Experience peace and introspection
with this walk around the space.
Please use earphones and turn the captions on.
A PLACE OF INTROSPECTION
The Giola Lagoon | Thassos, Greece
The process
Read the complete experiential narrative here.
You are Here now, Here with me.
Here, surrounded by water that is blue like the day sky and sparkles like the night stars. At neither time though, does this water stop breathing. With the gentle rise and fall of its chest, you buoy now, you float - despite the heaviness in your heart.
I gently touch your shoulder, but it is unnecessary. Your eyes are already travelling up the great white lagoon in front of us. The opening small enough for just the two of us to pass; The inside, big enough for everything you want to leave behind. Taking it all in like a deep breath, you enter. I follow.
And it is like breath again. It is inside, it is outside. It is like salt and water. It is inside you; It is, in this moment, surrounding you as well. The same water outside, that travelled with you inside. Looming up ahead, you see another great white rock. I take you forward, closer. Along the rock, just below the surface, teal grey fishes bustle about in all directions. Birds swoop down to drink water from where it is collected on the rock, where it, in the brilliant sunlight, glistens. You reach out and swim along the rock with one hand on it, feeling the coolness of it letting you in on the warmth inside. Suddenly, your palm touches air- there is an opening.
You heave yourself up on the rock. Standing here, you can feel the water dripping off your body onto the stone, collecting there. You feel the hard rock through the soft water, while the sun, finding only your back to scorch, does so. The opening is small. You bend and your eyes meet yours in the shallow plates of water that the waves have left on the rock floor. And you realize, you KNOW, that you face no one here but yourself alone. The fear, the hesitance in those eyes is yours alone. Here, you are alone. You step barefoot into this water and walk in, ankles submerged in the cool calmness of the water, shoulders sheltered from wind.
There are now, steps before us, slightly dented in the middle so that the water flows down it like a rivulet, leaving the sides dry to walk down. Walk we do, on either side of the little stream, hand in hand, feeling the beautiful way dry surfaces can dry your wet feet, simply by you walking on them.
As you reach below and look above at the same time, you feel that soft thud in your heart, of a pleasant surprise. You had not expected, the huge rock to be so much smaller inside. You feel the top not towering away from your eyes anymore, but looking kindly down into them. You feel the intimacy, you know that in this moment, this place belongs to you. The story it tells right now, is yours. You know it is like the best of stories, that even after you’ve heard or read, you come back to. The ones that you can enter anywhere and put up a tent there to live in it once more. The ones where you know who wins, who dies and who finds love, but you let it tell you once more, and then once again.
Inside, there is a big stretch of stone and another, bigger, wooden stretch. There is water everywhere in between, the surface broken by nothing else but the vines that have grown enough to touch it. Little fish swim in circles around them, nibbling at them, slapping their tails across it. Standing here, you realize you’re dry now, no longer cold. As you walk out on the stone, your eyes touch here, a potter’s wheel. Looking back and to the side, you see a whole pile of clay. It is only now, that looking around the cave, you see the pots and cups in all shapes, though most in no shape at all, on the glass slabs ahead and above your head. You realize people have come here, created them, and left them behind here forever, with hundreds of others who’ve come, and for hundreds of others yet to come, to find. It is like stories they’ve given to the cave to keep secret. None of them the same. And now, you see the cave is filled with them, a story hiding in every corner you see. Where people have not cared for the glass slabs, but placed their stories where they felt it belonged. Suddenly, you see them everywhere- on the small jutting stone on the far side, placed in the small crack to your right, or simply down on the floor by the water.
You realize, now, that this is what you came to do. Leave your story behind. To give it to the cave to keep safe. To give it to the ocean, to take it far, far on its waves, and never bring back to you again.
You can smell the earth, hear the water, taste the salt in the air. You can see the beauty around you, and as you sit down at the wheel, you can touch. Sense. All five senses channelled together, it is like meditation. The underlying infinities of thought, rise. You dip your hands in the water to work the clay, and in the same water again to clean your hands. You feel yourself released from all that binds you. From what you fear people think of you, from what you want people to think of you.
As you complete your work, you walk down to put it up on the glass slab. You reach the slabs, and as you rise up and place it, you see the sky through the glass, and through the pattern of the clay forms left on it. The sky through the glass- hidden in some places by them, framed by them in others. They reveal, they conceal. As you then look down again, you see the pattern repeated on the water, in the shadows they have created on it. You sit here for some time, dip your feet into the shadows that dance, you know, with stories and secrets. Your feet play with them, stir them, separate them, open them out. You smile as the thought lands into your consciousness- with no pomp and show but a slight, subtle thud- that one of these shadows, carries yours.
You would have sat for hours, but I nudge you aware. There is more. You walk to the wooden platform. You step on it and realize the roof here is lower still. It engulfs you, it protects you. You take a step ahead, and let out a sudden, awe-struck gasp. You would have taken a step back, had you not been absolutely transfixed. You are surrounded, suddenly, by coloured reflections dancing and bouncing everywhere it finds possible. At your feet, in a myriad of colours, on the water too, and reflected from it, on the white wall to your side. I point above and you see a hole in the roof, covered with pieces of glass in all colours, overlapping sometimes to create newer ones still. As the sun shines inside through the glass, you are bathed in reflections. Reflections.
Humbled, protected, alone and introspective, you feel the story come out of you. You walk ahead and sit down. It is directly behind the opening, and you can see the ocean ahead and beyond. You are ready.
You confess, you let it out. You feel change beginning to knock, freedom walk slowly up to you. With broken dreams and promises, it is much more difficult to live with the shattered pieces, held close to your heart and letting the jagged edges cut you. Now and Here, you know you’ve left it behind, and walking down the steps you lower yourself into the water and again. You dip in, and resurfacing, you know you are clean, you know you are free.
As you swim out of the lagoon, you look back.
You are Here. Here with me. I, am your spirit.
And as we turn back again and swim off again, I feel lighter.
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