BAOBAB

Published By DEIA, August 11, 2011


It's sure that there was a time in the awakening of man in which no one felt out of place in nature. Today, one of the biggest problems of the human being is feeling that he does not belong anywhere, neither to a family, nor to a place and not even to nature. And, curiously, I suppose that as in other rules of life, instead of searching to return to that link of union with what we are, we have tried to solve the problem by making the surroundings adapting to us, losing totally the north of the things.

How have I come to this conclusion? After reading an article of a tree that lives almost exclusively south of the Sahara desert and that has lived 3,000 years, reaching its truck to measure more than 30 meters of diameter.

It is the Adansonia Digitata or African Baobab. The odd thing of this tree is that it reaches those giant-sized thicknesses having grace at not having a high height. Living where this arboreal species lives it has specialized in the storage of enormous quantities of water inside, converting itself into something like an enormous barrel, capable of containing up to 120,000 liters of the liquid element. This tree is a true treasure because we achieve monkey's bread; a fruit with great quantity of vitamin C, of the bark; a fiber with which strings and baskets are manufactured, from his boiled leaves food, while from his wet pollen glue is obtained.

Because of its strange appearance, the baobab has been creditor of many African legends among them one is that everyone who drinks the water in which its seeds have gotten wet will be protected against the attack of the crocodiles or that the one, who extracts a flower from the tree, will die devoured by a lion. Besides their hollow trunks have served as jail, house and even like the one of Limpopo ( South Africa ) as a bar, being able to hold in its interior 40 people.

We try to subdue the surroundings to our needs, without realizing that the path is in finding what we are and in that way we’ll be able to enjoy all the baobab of our existence has to offers us.

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GORRITI

Published by DEIA, June 9, 2011





I remember a very special visit to one of the most authentic people that I know.
It was cool outside. It was autumn, a luminous day of those but humid at the same time, the ones that I like, with the aroma of the wooden smoke coming out from the chimney. The Malloak in front, as if of a giant-sized painting in three dimensions we talked about and at the front door of his home, its owner, Juan Gorriti, sculptor, painter and a thousand things more, but above all owner of his own destiny like few I have known.
I greet him with a strong hug and after a long and amusing chat he invites me in to taste the beans his wife has prepared. Everything next to Gorriti tastes different; he has the pleasure of what's sincere. A slug of wine, a couple of fried eggs and one already forgets about the problems of the city, hastes, paperwork...
Gorriti is a man with a special magic, with the wisdom of a farm man and the most creative artists' talent. A human being that, unlike other ones, expresses what he feels bluntly, in a natural way. Always it is said that artists receive infinity of influences and I believe that in the case of Gorriti those influences are mutual because anyone that has talked with him or has seen his artworks realizes that inspires life in all that he touches and converts the common, the normal in something with proper and different personality.
I am fascinated with his vision of what surrounds him: “Our villages and farmhouses, mountains, forests, all that surrounds us are big art galleries... ” Their art, their talent, are an accurate reflection of their philosophy of life, without internal wars obscuring their existing, letting oneself get carried away by what is born inside, without filters. And, curiously, that seems the less risky for us all, I believe is what really satisfies him, turning his gaze into something clean and in peace.
All that wraps him up is susceptible to be a part of his art although, particularly, I am delighted with what one is capable of achieving with wood, creating, like Mother Nature, transforming.

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PAGASARRI

Published by DEIA, May 26, 2011




Returning from Madrid from a collaboration, several meetings and the Music Award’s Event still in my mind. Just before coming to Bilbo I notice the slopes of Pagasarri and I discover the leafiness and the coloring of a spring in its complete effervescence. Passed a few days I decide to take a stroll around there.

The mountain Pagasarri belongs to Ganekogorta's mountain mass that, with its 1,000 meters of height, which is a natural border between the territories of Bizkaia and Araba. In the trajectory I can clearly see that the Paga is alive and vitality becoming the lungs of such a frantic city like Bilbao. In an article they commented that this area lodges surprisingly a rich fauna that, without a doubt, revalue’s the surroundings with residents like the aesculapius snake, the peregrine falcon or the sparrow hawk among others. With a burning sun on top I continue my walk throw the intense green grasslands and seeing some more and more privileged sights thinking about how difficult it is to me to believe that animal species so savage may inhabit a place so near to a dense urban nucleus like Bilbao than it seems that it would have to have lost his ecological value, as if the same went by human patterns.

Nature does not circumscribe only to distant and paradisiacal places. Animal and vegetal species, that now seem ecological treasures for us, thousand years ago it did not populate our lands exemplifying that nature is somewhat lively, changing, that evolves and develops itself for parameters, I would even say, we are unaware of in great measure. Before sparrow hawks, falcons, etc were species that we only could see in books or visiting very distant and agrestal areas. Today, even in surroundings so humanized like the Pagasarri, we can enjoy them.




Let's not get carried away always of pessimistic and alarming messages, true it is that not all is good but it is not less true that we achieve bigger things. I believe that we have to learn from the animals, because only they get carried away by their instinct, for what they need and what they are. And they always CORRECT. Maybe someday even we will learn, right?

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CATATUMBO

Published in DEIA, Oct. 7, 2010



Midnight, surfing the Net trying to find something. I’m searching but I really don’t have a clear idea of what I want and then all of a sudden, a small but a shocking discovery that I am going to talk about, without even visiting it . The place is in the National Park "Ciénagas de Juan Manuel", northwest of Venezuela, in the flowing river of Catatumbo and the lake Maraciabo. There takes place what today is named "El Relámpago Catatumbo" (Catatumbo Lightning). A lightning that strikes in the same place between 140 and 160 nights a year. Every time that the phenomenon happens it shines brightly between 7 and 10 continuous hours, with a frequency of 50 discharges per minute, around 1,176,000 lightning’s per year, generating 10 % of the ozone layer of the planet. So it is that in only 10 minutes he could generate enough energy to turn on all the bulbs of South America. Scientists allege two reasons for this to happen always in the same place: On one hand the stagnation of thousands of thunderclouds that collide with the mountain ranges that surround the enclave and an the other hand the high concentration of methane gas . Every time I can I observe the electric storms that visit us. The different type of wind that announces the storm. The lightning a true symbol of the ancestral and what's uncontrollable. The spectacular main star of nature that still has been impossible for us to subdue and that interprets his character under the same script, time after time, since the world began. And finally the thunder, deafening companion that reminds us what we are and what we will never be able to be. In Venezuela they have the belief that the Catatumbo Lightning has place because thousands of glowworms concentrate together at that point to honor the fathers of the Creation. I do not know what explanation, unscientific, we could give to the capricious distribution of our lightning’s, but as soon as I can I will enjoy their forms, lights and explosions again. A whole spectacle within the reach of everyone.

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