Miles Astray | passages

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passages

UNITED IN DIVISION

Sometimes I wanna shout fuck this, fuck that, fuck you across the aisle, and it makes me remember: we can hate hate all day long, but at the end of the day we hate too. We all hate, one way or another, one day or some other, no one better than their brother. And love can guide us through the night, but no one has a monopoly on shining that light. We all love, someone or something, maybe Alex, certainly spring. And whether we fear hate or fear love or fear fear, boy, do we fear. Come here.

DC / USA · 2024

HARM’S WAY

I ripped through my lovers like a tornado, a wildfire, a flashflood. Like a force of nature, not meaning any harm but causing it plenty.

Bokor Hill Station / Cambodia · 2015

BLEACHED YESTERDAYS

Yesterday got old. It was time to bleach it. Putting on that same self the next day, it felt fresher.

Colonia del Sacramento / Uruguay · 2024

COMMUNAL COMMUTE

Day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday. Allies aligned in highway lanes, side by side through dawn and dusk. Calendar days and weeks and months flying by like unheeded road signs, years and decades going past, until the exit.

San Diego / USA · 2008

LIVELIHOOD

His skin was leather, testimony to a noble life spent beneath the generous Ethiopian sun. He looked 80 but was probably closer to 60 when deducting the dignified furrows a career of arduous labor had etched into his face. And while his reticent demeanor expressed a polite indifference to my existence, I somehow felt like he would guard that bit of stranger’s existence with all of his if necessary. He exuded an air of loyalty to his responsibility as a scout. All he carried into the mountains was a small rucksack, a quilted jacket, an umbrella, a shawl that inexplicably sufficed him as a blanket throughout the relentless altitude nights, and the AK-47. Ka-lash-ni-kov, rat-tat-tat-tat – what a perfect last name to invent a rifle, I thought. The phonetics and connotation were a match made in Russia. What kind of machine gun would a “Wilson” or “Gonzales” be? But if the rifle made me feel any safer, it made me feel unsafer in at least equal measure. I disliked the tangible proximity of death the gun established, notwithstanding that this one was more livelihood than weapon – a tool of life and death that was foremost a tool. Some written or unwritten rule obliged him to carry it, and me to be babysat by an armed veteran. Wild animals or wilder humans are not much of a threat here, but a family going hungry is.

Simien Mountains / Ethiopia · 2017

PEACOCK APOCALYPSE

The sun had exploded and hung in shreds all over the sky. I could tell by the nuclear mist that seeped through the flyscreen, not minding all the little rectangles in its way. That entire morning was one fuzzy cloud of light. Maybe the fever had done me in. Hell, I thought, hell wasn’t so bad after all. Just that it was upside down. A celestial ocean of fire. Ah well, I should have been so lucky. The end of the world was only in my paracetamol head. Outside of it, there was no escaping another long day on the peacock farm. Can’t ever take a day off on a farm. Because nature doesn’t. And days are longer on farms. Breaks shorter. To be sure, meals and laughs are heartier. What you reap is juicier. And the sleep is sound like death. Until that pesky sun rises again. Never takes a day off either.

Piribebuy / Paraguay · 2024

ANTMAN, SANDMAN

Antman, sandman. How vast your ambition, how tall your expectation, how steep your inclination to match your purpose. You climb whatever you can climb, transcend whatever you can’t. No height shortens your sight, no fall cripples your gall. Your every summit a mere means not an end, a steppingstone to a higher throne of a bigger sandcastle in a wider sky. What bliss that you don’t know of those dimensions beyond your grasp.

Deadvlei / Namibia · 2017

A MIST OPPORTUNITY

Blue skies are lies. Heaven isn’t without price and no Eden grows without skies bleedin’. Give me something I can’t see through, and I’ll see it through. Make mistakes because mistakes make you. Take a plough to these muddy skies, till moonrise, till sunrise, always counterclockwise and there it is, underneath the dirt, the bliss.

