Some places are famous for something.
A church, a monument, a beach beautiful enough to be ruined by thousands of people who came all that way to photograph it. Then there are places with nothing to show, no attraction to review, and no particular reason to visit.
This is one of them.
And that is precisely why I return.
It is a stretch of countryside like countless others. An old stone well, trees that have watched more seasons pass than we will ever be able to remember, a few houses in the distance, grass, branches, and a horizon open enough to let the sun leave without asking permission from an apartment building.
Nothing happens.
No organized show.
No admission fee.
No recorded voice explaining what you are supposed to feel.
The sun descends. The shadows lengthen. The air changes temperature. Birds conduct their last business before nightfall, and the countryside goes on being countryside, utterly indifferent to my presence.
Marvelous.
We spend much of our lives surrounded by things that demand something.
The phone wants to be checked.
The work wants to be finished.
People want answers, explanations, attention, reassurance, and sometimes even a version of us we never promised to become.
Even thoughts want something.
They arrive without an appointment, sit on the couch of the mind, and all begin talking at once. What you should have said. What you should not have done. The future that never arrives quickly enough and the past that, by contrast, possesses an almost offensive punctuality.
A permanent meeting of ghosts and pains in the ass.
Then I come here.
And this place asks nothing of me.
It does not care whether I have been productive, brilliant, kind, or sufficiently optimistic. It does not ask about my goals for the next five years. It does not invite me to improve myself, which is often the polite way the world tells you that you are not acceptable as you are.
I can simply be here.
Which sounds like very little only because we have forgotten how difficult it is.
I arrive wearing the day.
The exhaustion.
The conversations still clinging to my clothes.
The pointless worries and the unfortunately well-founded ones. The entire small arsenal with which daily life manages to hit you without making enough noise to qualify as a genuine tragedy.
Nothing sudden happens.
No revelation.
The sky does not open to hand me the answers in a golden envelope. No old sage steps out of the woods to explain the meaning of existence before dissolving poetically into the mist.
I stay there.
I wait.
And, little by little, things begin to slide away.
Not because they have been solved.
They simply cease, for a moment, to be the only thing that exists.
The sky takes on color.
Light settles on the stones of the old well, enters the cracks, brushes the fallen branches, and transforms an object that has stood motionless for who knows how many years into something that seems to preserve the memory of the sun.
A little farther away, the trees become black silhouettes.
Bare branches weave across the orange sunset like veins, scars, or hands that keep reaching for something even when not a single leaf remains to justify the effort.
Then there is the grass.
Tall, unruly, crossed by light.
It does nothing remarkable. Barely moves. Yet for a few minutes, every blade becomes important. Every edge catches fire. The whole field seems to hold the day’s final breath.
They are always the same things.
The same well.
The same trees.
The same field.
And yet they are never the same.
The season changes.
The sky changes.
The clouds, humidity, wind, and the way the light chooses to cross the landscape all change. In winter the branches resemble bones. In spring everything begins growing again with that irresponsible optimism only nature can still afford. In summer the sun stays longer, almost as though it does not feel like going home. In autumn everything begins to die with such elegance that even in decay we look like amateurs.
The place remains.
The performance changes.
Perhaps that is what reassures me.
Proof that something can remain itself without repeating itself.
We human beings have a complicated relationship with continuity. After a while, we call anything that fails to provide constant new stimulation monotonous. We change phones, furniture, cars, relationships, and sometimes personalities because we have been taught that standing still means no longer being alive.
Nature seems to disagree.
A tree does not suffer an identity crisis because it has stood in the same field for fifty years.
It does not start a motivational account.
It does not decide to reinvent itself as a tropical palm because the broadleaf market is going through a difficult quarter.
It remains there.
Loses its leaves.
Gets them back.
Faces wind, drought, pruning, and the occasional human being convinced he knows better than the tree how it ought to grow.
And continues.
Not motionless.
Rooted.
Which is something else.
Perhaps we have confused freedom with movement for too long. We think that to feel alive we must travel far away, cross oceans, change cities, or buy a ticket to someplace exotic enough to let us forget who we are for a week.
Sometimes it works.
Travel can open the mind, restore a sense of proportion, and remind you that the world is far larger than the little private hell you built for yourself.
