Traveling

The text below is a translation into English of something I wrote in Spanish last fall.

A single tree is never just one tree but a multitude of trees. Specially in the north, where seasons bring multiple violent changes. During the fall, a tree is a different tree from one week to the next, from one day to the next depending on the light and the colours of the sky, from one minute to the next depending of the wind. I come as often as I can to this park, and I see the trees change ceaselessly. A week ago, a group of almost naked and very tall trees, with just some yellow delicate leaves at the top, started moving back and forward pushed by a single wave of wind. There was enough silence to hear the air passing through the leaves, looking at the leaves moving softly against the sky. I wanted to take a video, but a loud group of young people passed near me and then the wind stopped. The leaves were still, and those were now different trees. Trees are a multitude of moments that end, start, and end again. My dad goes out for a walk on the same mountain every morning. He knows too that the mountain is a multitude of mountains, during the rainy season, or the dry season, under the January skies, or among October’s flowers, before sunrise under the light of the moon, or under the stars. If you can go back often to the same piece of the world, you learn that you can travel on the same spot, through time, and that a forest is a multitude of forests, just as the sky is a multitude of skies.

I write this on a bench, in a grey afternoon. It’s the end of the fall (the fall is also a multitude of falls). This one now, near the end of October, is a lot more monochromatic and the trees show their bones and the leaves still standing are almost all variations of copper. It’s cold and I write in a hurry because after a while my fingers start to hurt out of the pockets in my jacket. Its 5:30 and the sun will be gone in 40 minutes, but the sky is so full of clouds that all seems right now to be sinking in a sort of twilight. And against this twilight shine bright, almost fluorescent, the yellow patches of trees that tremble, irreplaceable, just for today, and just for me, in this moment.

The Dream of Drawing

Dreaming is both a talent and a handicap. It can be a way of building a world not yet built, or an easy way of evading what needs to be confronted. It requires some skill. I have always been a talented daydreamer. Many of my dreams have been detailed evasions, of the handicap type. Instead of gathering the nerve to approach the boy I liked I would nurture imaginary stories in which the boy and I were happy together without the risk of breaking my heart. They would be long engaging stories with lots of dialogue and some twists and a little bit of tension that would always be resolved with a delicious ending. I wish I had been more heartbroken and exhilarated and wise right at the centre of experience instead of safely cocooned in painstakingly constructed imaginary worlds. I loved escaping, and still do. I love sinking into invented universes. I love fiction, I love novels and movies. I love forgetting about the world, not having to face the world, and dreaming always is so cheap and free and easy. It’s tempting to not work hard at achieving something and instead get lost in the dream of success blooming like a fruit out of your fingertips (a most disastrous recipe). One cannot avoid reality for too long and if time is perhaps the only valuable thing we could ever own, we should spend most of that time out there living and fighting, bleeding and laughing, taking flight and getting wiser in the real world. But I will never stop daydreaming, because I can’t. And out of all the human beings in the world, my favorites will always be the ones that hold feverishly a lottery ticket and think in detail of what they would do with all their riches.

Dreams can be cozy nooks that keep us from going outside and face what needs to be faced. At the same time, how could we ever move forward if we are not pushed by a dream? All that is powerful, and magic and inspiring has always begun with the kernel of a dream. Maybe the best of us, all of us, is our ability to dream beautiful dreams so we can fight for them.

For me, drawing is a way of dreaming. It is very similar to those long escapes from reality in which instead of talking to the boy I liked I would imagine a world in which we were kissing, or married. Now, instead of thinking about work and bills and cleaning my house and a thousand daily irritants and conflicts, I spend delicious hours drawing detailed worlds in a blank page, inhabited for example by round trees, and very large birds. But to draw is also a dream all by itself, a dream that needs to be fought for, and built, out there in the world. One day, I say, one day, I will be drawing full time instead of drawing in the interstices of all the other things one has to do to pay the rent. I hold that idea with the preciousness of a lottery ticket not yet cashed. I hold that idea like a candle that needs to be defended, protected with my whole body against the wind. I let that dream drive me and I fight.