I am on a hilltop overlooking the sea. I woke up in my tent this morning and wanted to leave early, not get into the writing until after I walked a first stretch but the writing is as important as the walking, is in a way the same thing as the walking. Making lines, writing words, taking steps, lines of thought, connecting places and people. I´ve got a beautiful book on the subject with me, "Lines. A Brief history" by the anthropologist Tim Ingold.
I owe you a day 3 and I had planned to write it in my tent at night but I was tired and didn´t have the energy to write. I might later. The order of things doesn´t matter here, doesn´t matter now. The nice thing about walking is that time disappears and I can freely move around in the past and the future.
I see big ships moving slowly across the water, the sea has been there in the last days, appearing around corners of the road regularly and this morning it reminds me of something that happened not too long ago but before the walking plan arose.
I was drinking coffee with some friends, Turkish coffee from beautiful small cups. We turned the cups upside down after we drank the coffee, in order to read our fortune, our future, from the coffee remains. My cup clearly showed a long sea journey and I couldn´t image my future would see me travel the ocean. The sea has been on my mind the whole year though, one of the reasons why I love Barcelona is because the sea is so present and I missed it every time when I left the city, searching for it in other countries, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.
It is hard to read your future. I don´t believe in fortune tellers but I do believe everything is present in the present, the past and the future and there must be traces of it you can feel, maybe see, sense in different ways than we sense warm or cold, pain or pleasure. I don´t know if you can really read your future from a coffee cup or from the stars or from the lines in your hand, but there is something there, maybe nothing more than your willingness to see something in it, maybe it is just an opportunity to give you a heightened awareness of the ability to know about your future, or at least a part of it, at any given moment.
And maybe this journey is the sea journey I saw in my coffee cup. A journey where I left from the sea and where it accompanies me while keeping my feet on the earth. Where it stays in sight for a while and then retrieves into my mind, stays in my memory when its vision is being replaced by woods and mountains and cities.
I carry some small stones in my pocket I picked up from the beach on my last seawalk, the day before I left. I had planned to leave them on Walter Benjamin´s grave in Port Bou and I will but I will keep one with me. And while walking I will remain seated on the big stone in the Barcelona sea where I used to take a break during my regular walk, sitting on top of it, surrounded by water, usually reading something.
Leaving and staying, land and water, past and future, it is all connected.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the boats I am folding on my walk. It was a gut feeling in the beginning, something I felt I had to do and seemed a bit ridiculous in the beginning but one of the things I learned on my walking is that you should always trust your gut feeling. And now it all starts to amke sense. I can fold you a boat if you want and send it to you. Or maybe I already will if you sent me something to support my journey, handy tips, a souvenir, inspiration sources or money or any other support. Read more bout that HERE
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