WALKING AND FREEDOM

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I think that talking about the concept of freedom is very complex. I once said: Freedom: Existential longing, mental mirage or metaphysical reality? However, here I do not intend to define what it consists of, I only try to make it feel in some of its most elementary forms, by just walking.

Freedom gains strength in terms of its absence; the more we feel that we do not have it, the more we long for it.

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Walking makes us feel and live sensorially that full strength of our interiority, regardless of what are the types of our emotional chains. It allows us to get away from that massive fervor of purchases, that envelope of mass advertising, because they constantly tell us that freedom is “a plus” that is obtained by acquiring things. When we walk along a path in the countryside, we say: We breathe pure air; and that is nothing more than a metaphor of feeling free, free of the things that imprison us, our commitments, obligations, physical things; we feel tied to all of this.

Just to get a little closer to its definition, we can mention a classification of this concept in 2 aspects, which are not the only ones: psychological, spiritual, mental and metaphysical freedom; and external freedom: physical, civil, political, economic, with all its rights, of worship, association, expression and others.

Now, the system of reading, writing and drawing, while we walk, is a possibility that we have at hand to get away from those chains a little. Those 3 fundamental activities that make up the system are linked to freedom, while we walk, it is a way of feeling free from our bonds.

In my book Evanescent stories (*) I present a dialogue between the conscience and the unconscious entitled “THE TREE OF EXISTENCE; AND FREEDOM?”. (All the stories consist of that dialogue between these two mental entities), which describes the struggle we engage with ourselves for not understanding what happens to us and for not being able to feel free. I quote textually:

“Freedom is random space where none of the mental functions find accommodation. Disharmonies that must turn back, seeking the intuition of that reasoned instant that imprisoned generates our own reaction to exist.

Paradoxical is blaming each other. Healing is the very longing for freedom, that self-presence in the balance of the source of feeling and reason, of suffocation and subjection; with the sole purpose of knowing and feeling that we are alone; condemned to hide in the memory of our own being, consuming that strangulation of deep loneliness, product of despair, of being authentically us, and only us. That is not being. The vital horizon is observed when freedom is oneself. And what comes next? My unconscious conditions are confused. The nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only hell. Blood flows at 103 degrees when freedom is taken away. Let’s not resist all movement is creator of itself; even if we are in those limits, we should not aspire to recreate only if the other dies”.

So far that section of the dialogue between those two entities seeking harmony. The title of this series of dialogues between the conscience and the unconscious summarizes our perennial struggle to be free: FREEDOM 103 (The result was the book: Freedom 103 **). When our being is cut off in its possibilities of acting freely or is observed blocked, in that point of intransigence and despair, our blood begins to overheat and comes to a boil if we can not emancipate ourselves from our chains, whatever they may be, personal or external.

 356 “Lady Liberty”

The walk is not the total solution to eliminate those chains, but it does help us to mitigate those emotional ailments. Let’s do it by choosing a place outside of urban areas and accompanying ourselves with a book and a notebook. Let’s read that book that transmits liberation and we rescue that suffering part of our being. Let’s observe the open space and vent our hardships by writing them so that they also fly with freedom outside of our being.

Grant us the permission to walk and make it a privilege that has no economic cost. Let’s perform these activities as a fundamental act of freedom.

The painting “Lady Liberty” is inspired by the poem “Liberéstula”, which I present below.

Poem “Liberéstula”

• They broke the silence
• lined up as they were
• seemed to nestle
• the semblance of a walk.
• &
• Defeated by time
• emancipated by pain itself
• accompanied by the shaft,
• you are the objectified expression
• with narrowed eyes
• -looking without seeing-
• &
• Nymph in elevation
• you are the Greek ode
• the smiling proclamation
• you inebriate in solitude;
• the architrave gives you continuity
• epistile of sustenance that draws
• those versifications of the sunset,
• even with your diluted silhouette
• there is no confusion in you.
• &
• The spirit of the plinth
• where you rest in an irony
• occupying the backwater
• you unsettle the pedestal,
• and the effort transmitted
• with similar somber anguish
• looking ever skyward.
• &
• Stulos,
• of inert stone
• with archetypal mask
• you ignite all my words
• that do not reach you
• &
• Movement in the static
• refulgence you express in your crown
• the living torrent of your command
• the contact
• reinforced
• you are chained
• the Roman enlarges your landscape
• the tonal
• your stylized silhouette
• you carry with you the whole work
• you are the praise of the heights.
• &
• Substantial of the figurative
• in the modification you are anchored
• you survive in death
• and faint in experience
• ex – expertise centered on the ledge
• the environment suffocates you,
• you still want to grow
• and you resurge in the future work.
• &
• Upright
• there, on the base,
• thrown in the path of incomprehension
• always illuminated
• are you definitive?
• transcendence in your being
• you make an appointment with the empyrean.
• &
• In darkness you shine
• you initiate in the ortho of life
• you are the refulgent expression
• and you nestle
• in revived history
• everything is afterlife
• you always reach the divine
• and only you
• because your opposite, the rest, is slavery.
• &
• You probe the floor with pleasure
• are your footprints
• there the boarding
• serious character
• that flashes your silhouette
• penumbras there is not in you
• transient exaltation
• always overcoming your own height.
• &
• The shadows lengthen
• you spread
• the impartial frieze
• transmission of your emptiness
• always hoisting your lineage
• in the veins transmitting your efforts
• wandering through the desert anguish
• your reign is an example
• the mystery of impartiality.
• &
• You exacerbate the cravings of hell
• series that ignites and raises the spire
• you are spirit in search
• unloaded and sad
• as a delicate figure
• surrendered in obeisance
• before the infinity
• &
• Eternal truth is simplicity?
• will not change your temperament
• tormented fruit in chained death
• you are the envy of others;
• the kingdom is yours, but not the peace
• life-long of the cares
• the environment now caresses you,
• you move without walking.
• &
• Complexity of the ardent look
• chimera of intellectuality
• you dream to see yourself exalted
• you emerge permanent in the deforming altar
• you are mutism sunk in your elevation
• and you smile together with firmness
• enveloping the glances
• deeply
• without existing in a single face
• inaccessible to visual withdrawal
• you conform fatally and inexorably
• without undermining your essentiality.
• &
• Decadence tries not to flatter
• the precedence that dwelt
• you are the edification of the symbol
• you are the faithful deviation the ideal unreality.

(**) Loya Lopategui, Carlos, Freedom 103, EMULISA, México, 2009.

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