I always liked this character, Charon, whose job is to take the souls of dead people to ‘the other side’. He has a small boat, which he rows across the Styx, the river that separates both worlds. I saw this picture at El Prado museum when I was a kid and I was deeply impressed.…
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I look at the horizon sometimes, mesmerised at the fact that I can see something I will never be able to reach. I remember it took me some time as a child to grasp the concept. I kept asking where exactly that ‘horizon’ was, as if it were a geographic spot and I needed the…
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I think about the public in a concert or a mob in the street. They act as One. People doing things they would never dare doing if they were alone. For a few moments they stop being individuals with an independent conscience and they become one with the group. They abandon themselves. They surrender to…
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I am in a train. I can see the outside world changing. Day, night, rain, sun, clouds, trees, unending concrete cities, a mountain. A succession of images outside. Inside, I remain still. From my perspective, I do not move. I am not surprised that Man once thought that the planet where it dwells was the…
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I don’t know what the title means, it just came to my mind. ‘Yes’ seems so invasive, so active, so demanding. ‘No’ means to stay with myself, peace, nothingness. ‘Yes’ is outside. ‘No’ is inside. I have as a desktop image a photograph of a path in the forest, full of bluebells (here it is,…
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Sometimes we read an apparently harmless line, and we can hear the hammer hitting the nail inside us. ‘Whack!’. Then, silence. The small drop hits the lake and slowly, relentlessly, the wave it produces reaches all the corners of our being. A shiver. Our world has changed. A hard truth we always knew, possibly. I…
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The music of Philip Glass makes me feel at home. Apparently flat but deeply mysterious. The nuances of repetition. Change in no change. Peaceful and yet disquiet. A tension of opposites. Quiet and yet so loud. An inbetweenness. I often dream of windows through which I get ‘to the other side’, usually some sort of…
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I recently finished watching the fourth season of The Crown. Throughout the series, the characters explain how the Crown and the elected Government represent the two sides of power. One side that is changeable, works hands-on, gets dirty and suffers the blame, and another side that is eternal, idealised, immaculate, almost magical. There comes a…
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And who am I? This question fills me with a kind of emptiness, as if highlighting what’s missing, rather than what’s present. The void. The nothingness that accompanies the lack of answers. The void has been with me since my early childhood, draining energy, will, and light. I tried to escape from it, to bury…
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Am I unique? Am I not repeating the pattern of so many human beings before me? Haven’t I been ‘me’ before, in another one? Am I the first of my kind? Don’t I make the same mistakes as that who was like me? Won’t another come later who will be like ‘me’, with my same…
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I see all these people with strong opinions. As if they were experts in medicine, virology, immunology, biochemistry, statistics, politics, law, economy and football. I guess strong opinions give them some sense of control over the ever changing reality. A sense that they ‘know’ what is going on around them and hence they can predict…
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The other day, it occurred to me that maybe I’m not searching for, but ‘searching from’. I wonder if a search is not a flight. If it is not a statement, a recognition that I don’t want to be ‘here’. A void, silent and permanent. I wonder, once again, if a search is not an…
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Some of the steps on which I base my current view of reality seem false now. But even so, they were necessary to bring me here, to this height. This tread on which I now stand may also be inaccurate or plain wrong, but it is necessary that I step on it to get a…
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It’s funny how we think we have read something in a book, in a blog, something that touches us, and when we go back to read it again it’s just not there. Maybe there are some words that vaguely resemble what we remembered, but the clear idea we had in our minds is not there,…
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As we ride towards the sunset, I ask myself whether the end will ever come, whether the sunset is a place, a real place. An end to the rainbow. A place to rest, to die. This thought makes me stop. The others look back at me, no words. I am not ready, I say. Ed…
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I finished Demian (Hermann Hesse) last week. Once again, it felt like leaving some of my best friends behind, those friends who do not exist but are alive in me. I was somewhat reluctant to reread this book, which had made such an impression on me when I was young, so many years ago. But,…
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The Introverted Tree 