Piribebuy / Paraguay · 2024

BRICK LORD

A summer's work,
Burned mud turned brick,
Soil fruit in his hand.
Blocks growing from the ground, layer by layer,
His blood in them, their scrapes his scrapes,
All colors earthy in this dirt rainbow.
A son's son and a father's father,
Glass bead cataract eyes with a vision,
Youth riding in his age, warmth hiding in his strength.
Always helper,
A giver this builder,
Building more than just a building,
Giving more than just hope,
Giving love.
To those children in his care,
Packed like sardines in the old dorm,
School principal, custodian angel.
The first step always the right step,
A long time coming, a long ways away,
Brick kingdom lying dormant underneath the drapes.
Large shirt, but he larger, larger than life,
Few know his name,
Mud hero.

Kitende/ Uganda · 2017

THE VIOLINIST

Most plots in life are stillborn. Ends dressed up as beginnings. Strangers slipping in and out of sight as though they only pop into existence the moment we encounter them, as though we make them up as we go along, like extras populating our film set. Likelihood in all its strictness had dictated that the story of the violinist would start and end synchronously, the moment I saw him volunteering his tune atop a dune. But somehow reality deviated from its script, and as I moved on to forget all about him, I walked straight into an unforgettable fairytale. Pointing my feet towards Russia’s Kaliningrad border, I descended into the sandy valley where determined steps fast subsided into an amble. Along the lagoon. Into the forest. Where the trunks stood taller than any temple’s columns. A portal between the Curonian Lagoon and the Baltic Sea. And in its wooden rib cage, with not another soul around, there was the violinist again, now resting on a moss mattress. Just him and a picknick and him. Not very alone in his own company. And me not very alone in mine. Something in us, some poetic longing must have been as much his as it was mine. Ours together. And driven by the same longing, I moved on. Again. Because you can’t hold these moments as much as they hold you. Finally, I saw the beige light at the end of that green tunnel. The beach. I dipped my toes into the sea and followed the surf down to that final EU frontier. The border ran through sand. Lithuania and Russia separated by something that runs through your fingers the moment you lift it. Again, not a soul around, much less a tank. I took one step across the border into the no-man’s-just-sands-land. Then I went back. And as I walked up the beach, there he was again. At the final destination of our story. Third time’s a charm, but first and second time no less so.

Nida / Lithuania · 2023

TEN THOUSAND NAMES

That was it. No political speech, no calls for resistance. It had all been said and shouted before. That was it. A simple list of names read aloud. But nothing, nothing could have been more powerful. Every name said everything. Every name belonged to one killed Palestinian child. Still belonged to them, still meant something, still meant everything to those who mourned them. One name, one life. Ten thousand names, ten thousand lives. A million dreams. It takes a long time to read ten thousand names and the forever-too-young age shackled to them. Sarah Asaad Mushtaha, 7; Lana Asaad Mushtaha, 6; Atef Dabour, 15; Maha Fadi Al Baba, baby… And as much as the laces of those children’s shoes had set roots long after the square was cleared, the names lingered in the air like the pigeons that weren’t doves, like they couldn’t be set free fully. Because they were ten thousand so far and that was so far from an end that it defied words. Only the names could tell.

Amsterdam / Netherlands · 2024

NAUGHTY BOYS

One had to wonder. Who were the Naughty Boys and why were they so naughty? And were they really all that naughty? Their vandalism was art, their tag philosophical – or was the symbiotic alignment of their branching Ys with the shadow branches mere coincidence and their statement not all that deep? Was this handwriting real or made up? I mean, was or is it someone’s actual, natural longhand or is it calligraphy? How did they choose which Naughty Boy got to put the tag, or had to put the tag? Could the whole collective be just one liar? But then why? To mislead? To not feel so alone? I don’t think so. You think so? Were they (I guess by now this could be a plural-they or a singular-pronoun-they – by now as in at this point in the passage or at this point in human history, even though the epicene they has been around since the 14th century I suppose, much like the word epicene has been around since the 15th century – anyway, going off on a tangent in these parenthesis much like those aforementioned branches) drawn to this hue of blue the same way I was (and did you have to go back to the beginning of the sentence and read it without the parenthesis to hitch the two parts together)? Or was I really drawn in by their doing more so than that blue? And was that color a mirror or their mood? After all, a lot of fine naughtiness is soaked in blues. Dunno. Maybe their naughtiest act was to raise all those questions. Or did they never mean to raise any of them? Did one really have to wonder, or was it just me? Am I an overthinker by any chance or by any measure? Or am I a naughty boy, just leading you astray on a wild-goose chase for answers that don’t merit questions? Anybody still here?

