Much remains untold when it comes to grief, and much feels unheard as we walk and connect to everything by our side. The dossier “Walking with grief” reflects on the practice of walking through the writing of six artists.
A year has passed. Was it very much like other years?
No…
Did it pass as quickly as other years?
No.
Are you the same after this year as you were before? Also, no.
What happened?
I was walking.
I was?
I am still walking.
For as long as I remember, I was never in such uninterrupted, constant contact with nature as over this past year. Which means since I was obliged to leave my home in Beirut due to the economic downturn in Lebanon that saw my salary lose nine-tenths of its value and services like electricity supply collapse.
I had found myself in a dark, indeterminate hole, so I left my apartment and a large part of my world behind and came without luggage, to a house that was not my home, to a small village in Mount Lebanon, with a view overlooking all Beirut.
But this journey of 20 miles hardly calmed me. I was wailing like a cow whose calves, weaned at its udder, had been removed. My heart was overwhelmed by grief and loss, by bereavement. My country was, and is, in slow collapse in a world prey to greed. When everything around is a wreck, personal defeats are enlarged as if under a microscope. My hope was shelled, my back was bent.
Surely, I had to be somewhere else in the world, in a haven in another country, or else I would rot with bitterness and be extinguished by disappointment. I had to move, to get away from all this nonsense somewhere, but where to? Anywhere might be the Qibla of disappointment…human catastrophes are everywhere.
Where was the escape?
I had to do something to rescue my soul. But despondency left me motionless, it offered me the temptations of surrender. Luckily, a generous neighbor with a diesel generator bestowed upon me the electricity that our rulers’ corruption and incompetence had denied us, so I could at least keep food cool and charge my phone.
I started to look around me, sniffing for the right exit. And I had the view down to the sea. I was able to share the sunset scene that pedestrians watch on the sea corniche in Beirut, while I also had the foreground of hills of trees and green slopes.
Here I began to associate with the nature with which I have always yearned to unite. Here I found I can get away from the hell of the others. Here I can get closer to myself.
So, I raised my finger to warn my destructive self that was tempting me to stay in bed. I started to walk in the company of nature away from pollution and city crowds.
Well, in the beginning I walked with a hunched back. I was heavy. My feet scuffed the ground with all my load. But the more I walked, the straighter was my head, the farther I was from what I wanted to get away from, and the closer I came to nature, to the roots. As soon as I took a few steps, my chest invited me to take a deep breath, and with the fresh air infusing my entire body, my senses begin to wake up, I smelled aromas coming from every direction, I searched for their sources – I approached them, contemplated them, I touched them. I began to know their taste from their smell.
Here, where I took refuge, I witnessed the birth of flowers and plants, the fullness of their splendor, and their withering and disappearance, in a harmonious, magic-like sequence, to be replaced with another batch of flowers and plants of different kinds according to season. Continuous pregnancies, births and maturation… every day a surprise or surprises. Slowly but clearly surprise started to edge tragedy.
I watched the leaves of the trees falling, branches slowly stripping themselves bare, and then little by little their preparations for a new dress and a new pregnancy. I glimpsed how natural factors intertwine in the cycle of plants, trees, flowers and herbs, from the moment they cast their seeds until they open and then disappear…but what is this disappearance like? It is the origin of all change and renewal.
I walk, I breathe, my chest opens.
As my senses ignite, my imagination flows with my rising pulse, my brain begins to throw out thoughts, thoughts from here and there, ideas that may have no relationship with one another. A memory comes and goes. Thoughts generate feelings, which provide soil for other thoughts, for various moments of being.
While I was walking, September arrived carrying grapes and figs. As I was walking, October came carrying pomegranates, vines, and olives, and on its wall climbed the star flower. Then came November, carrying oranges and by December the winter jasmine had climbed the walls.
I walk and I see lightning and hear thunder, and rain and snow wash me.
I walk and Snowdrops appear like a newborn piercing out his head from his mother’s body…
I walk and witness continuous celebrations – weddings of fruits, plants, flowers and trees – that vary as months begin and end, and sometimes even vary between a sunrise and its sunset.
I walk and nature offers me aromas among which I have recognized the smell of the in between of my mother’s breast. Here are scents that can heal depression, that made me open my arms, in gratitude and worship.
I rejoice. I identify with the transformations of nature. My view of loss changes, as well as of death and annihilation. My views of myself and my concepts change too. Geraniums and roses teach me to love what I don’t have, and not to aspire to hold what I love.
Before, when I walked just on the weekend, I felt at home amid nature, among the trees, the plants, the soil, the birds, and the insects. I always felt at sunset like a child separating from his mother, I waited for the moon like a lover waiting for her sweetheart. I habitually greeted the dawn like a mother cuddling for the first time her new-born. I always had a strong, mysterious longing for something missing, which I could not identify.
Fayrouz sings: فيروز – أنا عندي حنين | Fairouz – Ana andi haneen
I have nostalgia, I don’t know for whom, each night it kidnaps me, taking me away from those awake.
It makes me walk, it takes me far away…
I want to know who I feel nostalgic for, but I can’t find out…
Fayrouz could not help me. I couldn’t find out. But, hey, walking in nature led me to discover who it was I was longing for.
How?
Walking made me face a state of sadness that resulted from losses I felt deep inside. Facing sadness pushed me to mourn these losses. Mourning my personal disappointments, my grief for my country, my grief for humanity. Mourning for a love I lost, for a love I gave, for a love I didn’t find, for a love I lived. Mourning for what I didn’t do, for missed opportunities, for mistakes I made, for wounds I didn’t know how to heal.
Mourning for a lost homeland, for a human being whose technological development outpaced his human development, and who succeeded most in developing machines of destruction and never-ending ways of material gain.
Walking has called me into mourning, it has been the catalyst for the build-up of molten lava inside me. Sometimes the volcano erupted. Sometimes it sent forth a slow but steady flow of lava. Sometimes the volcano blocked itself. But the miles I walked shortened the distance between me and my depths.
This is how the core mourning absorbed all others, how the hidden mystery was revealed, and I knew for whom I had this deep nostalgia, this genuine longing that broke through all ways our Arabic language ties ‘mourning’, ‘hidad’, to cutting oneself off from loss.
I knew that my greatest grief is not my disappointments, nor the misfortunes spreading in this world, nor the love I lost, nor the love I didn’t get. It is a grief that took root before I left my mother’s womb. It is the longing, the nostalgia, for the original womb, the source in mother nature that I left long before I left my own mother’s womb, long before my consciousness formed. This is the loss I have learned to mourn.
But sure, everything has the right time to mature, just as flowers, fruits have their seasons. Man in his autumn may be wise or senile. Perhaps nature taught me some wisdom as I walked, as patience replaced anxiety, acceptance replaced heartbreak, a search for solutions replaced despair, and as balance began to redress sadness.
I continue walking, emerging from obscurity, mystery opened to shafts of light. And as I walk, sometimes, I dance ….