But there is another kind of journey too.
Returning to the same place enough times to finally see it.
Not pass through it.
Not use it as a backdrop.
Truly see it.
Notice where the light falls in January and how it changes in June. Recognize a tree by the shape of its branches. Know where the sun will disappear behind a house and during which season it will pass instead between two trunks.
It is useless knowledge.
And precious for exactly that reason.
It does not earn money.
It does not improve your resume.
It makes no production process more efficient.
It merely makes you more present.
In a world obsessed with utility, being present without producing anything is almost subversive behavior.
I also come here to photograph.
But not always.
Sometimes I bring the camera and wait for the landscape to decide to show me something. Other times I leave it alone and try not to turn every beautiful moment immediately into an image to preserve.
It is difficult.
Photographers develop a kind of reflex. They see interesting light and, instead of enjoying it like healthy people, begin calculating exposure, focal length, composition, and the odds of a cloud moving exactly where it is needed.
A socially acceptable illness.
And yet photographing this place does not mean collecting sunsets.
It means noticing the differences.
The well illuminated in a way that may never return.
A branch dividing the sky.
The low sun among the grass.
Small variations inside a landscape that would always look the same to a distracted eye.
The photographs become a kind of wordless diary.
They do not tell only what the sky looked like.
They tell what I was like while looking at it.
Because we, too, change the light of things.
The same sunset can seem like a promise or a sentence, depending on what we carry inside. One day we see peace. Another, melancholy. Another, nothing at all because we are too busy arguing in our heads with someone who may, meanwhile, be peacefully eating dinner with no idea they are the defendant in an imaginary trial.
The landscape remains innocent.
We are the ones who use it as a mirror.
Perhaps that is why I return.
Not to find answers, but to see which questions I brought with me.
The silence here is not truly silent.
There is the wind.
Some hidden animal.
The distant sound of a car.
The leaves when they are there, and the branches when they are gone.
But it is a silence without demands.
It does not want to entertain me.
It does not try to fill every second.
It gives me room to empty myself.
And that feeling grows rarer all the time.
We are afraid of emptiness.
The moment we are alone, we reach for the phone. The moment there is silence, we turn something on. The moment a conversation stops, we feel compelled to rescue it, even though it may have deserved to die several minutes earlier.
We fill everything.
Our homes.
Our days.
Our calendars.
Our heads.
Then wonder why we are tired.
This place, by contrast, is empty in the right way.
Not because something is missing.
Because there is nothing superfluous.
A field.
Some trees.
An old structure.
The sky.
Me, whenever I finally manage to stop being all the things I think I am supposed to be.
Nothing else.
And for a few minutes, it is enough.
The light begins to fade.
Yellow becomes orange, then red, then an ever-thinner strip along the horizon. Shapes lose their detail. The landscape stops revealing itself and slowly returns to keeping its own counsel.
There is no applause at the end.
The sunset does not seek approval.
It is one of the few beautiful things left that continues to happen even without an audience.
Then darkness arrives.
The thoughts have not disappeared. The problems are still waiting for me. The world has not suddenly become fairer, more sensible, or any less determined to sell me something I do not need.
But something has shifted.
The day weighs a little less.
The noise has quieted.
I breathed without having to achieve a goal.
I watched something end and, instead of trying to hold it, let it go.
Perhaps this is the peace I find here.
Not a solution.
A truce.
A small territory outside time where I can lay down my weapons, sit metaphorically beside that old well, and remember that not everything has to be understood, repaired, or turned into a lesson.
Some things merely need to pass.
A difficult day.
A thought.
A season.
The sun beyond the horizon.
I often return to the same place because the place is never the same.
And neither am I.
Each time I arrive with something different to release. Each time the sky finds new colors with which not to ask what happened.
It simply does what it knows how to do.
Changes.
Goes dark.
And without saying a word reminds me that even the worst days end sooner or later.
Tomorrow the field will still be there.
So will the trees.
The old well will go on keeping its silence, and the sun will descend again with another light and another version of the sky.
I will probably arrive again full of thoughts.
Then I will stand and watch.
Until nothing remains.
And it is in that nothing that, every time, I manage to recover something of myself.