I walk up from the cove to get the car after a swim. To follow the path, I have to look up. It's been raining for the past few days. Behind the luminous green tops of the pines, the sky is a massive block of blue glass, perfected by the north wind.
September matches this empty sky. The cove was empty. The end of the season has freed my corner of the world from predatory overcrowding. Silence returns. The jet skis are parked. The small boats are moored in the marinas. The seagulls and cormorants have returned. The sea and the land breathe. A group of jays start to scream when they see me. They change branches but don't leave. They are curious birds and actually follow me.
I'm once again mesmerized by the pure, cloudless blue above me. A moment ago, I was swimming through the equally clear sky of the sea, through the crystal-clear water that crumbles against the rocks and then returns to the sea, transformed into bubbles and flour. A moment ago, I was swimming through the white, effervescent foam that marks the silhouette of the rock like chalk when the wave recedes. The blue sky toward which I walk focuses and overwhelms me exclusively.
But I say exclusively because I'm carried away by emotion. In reality, how many generations over the centuries have not experienced this same awareness of the beauty of that same blue? How many humans have heard it with the same intensity as I, a moment before lowering their heads again? And how many have not been fortunate enough to be more sensitive than I and to find even more beauty and fulfillment? How many before me have experienced the privilege of this blue sky, or the green of the water, or the red of the twilight, or the white of the snow, with an awareness synonymous with gratitude, and even stronger than the one I feel now?
Suddenly, violently, a pine tree transforms before me into a poisonous green jellyfish. The jays see it and flee in fear. I think: what about the opposite? How many generations over the centuries have not experienced the opposite consciousness to what you are experiencing? How many humans have known the depths of the most savage hell, in a hospital or a psychiatric ward, or in the war I watch from a distance every day on the screen with the innocent dead, the bombed children, the houses, hospitals, entire cities destroyed, the deportations and hunger, the helplessness of the victim, the obscenity of Trump's project to turn Gaza into a huge tourist business, as if tourism were the modern way to subjugate and enslave a defeated country forever.