Cát Bà / Vietnam · 2023

NIRVA-NAH

I liked the reclined Buddha, nestled under that rolling tongue of cliff-rock with plants sprawling over his sleep like dream catchers. And there were big spider webs there, plotted by big spiders, but he didn't mind them because he was asleep and his skin gilded, and no critter would be able to penetrate it. He couldn't even feel them. He couldn’t even feel. That part was a bit sad. But maybe not for him. The Buddhists want to escape the pain of desire. Good luck with that you foolish sages, I said – I’ll take a good spoonful of whatever you leave behind. Sleep well.

Luang Prabang / Laos · 2023

ECHO TRAP

– and following his own echo got him trapped in his jagged ways before he knew it, and after he knew it. But it was a shortcut to himself, his agency, and his well-chosen freedom to be right or wrong on his own terms.

Valle De Las Animas / Bolivia · 2014

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Decisions, decisions. They matter. And yet, it's not the decision that defines our happiness, but how we (get to) look at it. Riddled with pessimism, every fork has but two negative outcomes. Riding the tailwinds of optimism, any road is the right way.

Namibia · 2017

La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires / Argentina · 2014

DEATH BIRTHING LIFE

You are not gone. Because when you went, all of you stayed here. Peekaboo. You didn't need that white marble heaven after all, or an ending repackaged as eternity. You just changed once more, effortlessly.

La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires / Argentina · 2014

BE LIKE YOU

When I grow up, I want to be like you. Audacious and loud like you, tough and tender like you, poking around and getting in trouble like you, raw and unfinished like you.

East London / South Africa · 2017

TIME SHARDS

Then I slowly turned around, wiped the dust off my shoulders, and started picking up those time shards. The youth yonders and coastal frontiers, where we lost wasted fears in our liquor tears. Disposable second selves we stole from supermarket shelves, honest robberies with indifferent intentions, our knuckles still so shy. Those bright nights of twisted lights and burning turns, when muddy visions made for handsome decisions. The way molten words dripped from our fire lips and galactic hopes boiled in our kettle hearts. Soul runs to the nearest heaven, blind break-ins at the wrong gates, trespassing artists with wings for feet. Just once more I want to climb onto those rolling stones that were our shaky thrones, put on my filthy crown to cover this metallic frown, find golden change in my leaky pockets, drink from rusty faucets, bathe in the flickering dreams of emerald streams where I sing my silent song forever long, walk through those lava marshlands, sinking into the dawn with a most innocent yawn.

Granada / Spain · 2017

COEXISTENCE CONTRAST

As the sun climbed the dune, so did we. And it came to me then, again, that all is contrast and contrast is all. All the arch opposites, born with the bang, were there before me – light and dark, hot and cold, the infinitesimally tiny and the infinitely vast. And so were their earthly cousins: left and right, day and night, up and down, life and death. At the seams, where they met, they lent meaning to one another. Their very existence depended upon it. Because everything, every thing in this space-time cauldron boils down to an essential juxtaposition, a molecular love-hate-bond with the other half. One constant temperature would be no temperature at all – we wouldn’t even have a word for it; an undetectable attribute can never become a perceivable concept, so no such thing can be a thing. To live was to balance between these extremes, to tiptoe along that ridge, a crest in this ocean of sand, where the particles always shift while the whole remains the same. But, as much as I understood the necessity of the other and the importance of balance, I wondered if there was always more of one than the other, as to not cancel each other out. And I believed then, that at the end of the day, there was always a little more light than darkness. Of course, this can only be true if something else is false.

Deadvlei / Namibia · 2017

MARKET THEORY’S REALITY

With his famous Five Forces framework, Harvard academic Michael Porter gave the business world a tool to determine the competitiveness of an industry. Thanks teach, that looks handy! For a business to enter under favorable conditions, the forces should be weak. Let’s look at retailers in Kigali’s Kimironko market for instance. Threat of new entrants: strong; threat of substitutes: strong; bargaining power of customers: strong; bargaining power of suppliers: strong; industry rivalry: strong. Well, it looks like this market isn’t a good fit for aspiring shoe vendors. Unless, of course, it’s all they got, and life isn’t a theory but a reality.

Kigali / Rwanda · 2017

UNSEEN, UNHEARD

What if you were unseen, unheard? Where would you look for solace, whom would you call upon?

