desired walk .8

Two oaks are in front of my house. One close to the other, even more so now that it has been snowing for two days. Beneath them there is a desired walk, a path where people love to run and walk instead of using the officially marked ones.

   This night, returning home, I followed my desired walk where the snow had not seen any footprint. Suddenly, the white at my feet faded under the canopy of one of the two oaks towards the dark of fallen leaves. It was so dark under the trees. The trees had collected all the snow with their branches.

   While I was crossing that dark space I was not paying attention to a point where the ground became white again, for a second, and dark again, when I realized it was a narrow strip running between the two trees, right in the middle: a line where the snows had opened a way through the closed canopy.

   I looked up at the branches, where the two dark masses met. A line was marked on the white sky. A white winding line drawn by the empty space left by the shoots of one tree meeting the shoots of the other. The canopy of the first oak did not interfere with the canopy of the second one; they grew attuned to each other according to their necessity.

   How the desired walk could be deliberately and fortuitously marked following this line, invisible all over the year except when it snows, is something that spoke of the necessity that sometimes ties things together. Obviously the path runs in between the two trees and the two canopies of the same age meet at that very middle: nothing strange about that, nor mysterious…

   It is about this white line on the ground, one night visible, surrounded all around by a dark carpet, a line invisible all the rest of the year and so similar to the empty line of sky, above, usually invisible too during the night, except when it snows. Two invisibles offering themselves to a winter night. This is wonder.

   The necessity of biology meets human enchantment. They live together one beside the other and allow us to discover how much enjoyment is in walking their unknown distance. A unmeasurable distance, because it is not made of matter nor of space nor of time and has no meaning. In that distance we find our life as a place where biology and dream meet in the unexpected richness of something real in front of us, measurable and meaningless that makes us dream: a line of snow, just in front of us, measurable and meaningless that makes belonging start.

   The measure of that line could be: “From a snowy day to a snowy day,” a measure of time more than of space, though… So the measure of this space could be “a walk along an invisible line for 360 days” (given an average of 5 days of snow per year)… Invisible just as the desire of the walk is invisible, made visible by snow, as prints are made visible by dust, and ghosts by flour.