At a certain age you get friends for walks. I don’t know if there is a club I signed up for. Or whether it is hormonal or culturally specific. But sometime you go for a walk in your spare time. with friends. You drive to the seas, swamps, forests and fields to take a walk together. Perhaps one of you knows what a five-toed burdock looks like and points at it enthusiastically in the rampant field margins. Or, your hiking friend can elicit some random tales about the passing of gray geese.
room
Hiking friends are boring in a fun way. Weekend Radio. You learn something, you meditate, you discuss something, but your hiking companion is always a good friend. Nobody puts you down on the spot, accusing you of all sorts of things or lies. And indeed, we should all become each other’s walking friends.
My hiking friend is called Lenny and his specialty is watching. He’s a photographer and he taught me what space is. And that’s a crazy thing to say because you think you know very well what space is. You’ve been navigating through spaces your whole life, appreciating distances and the amount of time it takes to traverse a space. You felt like you were the best in spaces, but you also felt small and insignificant in spaces. You have always recognized the space in relation to yourself. for your body.
‘Animal Pictures’
Lenny taught me to look beyond the limits of myself. On our tours, he depicts grass, streams of water and tree branches. He showed me close-up pictures of him. Spaces full of life and movement. The distances I would casually have walked if he hadn’t taken it. And in it, we romantic animals as well as we humans want to see all kinds of metaphors.
Lenny once randomly photographed a flight of crows and a crow against a gray sky. He pointed his camera up and typed. No big plan or endless stare and worry about lighting. I have pictures like an animal. Birds passed. I pressed the button and the result moved me, and it was printed two meters wide.
leave space
I wasn’t sure if I was that crow or all the birds at once. But the image of Lenny reminded me of how little space I usually have in my head. How I try to understand all my thoughts. Crate and categorize. While we waves as we think. To escape. We oscillate on the currents that pass through us. We like to take ourselves seriously and experience the world as a specific group of landscapes and properties. But there is more and more, if space allows.
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