Lowland

I’m sitting on my usual deckchair, in my favorite spot in the garden, looking up to the sky and the starry night. A simple treat. Far away from the disturbing usual city’s lights, it’s nice to appreciate the nocturn spectacle. This immobile painting, sitting up there in complete silence does not look dead either. All those stars, so far from me, so far from each other seems to combine all together to form a complex and precise pattern. Like a network where every single one of them is essential to the good functioning of a whole, far bigger than the individuals who compose it. I’m always perplexed,  before this schema.

So many unsolvable questions appear, so many mysteries that seem impenetrable. At some point a blurred reality took place anyway, clearing its path through the uncertainty. I guess it’s a human reflex to try to shape everything we come across, labialize it to something we’re familiar with; Always looking for our comfort zone. But even so, even here, in my childhood’s house, I just feel a bit awkward looking back to this deep blue infinite ocean. In a way it’s beautiful. Like in a movie. The top of the trees that border the garden on each side are in my visual range and create a spheric impression of the sky. So that I feel like in a snowglobe. Same as a tiny little figurine surrounded by a giant straw cloud, the view is great, even magical.

The time isn’t running into the snowglobe, not like it’s running outside at least, everything just lasts as long as I want. Every one of my movements is extraneous and therefore feels essential. But being inside that bubble also means that I’m submitted to the outside forces, an unexpected movement can make me falter, and even comfortably sitting in my deckchair I can lose my stability a second, and all of the sudden my thoughts are shaken. I can’t focus anymore. Now the outside is inside, the globe above me has a breach. I can feel the wind and the cold. The humidity starts going through my thick coat, I shudder as I get up to start walking around the backyard. As the elements are unleashed, as much as they can be this area of France, I feel like it’s a good time to go explore the darkness of the night. The first steps are a struggle like I just landed on foreign land where gravity is different, my legs are numbed and fragile but soon my mobility is coming back, my feet accommodate again with the ground, I can now feel the smoothness of the wet grass acting like a cousin facilitating my movements. The locust’s signature sound is loud, almost too much. Despite the bad weather of the last couple of days, they found it the right time to express themselves, remind me that some rainy cold days can’t be that bad for all the life that surrounds us in that country lowland.