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Lisbon is known as ‘the city of white walls’. The film with the same title intrigued me no end and has remained one of my favourite movies of all time.
The protagonist spontaneously leaves behind his sailing career (and wife) for a fresh start in Lisbon. The white walls are a metaphor for his new found emptiness; the nothingness of life without identity, home, familiarity. The human form in reality - endlessly dying and being reborn.
Now I found myself in a home of white walls… and I’m painting them whiter as the days go on.
Strangely, however, it feels much more like I’m building something than knocking it down. Perhaps if one is to CHOOSE for something, to CARE for it and to MAINTAIN it, then it may as well be that which is close to Nature, and to the truth of all things.
Whiteness is that exactly I feel.
And I’ve never been more creative, more grounded and more content…
It has been said that everything arises from nothingness. Jazz music is about ‘the silence between the notes’, Comedy the ‘space between the jokes’, Martial Arts the ‘time between the pokes etc etc.
So why surround ourselves with so many things… so much ‘stuff’? Well the questions is: do you want your home to be a museum or a moving evolution? In my eyes, one is the past and the other is the present (or the future).
We keep our past selves, memories, identities and experiences inside of our bodies. You see it in the way we walk, talk, run, dance etc, but also from our homes; the spaces we build around us.
Home, perhaps, according to the law of nature, should embody 3 things:
1) Constant change
2) Both ‘building oneself up’ AND ‘emptying oneself down’ (both constructing / developing AND clearing oneself away / decluttering etc)
3) Un’owned’ - instead, one of the infinite shared homes that inhabit this planet
What might your home look like, and how might you behave, if it was more in line with Nature? And how would society transform if home was an evolving, changing space, rather than a dusty collection of memories…
I’m curious…
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