Day 8. The hour of the wolf.

Wednesday October 21

Girona. I checked into a hostel and took a shower. I took a train here. There isn´t enough time to reach Paris by foot if I want to arrive on time for the big march on the 12th of December. And the walking isn´t holy. Sometimes I need other slow ways of transport. Faster than walking. Sometimes I need to find a new balance. I was amazed how good it felt to be back in a city again, the promise of a clean body, a soft bed, culture. I was raised in nature and for a long time I thought I wanted to be a hermit, I wanted to live a lonely life surrounded by trees and birds but that is a very romantic thought and I guess I am also still trying to figure out what that is, loneliness, solitude. I am figuring out what I need to function best in this world. I walk to be able to take the time for that and sometimes I get out of the walking to look at things from a different persepective. It is all part of the journey though.

I have to catch up on my writing and there are some stories about past days I want to share but first I want to be in the here and now, I want to be in Girona and see what it brings me. I will spend another day here, to gather my strength to go back to the mountains, like I gather strength in the mountains to return to the city. Like all human beings, part of me is nature, part of me is culture.

Even before I had the opportunity to rest my tired limbs in my new home, in my new room, number 2.01 where I got bed number 5 assigned to me, I got into a conversation with my new roommates. The small talk on the road in my limited Spanish and pretty well trained hand-and-foot language is wonderful but it is also nice to be able to formulate your thoughts, your ideals, your goals well and understand all the details of your communication partner´s story. We are six in the room, four women from Canada, France, South America and the Netherlands and two men, one living in Germany and the other only 20 kilometers away from here, but conveniently staying in a cheap bed for the night in order not to have to drive back. We talked, we laughed and when I went up to the terrass overlooking the city I joined another company of five, three German girls volunteering at a Steiner school in France, my German roommate who had walked up to the roof before I had and a man from California who considered buying some walking gear and join me on my journey for a few days when I told him about my moving slowly through the world. Lem, who was living and studying in Halle, Germany, told us about his bikeride from Barcelona, where he had bought a second-hand bike, to Sevilla and then onto a place of which I forgot the name but where he had sold his bike to his AirBnB host. He was returning to Germany tomorrow and the three girls were going back to France, to bake bread, cook ecological food for their students, teach German and work in the school garden.

I left them to make a nightwalk through Girona and to buy a bottle of wine I had received as a gift from a sponsor upon arrival in Girona. People are kind to me.

The city was deserted, everything seems to close at midnight. I wandered through ancient streets lit by atmospheric streetlamps, found a bag of sweets, some fresh bread outside a restaurant that was just closing and a bag full of cloth hangers - I took two to replace the one I had lost on my way, the one that kept my suit jacket hanging neatly from my backpack.

When I entered the hostel, the man on duty was just changing the weather. 22 max and 6
 min today, 21 max and 13 min tomorrow. Cloudy.

In a city I move straight back into my city schedule. I write at night. I sleep little. But last week I discovered how nice it is to move with the natural rhythm. To rest when it gets dark, wake up in the middle of the night to do some reading and then go back to sleep to wake up before the sun rises, when the darkness gets slowly replaced by the light.

Since yesterday I have been carrying about three kilos of chestnuts. Ridiculous but at the same time indispensable. Power food. And I only grabbed what I found lying in front of my feet. I felt sad about missing out on the figs and grapes and blackberries but I realise every month brings something else, now there are walnuts and chestnuts and mushrooms. The strawberry trees are filled with red fruits and there are still tomatoes and apples. I found kiwi´s today, I only learned about the winter resistant kiwi last year at my Permaculture Design Course and they don´t grow in the wild but I do help myself to fruit and vegetables in other peoples´gardens now and then, only when there is plenty or when the garden seems to be neglected and always just a little bit to keep myself going. I don´t know how it works here but I know that in Germany there is a law that allows you to take from the farmers´ fields what you need for your own survival. I wonder if the farmers know though. And I don´t think they would appreciate it. I always make sure I´m not being seen.

I was asked tonight if i have a bigger goal and I didn´t know the answer, I returned the question by asking "A bigger goal than what?" I guess the main goal is to be in the here and now. To find the best way to connect nature and culture. To show people you can live your life anyway you want. To show that we don´t need to be fast to get where we want to be as quick as possible. If we want to be in the here and now, only slowness can bring us there.

There were some online conversations as well. The other world which I consider just as important as the world where we are physically present. A friend asked me about ideas to fight her capitalist business partner. Another friend just needed a chat. I asked a friend if he would take a confession but he wouldn´t. I told him I usually merely confess things I feel the urge to hide for the outside world but mainly to show I am only human and he called it a very catholic thing. I replied I might confess it to Facebook if he didn´t want to hear about it but I won´t use Facebook in that way. It makes me think about a book I started reading in Barcelona though, about the internet being the new religion. I don´t believe in religion and I will do anything to keep my Facebook or other Internet pages from being the outlet people use religion for. So no confession here. And I am not writing this to make you curious, it was just a minor act, nothing sinful, whatever that means. Nothing to write about. I shouldn´t even have mentioned it.

It is 3.30 now. The hour of the wolf. Last night around this time I heard the wild boars coming. Heavily moving through the undertow, making satisfying sounds. They didn´t really scare me, nothing that happens in the hour of the wolf does. It is the hour when most children get born and most people die. The hour between night and day when everything seems so far away. Complete darkness. And if I wouldn´t have written about that in my notebook already last night (and I will copy it here soon), I would now. Here it doesn´t count anyway. Here it is light, there is music, there is wine and coffee and the promise of a soft bed. There won´t be any wolfs here until I go to sleep, until I close my eyes.