With my hands on the ground

My sensory perception is more whole when I am in this garden. I have no other purpose than to hang up the hammock, take off my shoes and lie down to look, smell, listen and, perhaps, mutter to myself a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson: “All life that is not purely mechanical is woven with two threads: looking for the bird and stop to listen to it ”. Stevenson spoke of the legend of a man who one day left a convent and went to a forest. On the way he was very attracted to the song of a bird. He stopped to hear their chirps. Later, when he returned to the convent, he noticed that his companions were looking at him strangely. They didn’t even greet him with the usual familiarity. Only one of them remembered. The time he spent listening to the song of the bird was not as short as he believed: several years had passed or, in other words, he had entered the elevator.

The saxophonist from El persecutor, the story by Julio Cortázar, explains it masterfully: “I realized when I started playing that I was entering an elevator, but it was a time elevator, if I can tell you that. Don’t think I forgot about my mortgage or my religion. Only in those moments the mortgage and the religion were like the suit that one does not have on; I know that the suit is in the closet, but you are not going to tell me that this suit exists at this moment ”. Johnny Carter had learned as a child that music took him out of time or, rather, brought him into a different time. That is why I say that, listening to the song of the bird, the walker of the Stevenson legend, like Johnny, entered the elevator. I recognize a similar feeling when I am here in the garden of my childhood home.