Oh yeah existing

Yesterday I was back at the Tiergarten, the largest urban park I've ever been in the heart of a city. Whether in a park, a lake or a forest, it’s been a little while only since I last went to walk around in the Nature, but it was starting to feel like a lifetime. I've been to the Mediterranean Sea a couple of years ago and even to the Baltic this summer, but almost four years have passed since I last dived into the ocean, my own personal redemptive landscape. I haven’t been in a mountain at all for a really long time... how I long for such a horizon for months. Even a real hill with a view would be awesome right now.

My good friend, who says that she feels attracted by contradictions, had texted me in the morning inviting me for a stroll. I’m glad to have noticed the phone at all and relieved that I have managed to pick it up this time and to have gone out on my bike to meet her, because I really did have a kind of a blast for an afternoon, just chatting away through the cold grey January weather that I am so afraid of every year. 

(Suddenly it’s snowing at last! I stare at the much craved happening from my bed window, the exquisite coffee she offered me being made in the kitchen. Oh yeah, the beauty of existence.)

We have had a glimpse of our fortune already as we were about to leave the Tiergarten for a hot drink, my friend and I, when we stumbled across a beautiful memorial to another (mainly ignored) massive group of Nazis' victims, the Sinti and Roma people. Neither of us knew of its existence, although we both live in Berlin since before it began being built. The sound of what felt like a violin echoing on the outer part of the surrounding hedge first caught my attention, almost as if a crying human voice had turned into a sirene. But it was the poem, by Santino Spinelli, inscribed at the foot of the memorial itself, that made me appreciate the abrupt silence between us for once, even if just to celebrate the possibility of having a clear voice against the danger of gagging urgent realizations amist the contemporary cacophony.

Gaunt face
dead eyes
cold lips
quiet
a broken heart
out of breath
without words
no tears

I remembered someone in great emotional distress who once told me that what could have helped to overcome old traumas better would have been the general acknowledgment of their pain. I've always appreciated most German people I’ve met for the established capacity of dealing with collective memory where it hurts the most. I wish we would all adopt and extend this attitude organically, for instance towards more recent times and the others - often but not necessarily always - facing us.

Memorial to the some 500,000 Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazis in the Porajmos (...)

 https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/monument-to-sinti-and-roma-murdered-in-the-holocaust-opens-in-berlin-a-863212.html