"To our dear friend Alan Roseman, a great guy and mate who loved to travel and continues to do so"

They say that traveling, the heart gets stronger

because walking new ways, makes you forget the previous,

I hope this happens soon

so my sorrow can get a rest

until the next time”.

Travel ... escape ... try new paths, although in pandemic times this is almost impossible, we always invent something and in my case, I must thank my work that from time to time allows me to escape. And in that last getaway unexpected things happened, as fortunately always happens and its surprise us ... we go out on the road with an irrepressible voracity, eager for the pics we will take and sometimes forget the essential: the essential empathy to get in tune with the places and their people.

On this occasion, my course took me to the Northwest of my country, at the foot of the Andes, a magical place, so different from the one I live where the Plain is the leitmotif that colours our passing. There it is the omnipresence of the hard mountain that places us in the place from which we should never have left: humility.

“And so you find a wounded pigeon

that tells its poetry

of having loved and broken another illusion.

Surely in a while it will be flying

inventing another hope

to live again.

Surely in a while it will be flying

inventing another hope

to live again.

... and there are many wounded pigeons (or not) that we find ... if we are willing.”

It's Sunday, a huge and empty fruit market welcomes me, but as I walk through those aisles that will be invaded by thousands of buyers on Monday, I am finding the loneliness of silent men, who seem not to want to break the spirit of a Sunday foreign to them ...

… A singer and poet at the top of an old railway viaduct filling the hills with music who tells me about his sadness at not being able to go on stage with his music and poetry because of “this bug that came from far away”, a man from to speak simple but deep that leaves the love of his landmark in my heart, the land where we can still walk through those ruins built by the Incas.

… Adobe houses that blend into the mountains and seem abandoned but the goats locked in a corral deny it to me…

... A child who has to suddenly become a man to take care of his blind grandfather, the crops and the animals on his little farm because his mother has to go out to work almost the entire day ...

... A famous goldsmith who suffers from Parkinson's disease is taking him further and further away from his passion ...

… The rural teachers who are seen so frequently on the roads of my country, hitchhiking to travel to their schools, so far from the places they inhabit… self-sacrificing to the point of heroism.

 “I think nobody can give an answer,

nor tell what door to knock

I think that in spite of so much melancholy

so much pain and wound

it's only about living.

 In my calendar there's an empty date

is the one of the day you said, that you had to go,

You must walk through new ways

so your sorrow can get a rest

until the next time.

Surely in a while you will be loving

inventing another hope

to live again.”

 “It's only about living”

Author of the Poem: Lito Nebbia (1979)