Journey within

"I saw the sea, its peace

I listened to my wounds

I prayed to the earth"

To transit, to walk, to venture, to move. It feels so natural that it becomes a habit and runs the risk of meaning banality. What does stillness teach us, who do we face in the calm, the waiting, the loneliness?

From the pandemic arose in me the need to rethink my habits, routines, the search for another vision of the world, a new way to inhabit it, to inhabit me. Contact with nature and balance with our environment has rarely felt so evident and necessary. The pandemic has brought with it economic problems and has affirmed social destructuring, however, also if we look at it from another point of view it has allowed us a moment to rethink our lifestyle and an awakening of our conscience about the need to be empathetic with our home.

After the lifting of the quarantine in Mexico and the return to what the authorities have named "new normality", I made my first long trip away from home, full of anxieties and the feeling of lack of protection and disconnection with people, carrying the affection of perceiving myself as a different person, however, the opportunity to contemplate nature again felt like a new experience, the same capacity of nature to heal that I had already experienced in other occasions I never perceived it so real and clear.

I asked the people with whom I shared fleeting moments during my journey to take a portrait, and asked them to write about a special moment linked to their first approaches to nature during or after confinement. As a way of listening and contemplating, a fruit of the experience of inhabiting nature after having been away from it.

As a poetic tool I was inspired by the Haiku, as a new approach to what surrounded me, talking about the fleeting moments, with the little but significant contact I had with people, reflecting on the need we have to rebuild the way in which we link with the environment and with the other.

Project realized for Ayün fotógrafas thanks to the National Geographic Society's emergency fund.

Haikus

Cuando pescaba

Su brillo deambulaba

Sol de los peces.

Vi el mar, su paz

escuché mis heridas

recé a la tierra

Don Mario

ojos de mar agitado

cuerpo de rio liviano

“Toqué una planta