the P H O T O and the story behind

for the Romanian version click here

The truth is that I am still floating. Three weeks are gone since I returned from Himalaya and I cannot find – or I don’t want to find it - the exit from this dome of fascination which seized me. And not just because everything was perfect and because everything was as it was. But just because everything was perfect in an amazing imperfection! Under that thing some people name it “a hard shell”, I always had my sensitivity corners. At this moment, I don’t care about what a he or a she are saying, what are they thinking or judging about me. And maybe in this way, lost in this emotional fog I failed into, I will learn to ignore – and to overcome – the rough issues and behaviours, the deep egocentrism coming from those I more less expected, to ignore and overcome the surrounding superficiality, the parasitism, the sloth, demagogy and my own powerlessness in front of a situation that depends of a context and an objective reality, but which strikes me and makes me lose my direction.

I’ve just remembered about those long minutes from my life, about that short time I spent alone on a rock, somewhere in an overwhelming Himalayan desert, coming out from one Ends of this big World. Fighting with a ragged soul, with that kind of emotion I struggle every time when I have to survive a separation that I hate to experience, I was in a point when I had to leave behind me a world corner where probably I suffered the most during this adventure. No drama, it was no disaster, the suffering was composed only of physical and emotional pain that together led to a trivial short-term psychological collapse. It was on Monday, Decembr 27^th, 2010 and I was going down from a high altitude, about 5.000 meters over the sea level, from Gokyo Lakes Area, Everest Land. The place where you greet some giants of this planet, but not only the Everest itself. You may greet the Ngozumba Glacier too, the longest glacier in the Himalayas. You are surrounded by the area of the natural records and you are so small and insignifiant. And lonely. And you turn your back against your will for returning to a world where you do not recognize yourself, where you don’t refind yourself. A world you hate it. But this is also a detail that you must live with, because if you talk about it, you will suffocate because your own inability to understand the others’ reactions.

It’s four o’clock in the morning. My exam starts in 6 hours, after two more days I have another one and this is my life for the next three days. Then I finish all the exams this session and I have a break. For what? That break I am waiting for like a breath for starting to read the words and thoughts of Sir Edmund Hillary and of Tenzing Norgay Jamling’s as they were expressed many years ago when myself I did not even exist on the list of still unthinkable babies. Reading and write, this is what I want to do. The rest issues seem to be a secondary matter, although the life and the place where I am living will inevitable point me out that my priorities should be different and that the order of the elements in my actual life should change. This is true, I know. The Maslow’s pyramid is not a mere fiction, but the reality that will bring me with my feet on this Earth. Eventually.

I was descending from that universe, though beautiful, sublime, still hostile and cold. And every step of mine was a ton of regret.

I left behind me the narrow and dusty path, getting out from the noisy river area, where the water's strong and wild voice covered all others sounds. I went down on the front shelf paths, contrasting generous and widely under my feet and I suddenly stopped.

Behind me, I left the path to a hidden world that you cannot see in the picture.

In front of me another path which brings me to another world. I came from that world before reaching the world I now was coming back ....

There was no turning anywhere. Just inside of me. And when we meet an intersection we usually are accustomed to stop. For assuring and choosing, deciding and making the next step. That step is the step for the next one and so one til the moment we die. Everything is connected, everything is hooked up, we sometimes get circles in our life, sometimes squares, pyramids, lines, curves, inverted pyramids and we go through all kind of geometrical shapes whose name we know ongly because of some linguistic inventions.

I stopped and looked for a higher rock, in order to fix my camera and take a picture trying to keep the illusion of an image of the state I felt there and then. The pictures cannot forward thoughts, but the still communicate some things. The batteries of the camera were very low, so I couldn’t afford too much options, I had to manage one shot and only one and to get a right picture. And though I take such photographs usually in other circumstances – when I feel that I want to dance and to frolic and to express the excitement of a moment -, this time I felt so lost. I wanted to take a picture of me getting lost inside me. I felt so lost in a palpable sense of pain of the soul. The soul, that “thing” which all doctors are seeking to heal and never find it, they just believe that they are getting closer, but whatever they poke, they never reach it.

Well, that moment, the moment behind of this picture is actually the essence of a travel I did on several levels. It was one of the conscious trips in the sense that I wanted in a particular way to understand the significance of every moment I experience. But somehow, when I’m there, although I breath with every pore the every single particle of the every single moment, I do not feel anything particularly deep inside. It is just a simple mixture of superficial and common feelings which I can translate in even more common words: beautiful, warm, dark, ecstasy, cold, hunger, well, fatique, thirst, nature, road, people, tired, animals, hard, loneliness, curiosity, fascination, sleep, insomnia, energy. That’s all. There’s nothing profound. Then, when everything is finished, ended, after you changed the rhythm, the screenplay, the landscape, the tomorrow’s day perspective, the food, the program, expectations, time, area, activities – only then it starts the real processing of information you collected. Then appear a different moment, when you should see what are you doing with all these, how do you manage, how do you pass over the new emotions and states.

The Myth of Shangri La exists. You cannot see it. Don't look after it. It is a matter of feelings and senses.