Exercise in Being Here, day 8: windows

A window can be a mirror at the same time, like any shiny surface, and sometimes a mirror is a window as well, but only if you let it be one. It transports you to other worlds, to other mindsets, it lets you see what is on the other side.

On the other side of what, you may ask? On the other side of what you think reality is showing you, beyond the visible but not necessarily less real. When you can touch something, hold something, feel something, you know it is real, it exists, you know you are real, you exist. A literal touching, as in touching a tree, a table, somebody’s hand, holding as in holding an apple, a tool, a plate with food, feeling as in feeling the wind in your hair, a hand in your hand, the pain in your stomach. But also touching in the meaning of moving, of emotions being moved, a holding of something, somebody, in your thoughts, holding space, holding the world in your hands, feeling sad, feeling happy, feeling both at the same time.

 

The magic

The magic is in the balance between light and darkness, in what is being revealed and what remains hidden, it is everywhere in the everyday things.

Exercises in Being Here, Day 7: collecting colours

One of the things I am doing here is making natural ink with materials I find on my wanderings through O Castro Art Village and walks in the surrounding area (the Ribera Sacra). It is a bit late in the year for specific fruits but I was happy to still find some pokeweed berries and remains of wallnut hulls, there were some bright red berries I don't know the name of and oak galls, perfect for a black ink (I also made some here in summer). In the almost abandoned village of Bexàn the ground was scattered with black olives, I am curious what colour they will give after having been processed. You can actually get a water or alcohol based ink out of anything and although experience in making ink will make it easier to predict what colour you will get, it is often a surprise. 

Exercise in Being Here, Day 6: collecting wild camomile, looking at seeds

Exercise in Being Here, Day 5: looking at mosses, making a lichen carpet for a scoby

 

 

 

 

 

When I was here last summer (read more about that here) I was impressed by the mosses and lichens everywhere in the landscape. Some of my favourite things in O Castro Art Village are the stone stairs overgrown with mosses in front of several houses, a sign that hardly any feet have touched those steps for a long time. 

Dead branches with lichen loosely attached to them are scattered everywhere and if you walk through the forest you see trees covered in it. The little apple tree that carried many apples in summer now looks eerier than ever. 

I collected large amounts of the lichen and made a first attempt to sew it together, without a specific aim other than to create a large piece and see from there. For now it is only a small carpet and when I placed a dried scoby on top of it I realised they are both the result of a symbiotic partnership: bacteria and yeast for the scoby, fungi and algae for the lichen.

Exercises in Being Here, Day 4: listening

 It is hard to take your eyes off the view, especially in the morning when the clouds form a blanket over the valley but also in the afternoon, when the sun moves through the clouds and beams of light reach all the way down to the river. In the evening the clouds are often still there but at night it is clear and there are many stars. I like to sit on the little wall in front of the kitchen, on the old part where the stones have been stacked meticulously, decades—maybe centuries—ago, where small plants grow on top and little ferns at the bottom. What happens when you listen to instead of look at the landscape? It sounds easy and in a way it is, but how do you really listen? The best way to figure that out is to do it and see what happens. 

I sit down and close my eyes. It is so silent here, which means that every sound breaks the silence and asks for attention. The wind is there most of the time, until it lies down and you forget about it until it comes back. A dog barks, another dog starts barking, somebody is hammering, a power tool, silence again, which of course is never really silence. There is the blood running through your veins and you hear it when your ears turn inwards. When a car approaches it is almost impossible not to open my eyes, because the sound of cars is rare here. Church bells, the same tune always, I already hear the notes in my memory before they sound. Faraway voices, another dog. Every time I hear something my brain names it, how do you listen without your brain processing what it hears? I try a few times during the day, but to actively “just” hear the sounds without thinking what makes the sound is hard. It is not so when listening to music, or at least most of the time it isn’t, at least when it is instrumental music.

In the evening the soundscape is different. There are no cars, no human voices, there are owls and they are loud. Every time I hear one I think “owl” and when they make an owl sound I am not familiar with, I think “what kind of owl?” There is something making a high pitched sound and for a while I just hear it without thinking, coming from different corners but then again:”Is it a mouse, mice, another rodent?”

Maybe it will be different when I am here longer and the sounds aren’t as new as they are now, probably I have to do some listening for a longer stretch of time. I want to read Pauline Oliveros who created the Deep Listening practice and Raymond Murray Schafer who coined the term soundscape and John Cage who taught that music is everywhere in the ordinary moments of life, but not today. Today I just listen. 

Exercises in Being Here, Day 3: watching the clouds, waiting for the river

 

 

 
We were waiting for the river, the boat and I. I knew it was there and I suspected the boat did as well. At 9, from somewhere in the clouds, church bells rang. In a dream, I would have stepped in the boat and rowed out on the white weightless blanket, but this wasn't a dream, even when it felt like one. So we just waited, the boat and I, until first the church appeared, then the village on the other side and much later a little bit of blue surrounded by trees, slowly growing into a moving mirror of the world above.