Lake Victoria / Uganda · 2017

Minneriya National Park / Sri Lanka · 2015

THE LAST TUSK

Just one more, we said. One more can’t hurt. Let’s take that one.

Just one more, we said, once more.

Until one day, there was just one more.

Minneriya National Park / Sri Lanka · 2015

STILL YOU

Two pairs of glasses on your head, when you forget what you forgot. Figments and fragments in a dance, reality’s beat as near as it is far. But with the last moment already lost, your grip on the present is all the more firm. And when it’s all blue, you are still you, through and though.

Montreal / Canada · 2016

topic

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lost touch

grasping for roots

How far we are from what's akin. How far we have gone from where we began. How far we've come is how far removed we've become. From our roots. From the matter of what matters. From where we need to be, back, to stay. To co-exist in defiance of odds we're stacking against ourselves. To co-outlive our collective suicidal tendencies. To co-struggle towards survival. To sail this kin-ship home.

A TOUCH OF NATURE

If velvet were crisp to the touch and soul fibers green… as though a faint childhood memory or ancestral longing or DNA artefact had guided her hand towards this touch of nature. A firmly loving touch, less speaking to curiosity and more to familiarity, a touch of what’s always been akin, fiber-deep underneath.

Paris / France · 2022

A N A L O G U E V A R A

And then the whole cabin went black for the landing, for reasons no one asked about. And only two people resisted the grip of mass-resignation and kept up what kept them up. One, across the aisle, reading her book, tracing and traversing the vertical Japanese script-scape up and down the pages. The other, next to me, writing. Maybe the same thing I’m writing right now. When was the last time I saw someone engage a reading light? Years ago? Decades ago? I can’t possibly remember. And now two at once. A good day for humanity.

in flight · 2023

topic

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home-o sapiens

home is where the home is

The first home is given, the last home is chosen. And along a long road with many detours I arrived at the realization that the place itself doesn't matter so much, but who you share it with and how your experience there begets your feelings, only to re-realize down the road that the place too matters, how it speaks and whispers to you, even if you don’t understand what it’s saying.

HOME SWEET HOME

Home sweet home, 40,000 years ago. Art and storytelling were born here, carved into our living rooms. We’ve come a long way since then, rocky too, and anything but linear. For the longest time, our house, dinner and gadgets were simply what was there; we reaped the land, nature’s gifts. Some 200,000 years of roaming and cave life. 15,000 years of agriculture, give or take. Our first cities popping up around 7,000 years ago. 1878, year of the light bulb; 1886, year of the car. 1900s: vacuum cleaner, A/C, first powered flight, plastic, coffee filter, crossword puzzles, bra, robots, insulin, frozen food, TV, electric guitar, pen, nuclear reactor, microwave, bikini, credit card, contraceptive pill (we’re now entering the digital age in the late 1950s), microchip, laser, HTML, internet, LCD, cell phone, PC, disposable contact lenses, WWW (in this chronological order, among many more). 2000s: don’t get me started – you see where this is going and it’s going faster by the day.

Gobustan / Azerbaijan · 2018

ALL WAS FEEL

On an afternoon so long ago, I lived a life so far away, where all was feel and none was thought, and no one with me there but me, with all my souls and both my soles, my eyes so keen to feed my heart, which longed for the moment I was in more than for any other part. And every house I came across was a home that was mine too, where I lived all sorts of fleeting lives, on an afternoon so long ago.

Normandy / France · 2020

topic

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ruralisation

retracing our footsteps before they vanish

There’s old gold up for grabs in the countryside. Those New Age millennials have only just scratched the surface of their permaculture farms and community gardens, but they’ve already unearthed some big fat nuggets. They’re saying something about remembering a sustainable past to envision a sustainable future, and that “this isn’t regress, but backwards progress.” Maybe we should all hop on that eastbound train. The west has been gutted of all its fast gold.

DYSTOPIA NOW

Hey, pack'em and stack'em inside those gray boxes over there. The ones labeled 1984. See how many you can fit.

