Day 4, part 2.

Saturday, October 17, 15.30

I found water. It is dripping slowly out of the rocks and I am not sure how drinkable it is but my Lifestraw bottle filters poluted water. It takes time to fill it up but any break is welcome, useful time to sit down, connect with and look at the world around me. A dusty mountain road, green bushes, yellow flowers. It gives me time to take care of my body, stretch, inspect my legs that are doing well. Red scratches from last night's roaming through the woods to find a hidden spot for my tent. I could have rolled down my trousers to protect them, the trousers of my 3 piece suit, the suit people think is awkward for walking but it isn't. The jacket hangs from my backpack when it is warm, the QR code clearly visible. The vest has three handy pockets, in one I carry some rosemary I picked yesterday to hide the faint smell of my body, in one I carry my iPod that supplies me with music in difficult walking moments, in the third one I carry some small stones from the Barcelona beach. Sometimes I slide my hand in it to touch the stones.
The trousers have a QR code as well. When you scan it, you land on my blog. I wear them all the way down when it is cold and rolled up when walking. It doesn't matter when they get dirty or torn.
The scratches on my legs are minor wounds. The scars will form a nice pattern with the old ones from former walks.
After taking a look at the world around me I visit the other world, the world you are in now, reading these words. I can access it because I carry an Ipad and a solar panel that works extremely well. I almost didn't get it in time for my walk but thanks to a dear friend, who drove late at night to the depot where they had forgotten to send it off, I can be here at all times. I folded him a small boat on my first walking day. I folded more boats for people who helped me to get started and when there is more time I will post some images.

My bottle is almost full. Time to get back on my feet again. When I stand up I can still see Barcelona in the far distance. It looks like a fata morgana, as blue and see through as the water dripping into my bottle slowly.

Day 4. Remembering the past, seeing the future

Saturday, October 18

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

Day 2. Back under the stars

Thursday, October 15

There were still some things to be done, some problems to be solved, before leaving the city. I arranged my mobile internet, checked my bag for the last time, closed the door behind me and handed in my keys just in time - or actually just too late but fortunately there was still somebody present at the shop where I had to leave them. Otherwise it would have meant another postponing day and when I walked to the shop with my new house on my back I secretly longed for it but at the same time desperately hoped somebody would still be there. I had postponed enough. And I was lucky. A good sign.

I can´t describe the moment after I left my keys and realized there was no way back. It was a split second only. Complete happiness and extreme excitement. I felt light as a feather. But things turned to normal straight away. It left some traces though. Some good energy to start with.

One of my favorite Barcelona spots was on my way out of the city and I chose it as the starting point of my journey. Not the house where I had just left from. Like many other places in this city, kindly supplied me by wonderful friends, it had made me feel at home but it wasn´t where I left from. It was just a temporary place to be. A place I might never stay again whereas the Place de la Virreina was a spot where I had returned to often since I discovered it on my first day in Barcelona and where I took shelter regularly in difficult moments.

I ordered a cafe con leche at my regular place and straight away got into a talk with a German couple from Dusseldorf. I was hesitant to talk, I just wanted to be in the moment and drink my coffee, but my walk is as much about talking to people as it is about walking and being in the world slowly and silently so I told them about my walk and how this was my place of choice to start from and they told me they had chosen it today to escape the bustling city and enjoy it in a more quiet way. Gracia is different in energy than the center is, that is one of the things I like about it. They said it reminded them of their favorite places in Dusseldorf.

I moved to a bench on the side of the square, not to be there but to realise I was leaving. It was a beautiful autumn day, brown leaves falling down from the trees. I watched a plastic bag slowly moving in the wind from one side of the Placa to the other side. The girl sitting next to me on the bench was reading a book with one hand in the pocket of her shorts. It was warm enough still for shorts. There were people with dogs, one was carrying a black wig in his mouth but when I looked a second time I realised it wasn´t a wig, he had the biggest moustache I had ever seen on a dog.
A girl passed by in a sweater with the word SELFIE printed in big white letters on a red square.
I felt the urge to start writing a story on my iPad straight away but I shouldn´t slow down more now so instead, in order to not forget, I made some notes in my new, almost empty notebook. A moleskine, the notebook I always use on my trips, the notebooks Bruce Chatwin used, he even gave this name to this particular type of notebook and he writes about it in his book The Songlines, how the small French family-owned company in Tours went out of business and Chatwin set about buying all the notebooks he could find before his departure for Australia, but they were still not enough. In 1997 a small Milanese publisher brought the legendary notebook back to life and gave it the name Chatwin had used. If you buy a Moleskine notebook now, you can find this story in the small pouch in the back of the notebook.

I made my notes, in pencil. Pencils never fail when you have a pencil sharpener or a knife on you. I took the last photo of myself in Barcelona, fully packed, fully dressed. And just before I left a small flock of the green parakeets I know from Amsterdam, where they are quite an exotic species, landed in the branches above my head and started chirping noisily. I took it as some words of goodbye and I put my bag on my back.

