a circle on a tiny piece of paper
on folding, context, giant plants and chickens
I should be writing this down with a pen. There should be a limited amount of ink in it. And I should not know how much. It should be quite difficult to write the words and the piece of paper should probably be not really made for the ink or pen or me.
I would carefully consider every small scratch. I would probably not even write but draw. But then you would not be able to read this. And I would probably not be able to read it either. But possibly that would be the whole point.
Even the pen and ink and the paper are all not possible without the connection to others, or to the world in which they exist. And we are exactly like that too. We can’t exist without others. But once the pen and paper are in our little hand, we can open an entire universe with them. A single line can become infinity
But I was thinking of something quite different when I started writing this.
I took a walk the other day. I was supposed to drop off a package at a courier location. A fairly simple task for which I used google maps, of course and the phone and also my legs. I walked in the sunshine and heat and I walked from hill to hill. From dot to dot. From location to location with all of them closed. Each one marked as open on the map, but not in reality.
Eventually the battery of my phone was drained enough that it became a hungry, complicated sleeping object. Not capable of providing even the false information it had been giving me.
But I didn’t really need it anyway.
The walk was quite wonderful somehow. And it became better with every disappointment. I did not manage to find a way to drop off the package. But I did manage to find all kinds of pieces of myself.
One bit I found was in Tapada das Necessidades, a park not very far from here, near a palace on a hill not far from here. There could probably be books about the meaning of the place and the various historic twists and turns of the site.
But for me, on that day, it was a place I wanted to cross, going up the hill mostly, through the section that is a garden of exotic plants.
I like that part of the park because it makes me feel insignificant. The plants are large and they have spikes and flowers that look like cell phone towers. Some other plants make it impossible to pass by them and they are thankfully not blocking any paths, but they could and would if we let them.
I like the chickens living in this part of the park too. They are wild and seem angry enough to not disturb. They do not care about disturbing others though.
Angry edible birds among towering plants that might be medicine or poison or both in a park that used to be the expression of gratitude and hunting ground and so much more on a hill that offers resistance, especially with the not so great paths, on a hot day. How very marvellous.
All of this was perfect because it gave me a sense of myself in a context so compact and simple and yet so infinitely complex. None of what I was experiencing could possibly be experienced this way on a screen. And even if there were anything close to it, it would still be in the context of a device and limited by its size and whatever that contained. While it was charged and connected to a massive network.
Obviously everything I was experiencing was also limited to my own size and ability to decode or understand or experience. But I liked and like how quite aware of that I was. To the chickens I was something else and to the plants something different. And even the path, while not exactly experiencing me in the sense of “experience”, was shaped by my wobbly steps.
Not only did I love the fact that I was finding myself in the context of this once holy place. I loved the idea that everything around me was also in a way a centre of an experience and in that context.
I saw a man who silently fed geese and peacocks by a pond at the bottom of the steep part of my walk. I passed two couples walking downhill, with one of the men complaining about his long it took to get through immigration in Lisbon Airport. And once I reached the more shaded area in the north end of the park a plane roared overhead, packed with people destined for that very airport.
All of us had wildly different experiences in the same blob of time and space. And that’s a tiny tail of a spark among the raging fire of existence.
I should be writing this down with a pen. There should be a limited amount of ink in it. And I should not know how much. It should be quite difficult to write the words and the piece of paper should probably be not really made for the ink or pen or me.
How grateful should we probably be for being mortal and really, really limited.
I wonder how I would fold that piece of paper once I had written a message or infinite meanings or none.
(oh, a tree of buttons…)