When I walked through the mountains I got in some sort of mode, a mode where I was sleeping inside myself directed by the wind. I did not feel ecstatic nor exhausted, I just felt numb, like I was in the mood of sobering up. Only when I reached the top of one big hill, something changed. I fell back into my reality and the feelings came alongside with it. Extreme exhaustion and completeness, I heard sounds again. Everything became so clear and tactile and haptic, my knowledge emerged through dimensions of sense. Everything I saw I swallowed.
I walked for days through the woods of the mountains, camped out on the best spots and ate the fruits I could find. My life consisted of the basics, I ran, I swam, I slept, I ate the rice I brought with me from home, I carved letters to my sisters into the dead branches of the forest (they never read them). I did not speak to anyone, but my body spoke with the environment. My mind could not seem to understand it, tired by the fierce emotion of the impulses that the surroundings brought with them.
The days would wake me. I could live in these days only. Time lost its sense, at least the precise division of time did. I would talk to myself trying to find an indication of happenings, I’d say out loud: “two moments ago I walked down the river and washed my feet.” The week was depthless. The past and future slipped away and I could only live in the thundering now. It is untellable what it feels like to lose connection to time, time is guidance. I kept walking descended in my thoughts and confusion.
Like a prepossessing nymph I let myself roll into these woods, wildly quiet. When I scratched myself, it was excruciating, I soothed myself as if I was my own mother.
Right at the top there was a beautiful view, Every morning I walked towards the edge and threw stones down the hill. I pretended the stones hit passing men and the men would shout at me and I would shout at them.
I wished I had books, or a paper and a pen.
Many nights had passed and the beauty wore off, I always thought that I was a girl of the mountains and not of the crowd, yet in everything I searched for a friend. Through motion in these places I had come to understand them. I knew the hills that I had lived in by heart, I knew them and I loved them, but I also started to lack interest and to miss.
Boredom made me aware of time, like prisoners counting days on their cement walls. Like a fever that eats the being, the stretched out time consumed me.
Doing this alone was like trying to eat a mountain.
This very time that rotted me brought me back home.
Time is represented as a structured element of many, with qualities like chronology and linearity. But I don’t believe that, I mean, I still live in the illusion of clocks, to create some kind of appearance of continuity but mostly because my mind does not always catch up with my beliefs.
In fact, time steals itself. There is barely time in a landscape, while walking in the mountains, the information I got from all of my senses (working hard to make an experience real), hours are being forgotten. I experienced nature as if I was part of it, grounded in the roots of trees, I lived in nature’s sense of time, like my feet in contact with the earth I am in touch with my surroundings, I perceived the place as it is supposed to, in my own way and any way possible. The landscape is felt in multi-sensualities and the most distant memories.