Montreal / Canada · 2016

CONCRETE JUNGLE

Once, there was a jungle that gave life. To all creatures. And to itself – the all-encompassing, all-consuming, all-composting mother-organism. Along came the hu-monkey and poured concrete all over the natural habitat to turn it into a mac & cheese dispensary. Now all the urban jungle births are creatures of habit. But the more we habituate, urbanize, paint grey over green, the more we need to foster a healthy symbiosis between towers and trees, before the slabs suffocate us. So we try, a little: relaying a green echo of the long-gone jungle from floor to floor to floor, modern cement acts as a superconductor for chlorophyl and for our super-pride to be super-progressive. We pat our backs so hard, it sounds like clapping, when we realize that the new direction of civilization’s advance is back, towards the roots. Our applause drowns out the screams of those activists who demand more, faster, who say that green band-aids look nice but won’t cure our underlying condition: to want more, faster.

Singapore · 2016

topic

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long longings

longing to never stop longing

Forever longing, we're chasing our own tail, something that is already part of us, but that we must be after constantly to escape boredom. After all, chasing your own tail is as much flight as it is hunt.

Drakensberg Mountains / South Africa · 2017

DENSE SOUL

Fenced in by elbows for much too long, his escape from civilization was a matter of survival. The city’s plots were convoluted and twisted, and their fragile pleasures could never carry the entirety of his dense soul. Spinning inside that centrifuge of light and diluted realities, his core got pushed outwards to the societal rim, the first and final frontier, where his heavy heart began, finally, to gravitate towards nature’s pull. The city had had it all, but nature had something more, something more existential, something truer. Neither cruel nor benevolent, the plots of the wild were simply what they were, honest and pure, written by life and his conscious partaking in it.

Drakensberg Mountains / South Africa · 2017

LIVES I’VE NEVER LIVED

When I see you and the place you call home so tenderly, it reminds me of a life I’ve never lived, a dream I’ve never dreamed; but my longing is painless, my melancholy sweet, my smile pure.

Chennai / India · 2018

topic

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rat race renegades

forever younger than those who are older

These are the last days of the rat race. The finish line is still nowhere to be seen but this stampede of obese rodents has trampled everything that was worth racing for.

GOOSEBUMPS OF OUR PRIME

Halfway there, halfway here, some road ahead, some in the mirror. Every fork the right way. No desert wasteland wasted on us. Passion reactors, fueled by horizon hopes and longings to linger, bound to burst but never today. Destination none. Freedom fever. Don’t need a thing, much less everything. Dreams yes, love perchance. Bright light leaving dark marks under our skin. Friendly risks, more firsts than lasts, pain painted over. Goosebumps of our prime.

Namibia · 2017

OUT THERE NOWHERE

Out there nowhere, nowhen, none the wiser. Still on a silverfish search for the soul of this place, feeling out the teeth of our cog in the grand machinery. But with eyes wide open, it is easy to see that there is no way around crossing these ever-so-endless tracks laid out for us. And that they have led away, not towards, all along. The promised land was never straight ahead, or west, but wherever our feet are pointing.

Bolivia · 2014

WHEN WE ARE

Come graze with us on this silky autumn air, feed off its slowly cooling warmth, sinking late tonight with all the colors making out. Now that the night leaks into the valley, it flushes atomic pulp down our backbones’ marrow and waves of chills ripple through our collective arteries. And we slingshot our dreams into the firmament to never land, as we, too, never land while a flock of feelings soars deep inside our selves. We’re nimble, lean but full, a full filling of passion for passion dripping from our pores. Drowsy drifters slashing their own sails, we wake up to a dream life, the world our living room, an entire universe for a ceiling, our jest fest uninterrupted on this phantom stage. When we are, everything is.

Granada / Spain · 2017

TEXTURE OF THE NIGHT

Tantalizing texture of the night, surrender to dark promises we don’t mean, we don’t mean to keep. Plans biting into ripe potentials, swallowing us whole. Sweet stimuli countdown shoves and pulls and tears. Soon our solace soles will dance away in the sonic smoke. Straight line saboteurs devouring neon nibbles until the oxygen outage, vandalism vanguard on a scavenger spree, utterly unafraid of these angry afterdays with their stale smells. None of that can touch us now. The now is us, the midnight all young and daring.

Cape Town / South Africa · 2017

topic

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feeling feelings

What good is knowing when you're feeling?

Feelings can be vague, can be deceiving, can be misleading, but when you're feeling them, nothing is realer.

GRINDED FEELINGS

The tremendousness of this world has grinded my feelings into something so sharp that I cut myself often. But I’m still digging into these feelings long after my mind begins bleeding because it’s just a stream of rose petals.