I walked. I saw a corner of the city I had never seen before. Walking all the way through, out of it, made me realise how big it is really. Leaving the last houses behind me, the sun already setting, I thought it was the last I would see of the city and I took my goodbye photo and placed it on my Facebook page. I entered the park, walked on sand, was surrounded by the scent of nature. It was getting cold and dark and I didn´t walk too far, climbed a small hill, found some bushes that formed a good shelter and decided to just roll out my mattress and sleeping bag. On my left there was green and the entrance into a vast natural area. On my right I saw Barcelona in the far distance. The Tibidabo amusement park with a beautiful new moon over it. I saw Park Guell, Montjuic to the far left and in the middle of it all the Sagrada Familia and the big cranes surrounding it.

Nothing beats sleeping under the stars. And although it took me a while to get comfortable, mainly because there was an animal roaming around, I felt safe enough and warm and tired. Happy to be out in the world again, slow and sensitive to the things around me.

Day 1. Leaving and staying

Wednesday, October 14

I was ready to leave, I had been at my readiest on Tuesday morning already, mentally at least, but there were still things to be done. When I postponed my leave in the weekend the plan was to get some last important supplies on Monday but I hadn´t counted on a Spanish national day and shops being closed. Tuesday, yesterday, they were open again and just when I was about to go out to arrange the most important thing, mobile internet for my iPad to be able to communicate during the first stretch in Spain, my iPad fell apart. The screen had been damaged already but going on a walk with little means, in a suit I had been wearing for 9 months, planning to try to survive with as little money as possible, it seemed a good idea to just keep it using like this since it seemed to work fine. Maybe it was providence. Otherwise the glass would probably have started falling out during the walk and that would have meant a much bigger delay. In the past these sort of things freaked me out,
I would find it unjust that it happened to me at a very bad timing but these things happen to everybody at the worst moments. It helps to see it from the other side. To just take it as it is and see what you can get out of it. This meant some more time in Barcelona which would give me the opportunity to get some other things sorted out. It meant paying a lot of money, but it also meant I could use this device well somewhat longer instead of wearing it out too soon and then having to buy a completely new one.

The man from the repair shop kindly gave me a €15,- discount without knowing that that is what I count on as the minimum I need for an average day on the road. A nice coincidence. Money spent but also money gained. He opened his shop an hour earlier for me to have it fixed at 12 which was a kind gesture, even though in the end it was only ready at 13.30 and I wandered through Gracia the last hour to wait which was tricky because I have a bad sense of direction and I always use my iPad to navigate. It is my old area though, my first three months in Barcelona I lived at the other side of it and I took this opportunity to drink a coffee at my favorite square, the Placa de la Virreina and start a small embroidered drawing in my jacket. I remember well finding the square on my first full day in the city, on a quest to make myself feel home by finding places that suited me. After that day I spent many hours in this square, at daytime drinking coffee in the sun, on Sundays watching the crowd dancing in the middle of the square and in the evening sitting on a bench in the dark, like many other people, listening to the musicians playing guitar on the church steps and watching passers-by. Sometimes buying a beer from the street vendors. Meeting friends now and then but usually on my own, to take a break from the work in the gallery, from embroidering small stories in the pockets of found clothing items.

My backpack was already packed, among other things a pair of found sneakers and two found shirts, the third one, also found, was on me. I had thought about carrying a fourth one and when I picked up my iPad and walked back to the place where I am staying, I bumped into a container with a nice collection of summer clothes in it. It looked like a good sign. I am a bit afraid to walk into winter but I know I will be back in the warm Spanish days afterwards and there would be no harm in already having some clothes waiting for me here. I took a few things and also found an ultralight, nicely decorated shirt that would take up almost no space at all in my bag. I wondered if there was anything else I needed.

A few minutes away from my door I smelled lavender and for the first time I noticed the big field in the middle of the square I had passed several times. I picked some flowers to put in my inside pockets. The jacket will get smelly on the road. Herbs and flowers, natural perfumes, work wonderfully there.

The goal was to leave at some point during the day and walk to the old industrial part of the city to spend the first night at a friend´s place on the way out of town and continue tomorrow early from there but the closer I get to my slow walk, the more things seem to slow down. I guess it is a good thing. The only deadline, apart from the big march during the Climate Conference, are the deadlines I created for myself and it is nice to blow life in them again and move them a little bit.

