Day 16. Growing mountains. Manresa.

 

So many stories that still have to be told. It has been a beautiful walk but days have been so full and as always there is too little time to do everything I would like to do. It is a difficult choice always, to use the time to write down past experiences, to document, or to use the time to experience a new place, new people, be with the group, collect more stories. There are small trees to be taken care of, a suit that has to be embroidered, talks about collectivity and collaboratives, visits to convents, performances and concerts specially organised for the Grand Tour. And apart from the things that are planned there are so many unexpected things happening every day, so many wonderful conversations, magic places, new questions, old memories getting weaved into new ones.
There will be time afterwards to go back to all that has happened. 18 days that feel like 18 weeks. If I would really want to somehow catch all that has happened (as far as that is possible) I would need 18 months.

Today is a rare slow day in the walk. A day where we woke up in a beautiful apartment in the heart of Manresa and I wandered through the city to end up on my favorite square, the one I found when I was walking through Manresa virtually in June this year and explored the city´s street to look for graffiti by using Google Streetview. The square is just behind the warrior girl with the intense eyes, fighting for her dreams, whatever they are.

Tomorrow we will walk the last part of the walk, from Manresa to Montserrat. A week ago the holy mountains suddenly popped up, almost like a fata morgana. The rest of the week they stayed in our sight, sometimes invisible behind other mountains, behind buildings, trees, or hidden by the darkness of the night. Yesterday they were gone completely for a while, it had rained extensively in the early hours of the morning and the solid shapes were swallowed by thick grey clouds, as if God had performed a magic trick.

I guess we will see them again tomorrow, slowly getting bigger in our vision but not really changing size. I wonder if the mountains have seen us getting bigger as well. We must have grown during those 18 days. No man can stay the same walking for 18 days to reach a mountain.

When I put on my suit again this morning, like I´ve been doing every day, I saw two things. A tiny heart and a completely new mountain range.