There are moments in life that become frozen. Every day is the same old routine: you’re grateful for what you’re fortunate enough to have and you work toward what you don’t yet have. And what you need. But in the meantime, life stops. It freezes. It’s like being in a kind of quicksand: you walk but get nowhere; you talk but no one listens.
I’ve stopped painting. Not because I don’t want to anymore… on the contrary, I have so many ideas to pour onto my blank canvases, but they’ve been there for months, still wrapped in cellophane… painting is Magic, and that magic can’t be fulfilled here. I’ve stopped dancing. And this blog has also been dormant for a long time: I don’t remember when I wrote the last post. Because here, within these four walls that should be my safe haven, the world I can escape to, here I feel trapped. I can’t let go of my inner self, which stays there, in a corner, like a bored cat watching you with one eye open and the other closed, curled up and bored. Unmotivated. I reread these words and they don’t even seem like mine, me who have always been combative and resilient, me who have never stopped until I’ve achieved my goal. But these last few months are teaching me that there comes a time when you have to stop doing.
You have to stop.
You have to.
If you’ve done everything in your power today with what you have available where you are, then all you have to do is cultivate unshakable faith. You have to believe. And you have to figure out a way to survive.
For me, it took just a moment, a morning, a walk in a little corner of paradise, and a little door opened a crack, I peeked inside and said to myself, “Why not? Let’s try!”
I started walking. In the woods. Climbing steep, uncomfortable trails, sweating and getting dirty, and with every step, with every climb, my breathing became more steady, my legs grew stronger. Two months in which Nature welcomed me into her maternal arms and opened up to me, allowing me to discover a world I never thought I could love so much.
Every path is a mysterious journey where you don’t know what magic you’ll see; every Stream is a background music that constantly accompanies me; every Tree is a friend to whom I cling and who supports me on the most difficult climbs. Every thorn is a wild caress from a nature that is there just as it was a hundred years ago, virgin, untouched. And wonderfully intense.
Now I can’t do without it anymore: the greenery of the trees, the shade of the woods, the stone pyramids and quick lunches because we have to start walking again.
And when I return home, I carry with me the immensity of my experience WITHIN Nature. The same Nature I see in my cat’s eyes right now as he scrutinizes me.
Below is just one of the videos I’ve created to capture each of my experiences, because every journey I’ve taken has given me something I’ve only found there. And I want to remember it forever.