It started like this

It started like this.
I was asked by a Danish activist writer from Sweden if I wanted to meet her on her slow journey to the United Nations Climate Chance Conference in Paris (COP21).
I said yes.

By then I had already committed to going on a Journey to the Underworld with the Dark Mountain Project and the Swedish Riksteatern, who focus on Climate Change and are involved in a project with people running for their lives from the Arctic Circle to Paris in a 4000 km raley.
I had some long talks with a friend, which brought me back to Walter Benjamin’s writings about history and materialism and it reminded me we had a common enemy (he believes in communism, I believe in the environmental movement), capitalism.
And I coincidentally met an artist I admire a lot, Kubra Khademi, who earlier this year walked in a metal armour shaped like a naked woman’s body through the streets of Kabul and had to flee the country afterwards. She will “Walk with Walter” on the 11th of October from Portbou, the city where Walter Benjamin committed suicide after having crossed the French-Spanish border in 1940.

I watched Naomi Klein, Mark Boyle, the Moneyless Man, Vandana Shiva.

I remembered how I once was called the Plastic Crusader when I carried all the plastic I found on a 4 day journey to the Eigth Continent where I created my own plastic island.
A small voice started in my head.
It said “You have to walk from Spain to Paris”.

It scared me, I didn’t want to walk into winter at the moment when I was thinking about staying somewhere after having been on the road for so many years. But I once wrote “The question most asked when I am on the road is whether I am not afraid. I never hesitate answering that one. Not when I am walking, not when the world is carrying me.”

I remembered Charles Eisenstein. “As you go about your life… feel that part of you that knows that you are here in service. And ask yourself if you’re ready to bow more deeply into service. If you do it, I predict that you will experience an unexpected opportunity to act on that intention and it will be just at the edge of your courage, but not past it.”

I am walking towards the edge. I will be leaving in less than a week.

I will be accompanied by Benjamin’s writings and by many others. I might be a flâneur at times but I will mainly be a walker. I will look out for the forgotten objects, because “By returning to the forgotten object, the collectivity—and ‘man’ therein —realizes that history is not a progressive, unending and hegemonic continuum, but a transitory collection of discarded or disused (used, abused and abandoned) objects that in their suppressed and subsumed silence nevertheless hold untold stories, silenced speeches—the power or potential of expression and revelation.” (Ah yes, I am actually a Master of History, whatever that means .... I don't have the feeling I mastered it). I will wear my suit, the three piece walking suit or business suit that I have been wearing since the beginning of this year, inspired by Henry David Thoreau's writings. I will write my thoughts and stories and I will publish them on my blog or tell them to people I meet on the road. I will fold small boats on my way, like children do, using the discarded materials of our culture, breathing life back into what has been left behind, slowly building a big fleet to bring me to Paris, vessels to help me reach my destination. Things made out of gold and silver and shiny paper but worthless. Things that will carry me but are so small I can hold them in my hand. Fragile but unbreakable as a symbol.
I will not plan too much. I know where to start (in Portbou) and to end (Paris). The rest I will improvise. I will get lost in time. I will take time. And that is important these days, it is a skill we lost, something that is so deeply human but so rarely being appreciated in a world where we have to show other people how busy we are to be somebody. But we are already somebody. From the moment we are born. And the best way to develop yourself is to give yourself time.

In an essay titled “Remember the Future?” Dougald Hine, one of the founders of the Dark Mountain Project, writes that our history is broken. He writes about improvisation as the deep skill and attitude which we need for our times. “It is arguably the basic human skill, the thing that we are good at. It is what we have been doing for tens of thousands of years, over meals and around camp fires, in the marketplace, the tea house or the pub. Every conversation you have is an improvisation: words are coming out of your mouth which you didn’t plan or script or anticipate. And yet we are accustomed to thinking of improvisation as a specialist skill, a kind of social tightrope-walking; this magic of being able to perform, to draw meaning from thin air, to make people laugh or make them think without having had it all written out beforehand.” He continues, saying that “Our fear of improvisation is, at least in part, a result of what industrial societies have been like and what they have done to us.” Somewhere else he talks about how the age of industrial modernity, of capitalism and the changing culture in which it flourished, is the story of the loss of timeliness.

It reminds me of how I once wrote in an article for The Dark Mountain Project: “We have to land again. Get close to the things. Be part of the world. Walking teaches us where we are, who we are. A slow speed makes our brain work fast. Makes us see more. Be more. And best of all: walking makes time disappear.”

www.asoftarmour6.blogspot.com
www.dark-mountain.net
www.andreahejlskov.com/wellcome/
www.walterbenjaminportbou.cat/…/…/memoria-de-walter-benjamin
www.theguardian.com/…/afghan-artist-armour-street-harassmen…
www.dougald.nu/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5LuIAJEFUc (naomi klein)
www.moneylessmanifesto.org/
www.vandanashiva.com/
www.vimeo.com/82813954 (The Plastic Crusader)
www.cop21.gouv.fr/en