Cotopaxi / Ecuador · 2023

SOULSCAPES

These indescribable feelings. There are these indescribable feelings echoing through me. Soulscapes nobody can follow me to. Where even I see nothing but a benevolent blur. Like an unhinged carousel of neurons where places and times and colors collide, and send shockwaves fishtailing along my synapses. A dance. A fix. A blissful, orgiastic mix of what I don’t know. You know?

Thailand · 2023

ICARUS

I’m Icarus. I can't fly at reasonable altitudes, can’t ascend by degrees. I take off and insist on a higher high. I must get my wings scorched before I can descend. And then I fall to another splattering death. And then I’m Phoenix, rising from the ashes I’ve sown, from the hubris debris.

Paris / France · 2022

A BETWEEN

Adiós, I'm a ghost between sheets, a note between keys, a god between prayers, a clown between costumes, a skipped gene between generations, a ripple between moods, a hummingbird between flaps, a temperature between seasons, half a half-life, February 29th, a grain falling through the hourglass, always departed, never landed.

Samos / Greece · 2021

GRAY DAY

I don't mind the gray days. I dress my moods accordingly and squish the rain drops with my self-taught grade A embrace.

New York / USA · 2016

DAY IN MAY

On a rainy day in May I cast my doubts aside because it felt too easy when the sun was bright. Now I don’t mind the ripe sky, hanging low and heavy, or the faith that has long since left me. Best make it a flash flood to wash that grime off my mind, so I can jumpstart my heart and make the way I depart my art.

Bonn / Germany · 2018

topic

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fire, water, air, earth†

Pacha Mama is screaming, but we’re whistling our whatevers louder

We’re sitting on a radioactive powder keg with our throats half-slit but we’re still panting for more thrills. Climate arson, baby!! Oh, how fun it is to set the planet on fire. You can use just about anything as a match – a car, a bulb, a piece of meat. Our efforts to resist this arson are so vague, somebody should sue us in The Hague. But hey, worry tomorrow! Nobody likes to live down the road. And we can always have another one of these cute climate conferences where we shake hands – for now we must dance! How else are we gonna put out our burning feet?

SETTING MOM ON FIRE

Burn mother, one last time and then another. We won’t learn, we won’t turn, knocking on our self-made urn. And when we’re on your mantelpiece – inside the ruin we’re building a few steps down the road – will you miss us please?

Samos / Greece · 2021

THE RIVER DOESN’T CARE BUT WE CARE LESS

With one lazy eye on the horizon and all the rest of us lounging in the here and now, we didn’t see so well. Didn’t see that horizon closing in. That ever so intangible tomorrow has become this sledgehammer-to-the-face dooms-today – neck deep in floods, hair on fire, choking on a hurricane – but we’re still pretty chill, sitting on that snooze button like asses.

Paris / France · 2021

GOLDEN GREEN

With a harvest so golden green came the luxury to forget for a moment; forget about the previous year’s drought and those floods the season before that. Their pay was not measured in labor, sweat, dirt or time, but in luck – existential luck – and so their fate was never fully in their own calloused hands, but in the hand they got dealt by the capricious mother of all, queen of spades.

Tamil Nadu / India · 2018

OUR DUSK

Nature is balance, and survival is balancing. Eat, but don’t deplete. Reap the land, but don’t rape it. A predator too skilled falls victim to his own success, a harvest too rich cannot last. We thought we had tipped the scale in our favor, but now we see that we’re slipping, and that nature doesn’t do favors. When we freed ourselves from the food chain and started playing life by our own set of rules, we crowned ourselves creator kings; but we’re stuck on the same board as the pawns and we hardly know how to navigate it. Half day, half night, we made this dusk, fire on the horizon. Will we see the next dawn? Or will we commit collective suicide, leaving nothing but atomic human shrapnel to fill a vacuum we never owned? One thing comforts me: if this all goes south, life will survive, with or without us.

Granada / Spain · 2018

SETTING UP CAMP INDEFENITELY

One day, a peculiar new tenant set up camp next to the weaver nests. It looked like a temporary situation at first and, quite frankly, a bit ridiculous in the vicinity of these iconic landmarks. The material was somewhat cheap and trashy, and the tacky yellow walls fluttered helplessly with every little blow. Back then, nobody knew how resilient the new super material was, and that it had come to stay. It was still around when the birds left the nests, and long after the nests fell apart.

