Pauses

When I think about what all has happened in the past 2 weeks I feel exhausted.
No. More then exhausted, more like I´ve been walking around with a bag of stars on my back so bright and heavy my shoulders are bruised and glowing.

It is a hardbliss.

All the things one sees, and doesn´t. The parts we enlarge and then reduce down to a fraction. I remember reading an interview with Georgia O´Keefe in which she was asked why she always painted flowers so big? Why did she feel it was necessary? And she responded,

I hate flowers. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

This illustrates so much. We have a tendency to be so busy that the rush swallows us whole, and by the end of the day, we wonder where all the hours went. We miss the freckles. The floating questions. The clouds. The puddles. The hours will always go by. Afterall, the day you are born is the first day you start dying. I have to remind myself that no matter how much I want to do and accomplish I can´t do it all. Argentina is teaching me that it is okay to sit in a park. I can just sit! It is amazing!! And it isn´t laziness, it is being human. It is taking in your surroundings and enjoying the spot that you are in. Everything can be enlarged, reduced, or pushed aside. I´m loving the small things. For instance, I was having a conversation with this Argentinean girl at a coffeeshop. She is studying film at the University and so we started talking about the difficulty of writing screenplays. She was working on one and told me that she liked going to cafes or parties and just listening to what people talk about. As we were having a conversation about conversations it occured to me that perhaps, the most important thing to listen to is not just the words or topics, but the pauses. The things that are said in those small fractions of silence. The way people fidget with their pockets, or clean the dirt from their nails with the tips of pencils. The squints, the blinks, when people crack their knuckles, look up to the stars or stare at the concrete.

Today, I´m going to look at flowers.