecates is capable of creating synapses connected with divinity; clouds. Do you know what else? Shit can be fertilizer. Shit is directly related to what you eat. As heaven and earth, mouth and ass have an intimate relationship.
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I am here. I am standing on a small hill where trees create a circle around me. I look up and see that they point to the sky. I look at the ground and see that the roots are talking to each other. Positioned in the center of this circle, I turn my body in many directions and see different landscapes surrounding me. On one side, an avenue with cars passing by, on the other side, trees stretching out in the vastness of the "wild" part of the park. Between the trees, paths where people walk with their dogs and run with their gym clothes and headphones. I pay attention to the birds singing and try to follow the sound to see if I can find them in any tree. I notice the difference between the time of cars and the time of birds and trees. I see the cycle of life: fallen trees, old trees, child trees. I wonder how old those trees are. I head towards a fallen tree and look inside the trunk. An entire topography and anatomy of life; wisdom and experiences that I will never have. No matter how many books I have read or how academic I am, no matter how many countries I have visited, I will never know the world as deeply rooted as a tree.
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Trees very much symbolize a sacred place for me. In moments of distress, I have run to hug a tree. I love climbing trees to pick blackberries and look at my surroundings from another perspective. In Eden, there was the tree of good and evil knowledge. Trees are wise. God manifested himself to Moses from a burning tree. The cycle of harvesting, the act of creating roots, and generating fruits are constant spiritual metaphors in the scriptures of the Bible. I see God in trees. Nature is a place of prayer, praise, learning. It teaches us about the importance of communication, giving and receiving, living and dying. Nature is not romantic; it is beautifully brutal, visibly spiritual.
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On the way back home, I walked the same path. After every step I take, the city atmosphere starts to take over the surroundings. A city that is not big, that is not São José dos Campos, or São Paulo. It is Arnhem. It is reddened by the bricks of the houses and the band of cyclists. It is watered by rivers, canals, and ducks. It is marked by the absence of skyscrapers. I feel foreign, not because I am a Brazilian from São José dos Campos (SP), not because what I understand as city movement is much more frenetic than Arnhem presents to me, but because I have just left a conversation with the trees, I have just watched birds eating and taking food to their nests, I have just witnessed the trees dancing with the wind. The same wind that takes my thoughts to the clouds and makes rain on me, irrigating the soil, the place where I walk. I bloom. What was once the soundtrack of my walk to the sacred, is now the noise of the city. Cars on the avenue, a train passing in the distance, a tractor in the pasture, the bells of the bicycles. I realize again something that I had forgotten or use to not notice: people speak Dutch; we don't speak the same language. I know that in a few moments I will be adapted again. Then, this same path will have other colors, other sound ambiances, other sensations, other epiphanies. I start to believe that the sacredness of this experience is walking.
WALK 2 – (from Analu to Laís)
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Ingredients:
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Scotch tape, headphones, cellphone
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Directions:
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Take the ingredients and go out to your destiny. Do not use any of the ingredients until you arrive there.
When you reach the destination, take the scotch tape and make a line in the floor of approximately two meters.
Connect the headphone to your phone and put the song ‘It’s a Long Way’ by Caetano Veloso for you to hear. While you listen to this music, explore different ways of walking in the line you made.
After that, come back to the starting point. In this ‘coming back’, record an audio telling me where you went and how was to walk there.