Yes, there are deadlines but they are soft ones. Like harvesting some seeds before they have naturally spread. Or exploring the old limestone oven building in the light of the full moon. I have to find a different word for those.
Being here is mainly about being in the flow of things. Finding space and time. Which is so much easier in nature because you are confronted by it, in the middle of it, continuously. In pleasant ways and sometimes in challenging ways but the secret is in looking at your own response and at the cause of it and see it for what it truely is. Change plans sometimes. Or actually often. Which usually is a good things.
I don’t know why I called this blog “The middle of nothing”. It could just as well have been titled “The middle of everything”.
This morning the plan was to walk the route I created yesterday. It is one of those plans that took a while to get its proper outline. I came here with the idea to walk the same small path again and again and again. Originally it was supposed to be a circle. It had the diameter of one of the ancient dry stone huts at some point. Then is turned into a rectangle, a memory of a house. I kept track of my steps while walking it. I carried cosmos daydream seeds to mark every time I walked it, starting with a specific number of seeds and throwing one in the middle every time I walked the path that was slowly becoming clearer and clearer. It didn’t go anywhere. Or that is what I thought. Plans always go somewhere. Sometimes they disappear for a while and pop up again when the circumstances are right. When something has changed. Sometimes you don’t even realise that it is the same old plan still but it has changed shape.
When I was in Barcelona shortly last weekend I measured my apartment. Back at CACiS I reconstructed the exact outline in the middle of the old stone quarry behind the limestone ovens. I made sure the orientation was exactly the same, my main room (the private one, the other rooms I share with my housemates) orientated north-west. In the coming week I will “walk the walls” again and again and again and again, until the groundplan of my apartment has been recreated in the dry soil and my continuous walking has loosened the soil I walked on. I imagine walking it hundreds of times. Thousands maybe. Then I will sow Cosmos Daydream seeds in the lines that form the walls. The doorspaces will be left open.
If all goes well, the seeds will sprout, the plants will grow and at some point you can walk through the main opening where the front door is from room to room, rows of tall flowers forming natural walls.
The plan was to start walking this morning but Trufa (the dog) decided to join me and what she likes best is to pick up things and ask you persistently to throw them away. Or just pick them up and move them around. Which isn’t really handy when you spent hours measuring and placing stones and bamboo poles at the right place and they can’t be removed until your walking has created clear lines. So I postponed and it gave me time to write a little here which I had been wanting to do as well. And walking back to my terrace I found a bird’s old home.
There is a week left. Only a week but also a sea of time. There are so many things to do still. Like watching the giant caterpillar eat the leaves of his favorite plant in an astonishing speed and
wondering if I will see him pupate before I leave. Sit on the roof at night in the moonlight and look at Venus. Go to the river in the evening after sunset and sit on the still warm stones listening to the frogs. Join the fig tree that decided to grow on the bottom of one of the ovens and look up to see the blue sky circle. Those things are as important as “making work”. Those things are indispensable and are at the basis of what you could call a work of art but creation is a better word for it. The more I “do nothing”, observe, listen, sense what is around me, the more ideas are starting to grow and the harder I work. (That is also why I strongly believe in a basic income, but this is not the moment to get deeper into that).
The workshop, kitchen and bedroom are filled with seeds and flowers from which seeds still need to be harvested and have to be given their proper name (I know there is an app for that but I learn so much more by going through my plant books).
In the evening I fold small boxes from paper that seems to have been used by children to draw on with the colours from here, some still have dried plants inbetween them.
Those seeds, I estimate between 120 and 150 different kinds, will be turned into seed balls, every seed ball containing the essence of the surroundings here, a small possible paradise, to be given to people who visited CACiS and can plant or throw it somewhere to let the soul of this place spread.
There are photos to be printed (the small boxes will be used as frames once the seeds have turned into seed balls), there are long stockings to be worn while roaming around which will automatically become seed collectors (because that is how you turn the irritation of having to remove sticky and itchy things out of your shoes and socks ten times a day into something valuable: like I wrote in the beginning it is useful to observe your reaction to things and truely look at the cause of it. A lot of seeds are very smartly designed to stick to the fur of animals to be spread around or plants have pointy parts to protect the seeds, or feathery parts to blow them in all (and your) directions.
There are stories to be written about all my favorite places here (maybe it should come with a map) and about my housemates: the lizard with whom I share the kitchen, the big beetle moving around inbetween the bedroom, kitchen and terrace, the gecko who prefers the bedroom and the giant roly poly in the bathroom. The ants on the terrace of course and the caterpilar I gave its own small space after it hitchhiked home with me in a bunch of flowers (I supply his favorite food a few times a day). There are the ones outside as well. The mystery animal the former residents have seen but I haven’t so far. The bats and their high pitched sounds in the evening. The numerous birds, the uncountable insects, the wild animals I was hoping to see when I walked back from the village through the woods after sunset and reminded me that you have to be careful what you wish for (although I am not afraid of giant big boars but I do feel a bit uncomfortable when one comes out of the corn because he didn’t hear me, being noisy himself and I am carrying 2 bags with food - I was thinking about throwing the sausage at him if he would show interest in me but then wondered if he would be offended knowing I was planning to eat his tame cousin).
There are videos of the most crazy seeds I have ever seen dancing in the wind.
There is the idea to build a dry plastic hut out of all the left over packing material from my groceries, inspired by the dry stone wall huts you see next to fields everywhere in the landscape here (ideally to be placed in front of the Dia supermarket in Artès).
There is black ink I made from oak galls and rusty bits I found on the roof of the oven and water from the Tapies river and there's the wish to make more natural ink with plant material.
There is even an idea for a performance which is in a very early stage. There is too much. But that’s ok. Some things will happen now, some things will happen in the future, some things will never happen.
The deadline is still far away. I hope. I don’t mean the one next week, when I leave this place but hopefully will keep the space in my body and mind. I mean the big one. The one where the word comes from. Until then, somehow everything I do will be influenced by my being here now. Some things as a direct outcome, some things because here I got reminded again what it is I want to do, how I want to be, what it means to make time - or more accurate: to be in time, in the middle of it, to forget about it, to just live it in the best way possible.
Time for a walk now. Or maybe lunch first. Or possibly something unexpected will happen next. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.