Another leaving day turned into a staying day and it makes me think about leaving and staying again, how they relate to each other and how sometimes you leave by staying and other times you stay by leaving. One of the things I know for sure is that the leaving keeps my love for the city alive. Every time when I am leaving, I see it with different eyes, I see things I never saw when I was in my staying mode. I move in circles here often, like so many other people, but I drag myself out of the circle regularly, with some effort because I think I don´t want to be out of it but I always enjoy it, especially the pleasure it gives me when I return, when I get out of the bus at Placa Catalunya and remember how it was all new to me the first time I arrived, just over a year ago. How I had no idea of what and how and where and now I call it mine, even though I still don´t speak the language. I call it mine because every time I am leaving I am staying as well. Where if I would just be staying, I would probably get lost. I would disappear.

Now I will stay present here. And when I start walking time will disappear. I don´t have to say goodbye. I just have to leave. In order to return.

Tomorrow. First thing. No more delays. I will open my door, close it behind me and time will disappear. I won´t. I will be more present than ever.

The first boat is for Chris, who fixed my iPad today. A golden one from the inside of a cigarette box.

Walk with me

In a few days I will start a long walk from Spain to Paris. I will be on the road for two months, wearing the three piece walking suit I have been wearing since January, carrying everything I need on my back. I am walking to the United Nations Climate Chance Conference (COP21), to join thousands of people for a march through Paris which is called “the largest civil disobedience action on climate change in Paris”. On my way there, I will meet people on the road, talk with them, listen to their stories. Any stories.

 

My themes will be ecology, simple and slow ways of being, consumerism, history, humanism. Love and life and death, in small and big ways. I will write about it on my blog, I will leave and collect traces. It will be an adventure and I’d like you to be part of it as much as the people on the road and the people I will walk with in Paris will be.

 

I need your support, whatever you have/want to offer. And I am not talking money. Tips, advice, inspiration sources, people on my route you think I should meet, places I should visit, where to sleep and what to eat. Money ....  comes in handy too, but my journey will be about exchange in any possible way, getting away from materialism and easy ways to go through life.

 

Whatever you’d like to share with me, I will give you something in return. Equal value. Something material or immaterial. I will make you part of my journey. Not because I can’t do it on my own but because I don’t want to do it on my own. The only way to change things is to work together, because we are in it together no matter what.

I’ll build you a boat, you’ll be part of the fleet that will carry me to Paris. Over land.

(boats from trash i found in my garden)

Here’s what I’ve got to offer:

 

* Stories. They will be online. They can be shared.

 

* My attention. If you are on my route, I’d love to spend time with you. Or you can come along and walk with me.

 

* A small boat. I will fold them 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. Every one of them will be dedicated to somebody who is helping me on my journey in any way. 

 

I’ll exhibit the fleet in Paris and I will send you a digital image of your boat and the full fleet, or:

1. if you want your boat, send me some money so I can snail-mail it to you afterwards, a few euro’s will do the job already. 

2. If you want to share a day with me as well, send me the minimum of €15 I know by experience I need to "survive" (some days I sleep and eat wild but other days there are unexpected expenses) and choose a day inbetween Oct. 14 - Dec 10 or leave the date up to me and I will think of you on that day and take a photo especially for you which I will send you by email from the road (and the boat will be send to you later).

 

3. But if you want to donate more (let’s say € 25,- or more) I can also offer you a professional photo paper print (A4, limited edition) of the full fleet in Paris & a digital photo I will take especially for you on my journey on any day you’ll choose (Oct. 14 – Dec. 10) which I’ll be sending to you by e-mail from the road (and I’ll be thinking of you). Plus a boat of course.

 

There’s a paypal button on my blog (top right) and if you have any questions or comments, send a mail to monique.besten@xs4all.nl

 

If I get more money in than I need, I’ll use it to send everybody who helped or inspired me in any way a boat by slow mail. It would be great if afterwards all of them will be all spread around the world.

 

Still the best support I can get is if you read my stories here and keep an eye on me in that way. It will keep me safe and sound.

* It will take a bit longer before you will receive your “physical” boat and the photo print.

(2005, At Home Galery, Now Here)

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

the flaneur

back in amsterdam

reunited with my books

i broused through phil smith’s “on walking”

the latest edition of the dark mountain project

rousseau’s “the reveries of the solitary walker”

basho’s “the narrow road to the deep north”

and werner herzog’s “of walking on ice”

i checked rebecca solnit’s “wanderlust” on walter benjamin

and found the chapter “paris, or botanizing on the asphalt”

where she writes about him as a great wanderer of streets

and the flâneur, a concept he writes about often

i am here to gather my things, my walking thoughts

to prepare myself to walk from benjamin’s grave in portbou

to the arcades in paris

to talk with people on the road about slow and simple ways of being

about ecology, materialism, how to find the future in our history

i will walk to the climate conference

to meet a swedish activist & writer i once lived in the woods with

we built things there, we grew things

and in the room i lived in, in a lonely red house in the middle of nowhere

i found a suit one day, hidden in a closet

i wore it on a few occasions and i brought it home with me afterwards

i didn’t know what to do with it

but today i remembered its label

maybe it is time to wear it again