never too much to repeat to yourself, like a mantra... (1)

Walking and waiting, waiting and seeking, patience and despair, movement and stillness, silence and song are closer than one might think. Well, at least to me they are part of the same continuum of perception and desire. And being in transit is precisely this: walking, negotiating the boundaries that at once comfort and constrain you, constantly searching for something that forever eludes you and turns into something else. Arriving at seemingly new, unexpected places that turn out to be familiar ones, even though transfigured beyond hope or reach. Encountering people that nearly always reveal themselves a baffling amalgam of promise and disappointment, shallowness and depth, suspicion and trust, distance and intimacy. The mystery remains and deepens in the course of time, however, since it is impossible to separate all those things from one another. Everything sticks together like a dough.

People unfold themselves slowly (but never completely) like a long, heavy, intricate tapestry, recoiling at times in fear, but eventually stretching out towards a fuller shape, in a process that requires time and space, patience and waiting. Yet, (and there we go again), most people, in their hectic, mechanical, self-absorbed routines, seem to have less and less time and space for the other(s). Magnificent tapestries may never unfold, alas. Such a waste.

Anyway, there is nothing else to do in the meantime but walking and waiting, waiting and searching. Stirring stillness. "Walking is a mobile form of waiting", indeed, as Thomas A. Clark so rightly puts it.


(Originally posted in December 2008.)