Going home
I am going home. Here at this well that saw me come to this world, some depth is calling.
I can see myself, from afar, from above. I can see myself when I first looked. I can see myself today. And behind me, all those who once looked down into it.
A tiny branch, a tiny pebble, and the image becomes blurry. My reflection disappears; from clarity to dissolution.
As if the well was always challenging me to question: “Can you really know yourself?”
I am walking on this old land, owned and grown for over a century by my lineage. I am perhaps trying to find, return, go home. To know myself – a little further.
As blood, this land has passed in the family. It runs through us, welcoming us, housing us, feeding us, and us feeding it in return. Yet with the years, this tradition started to disappear.
No one from my generation seems interested in putting their hands into and feet onto this earth, dispersing seeds or conveying the old wisdom of the well to their thirsty bodies.
I had this strange image today of an old person, waiting without much else to do, in the cold corridors of a desolated home, peacefully knowing that the big transition soon will come. Likewise, the soil here is waiting, like an old sage slowly preparing for the inevitable change, fully accepting its decreasing fertility and irreversible destiny.
One day in the near future, these trees, these old stones, these intertwined plants and random object installations accumulated, mostly randomly, will be removed.
This soil, for long feeding my lineage, including myself, and the neighboring communities will stop produce the salads, parsley, figs, apricots, and the cabbage grown with love and an unquestioned sense of duty.
This duty is now completely questioned. It has been, actually, declined.
The financial equivalent of the land itself has in turn become unanimously the new duty. The land will soon be sold, and thereby dug and built. The land will experience its first disappearance, and with it its never adequately acknowledged, yet generous magic of fertile soil.
The magic is soon gone… Or is it?
The well, patiently, from the depths, is still keeping its secrets. It keeps them so well than no one really knows its actual depth, temperature or origin. In the years I have known it, its mystery hasn’t changed. I know it has listened to and felt each step we took, and even thought of, on the land.
I am of the youngest of the last generation on this land. Soon enough, this land which saw me grow up will allow its own depths to give birth to a new destiny—for many. With the same allegiance and acceptance with which it has seen me become a man or quietly accepted its own decay, the land is now quietly preparing to bear new homes for far more existing families and lineages to come.
To my delight, the well will stay. As if the land will keep a deep, mysterious and eternally beating heart to pulse under each home to come. So going home always stays as easy as a walk on the land.
Cédric Gorinas © All rights reserved