Windhoek / Namibia · 2017

topic

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finding the home within out there

traveling inwards

My soles brought me places, but immersion taught me places, taught me people and lives.

LOTTERY FAIRY

Like astrological beacons of false hope, the Laotian lottery fairies popped out of the early night that befell those long days of work. Splitting the dark with LED-glazed folding tables, their stations attracted a wealth of motorists driven by the same wish: turn little money into big money. An eager lamp would bend its metal neck towards a well-thumbed layer of laminated pages that caged a strange zoo of animals, numbers, and Lao script. Three digits, associated with a creature one might or mightn’t have been lucky or unlucky enough to see in their dreams, all claimed the shortest route to small fortunes. Rooster 428, snake 632, deer 974 – the wish of your dreams was registered with a swipe to conclude the invisible transaction. And hadn’t the upper bosses clipped their wings systematically, maybe the fairies could have seen to granting more wishes.

Luang Prabang / Laos · 2023

SALASAKA

And so the months passed by as the place kept me. Its spell felt like deliberate inevitability to me, some sort of circumstantial fate. I was stranded well. In a subtle paradise. Salasaka. Melding yesterday and tomorrow today, the Salasakans knew something that was either long forgotten or far from discovery elsewhere. Their wisdom was of the ancestral kind, their lives in rhythm with life itself. Everything was deeply rooted in bygone centuries, in the land, in Pacha Mama, but change was harvested everywhere. Salasaka was not a village outside the world or inside a vacuum. It was right there, where it seemed to belong and want to belong, in a forward-facing folkloric dance between eras. Holding on to ancient knowledge while embracing the next generation’s wit, the indigenous realm lingered beautifully on tomorrow’s verge.

Salasaka / Ecuador · 2012

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Austerity is a narrow gateway. Most material possessions are too bulky to fit through. The flood of overindulgence is too wide to pass it whole. Merely a humble iota of societal diversions makes it to the other side and accompanies the Buddhist monk on his path to raw consciousness and spiritual enlightenment. Only after shaving off all distractions delivered by the senses, the innermost mind is sharpened into necessary focus for the journey inwards. But concentration goes only as far as the belly is full. The blossoming mind can’t escape its organic roots. And so the monk’s quest is nourished by the alms giving lay people, who in return feed off good Karma and the Buddhist teachings. A mutual exchange of food for thought.

Luang Prabang / Laos · 2015

PIECE

Oh Santorini sun, fiery minx, you set like no other; dressed in nothing but amorous promises, you lean in to kiss the horizon and our voluptuous human longing for romance begins to dance. But, alas, the faster you near the embrace, the more passion shatters into skirmishes. To hell with loving surrender – we choose a piece over peace any day before the night. None of us can afford time or space for sentiments while demanding our turn in this crossfire of pointed elbows and hectic shutter shot staccatos. Like the tide below, the second wave of people has arrived to replace the first, but the flesh pours in erratically unlike the smoothly transitioning surf that caresses the shore. We are all here, now, but not in the moment and not together. Oh Santorini sun, you lured us with union, but all you gave was divide. Now you wander west to seduce another sorry lot of naive fools, leaving us in the dark.

Oía, Santorini / Greece · 2017

REV

"Revving the engine is enough to lure them," explained our captain. Then he fed them anyway. Unconditional conditioning. Right off Belize's Caye Caulker, nurse sharks live alongside stingrays, eagle rays, manatees and other aquatic neighbors in an oceanic vicinity known as Shark Ray Alley. Local boat operators use bait in preparation of a touristic snorkel encounter with the harmless animals in the shallow and crystalline Caribbean waters. The dubious feeding practice has conditioned the sharks to line up in front of the boats by the mere sound of an outboard and raises the question of how this unnatural dependence and behavior will affect the animals in the long run. After raising the question, silently inside me, I hopped in, because I’m just like the other sharks.

Caye Caulker / Belize · 2014

ORCHESTRATED CHAOS

Twisting your feet and senses and grasp until you’re mad with hues and scents and dichotomies, the medina of Fes is an orchestrated chaos, underneath, if you read chaos. You shouldn’t though.

Fez / Morocco · 2016

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