We’re blessed with fine weather at the moment, hot weather in fact, in the Spanish city where I live and I’m rising early to walk along the river each day, before the temperature begins to climb. I love this ritual and the sense of tranquility it gives me and I know I’m not alone. The other day I met a young man who’d been up all night partying, but stood gazing out over the water at that early hour…”It’s so peaceful” he said “I wanted a bit of tranquility.” I think we all do. The time and space to gather our thoughts…or let them settle into the silence…and to hear and see the magic all around us.
When I got to the weir, which I love to stop and look at, because it’s different every day, I thought about something that I witnessed there 3 years ago: a young man, not so different from the one I’d spoken to a few days earlier, carefully making his barefoot-way across the water, to the riverbank on the other side. The river was lower then, because we were blessed with enough rainfall this year to keep the fields a vibrant green (even now in this heat), and many of the region’s rivers are still flowing and full of life, which it gladdens the heart to see after years of little rain.
I asked myself “Could he have crossed the river so easily now? Could I cross it now?” and my gaze spanned its width, trying to calculate the likelihood. Then I spotted something close to the other bank, that at first made me frown. “Rubbish!” I thought. “What a shame that someone’s tossed rubbish into the water and it’s now lodged in the weir!” But then, I looked again, and I had to smile.
I suppose, technically, it was rubbish, but to me it was a spirit-lifting sight to see. A fully-inflated red balloon, bobbing along rhythmically and happily as the flow of the river moved it this way and then that. It brought to mind the iconic, well-known and beautiful film “The Red Balloon” by Albert Lamorisse (which, if you haven’t seen, I can recommend: the link is here).
I think it tries to tell us many things we forget about ourselves; about the pitfalls of this world; about Life; and about our spirits and how to welcome and embrace them…and it does it all with very few words.
Yesterday, on my morning walk, I found myself pondering something that I think about quite a lot. “How can we convey to others, who see no hope or magic in this world and no beauty, goodness or potential within their lives or within themselves , that these things exist? That they’re there, all the time. They’re just hidden from our awareness and sight by the avalanche of distractions and spirit-deflating messages and encounters that bombard us every day?”
I think today, the river tried to give me an answer…I think it said “Hold onto your own ability to see and feel these things, and just keep trying to help others to see and feel them too…in any and every way you can“.
La Casa de Paz 