Blog of an imperfect mystical adventurer in search of herself!
What excites me most about a new adventure is never knowing the colors, textures, nuances, flavors, smells, or even the consequences of the experiences I am about to have. That's certainly why the profession of photographer and writer chose me.
What's funny is that as children, we discover the world and we are eager to see everything, to know everything, to taste everything, we want to be like the grown-ups; we then play at "Let's pretend I would be... let's pretend you would be..." It would not have occurred to us, I think, to challenge what the Other wants to be, or what the Other imagines they should be. We learn about life at our small height and through the imagination and prism
of our little playmate of the moment. It seems to me that the "We are" does not yet exist. By playing at exploring and discovering the world, we learn courage, we learn to brave our fears and the prohibitions of our small society which is reduced to the authority of our parents; so, without knowing it, we sometimes put ourselves in danger; our comfort zone has not yet shrunk.
What happened to us as we grew up? What have we forgotten along the way to no longer accept that the Other is not us, that our truth is not necessarily The Truth, that our prism necessarily represents only one of the mobile fragments of colored glass in the kaleidoscope of life, and that it is precisely because it produces infinite combinations of different realities that we can touch on the answer to the three eternal questions that the frenzy of the modern world has made us forget:
Who are we?
Why are we here?
Where are we going?
Today, with hindsight, I can say that this thirst to discover who I am pushes me to cross the borders of humanity, to discover my own borders, my own limits, my own fears, and my own contradictions. It is because I feel totally imperfect and incomplete that I journey towards the Other, so that they can show me who I am, at every moment of my present. I then wander into different universes within our world; two years with homeless women in Paris for my work Cœur de femmes; six months hidden as a lay missionary in the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic where Haitians are reduced to slavery so that we, Westerners, can sweeten our lives; eleven journeys to Compostela and Rome in twenty years to collect my joys, my sorrows, my doubts and those of other pilgrims; three and a half years in about sixty hunting packs all over France, questioning the West about its relationship to rituals, nature, and death.
It is for all these reasons that it has always been impossible for me to accept that anyone dictates to me what I should think, how I should live my life, or how I should behave. Even less so if that someone is society. Living in awareness of one's own ignorance means accepting that with each encounter we can be surprised, disturbed, amazed, outraged, dazzled, disgusted, bewildered, or shocked by the habits, customs, and traditions of those who are not like us.
So I question myself, constantly. Do we need to go to the other side of the world to feel foreign to a people, a custom, or a culture? For dialogue to take place, do we not need to overcome the fear of the unknown or the preconceptions of a collective unconscious that weighs on our shoulders and our education depending on where we grew up? Taking a firm stance is perfectly legitimate, healthy, and essential for the balance of humanity. But to take a stance, do we not need to take the time to know, to be informed beforehand, to be interested, to investigate, to know?
Dear ones... through this blog I invite you to walk in my footsteps through the different adventures that I am going to experience, in order to offer you my perspective and expose my own doubts and questions.
Would you agree to play with me? Would you agree to travel in universes that perhaps you do not know?
So let's play...
It seems I would be the captain of a special ship that takes you through her eyes, her prism, and her gaze, to discover people who are neither you nor me.
It seems you will be an explorer who wants to live a great adventure and discover a new world you don't know.
It seems we are eager to see everything, to know everything, to experience everything, to feel everything, and to taste everything.
It seems that the Other will inevitably show us a part of ourselves through their way of living and seeing things.
In any case, we will have taken the time to try to understand the Other's vision, we will have paid attention to the Kaleidoscope of life that only wants to show us, through the Other, the totality of the immensity of ourselves.
RESIST TO EXIST: THE ART OF NOT LETTING YOURSELF BE EXTINGUISHED. There are silences that kill, absences that confine, acceptances that bury us alive. We live in a world where everything is designed for us before we even have time to ask ourselves the question: Who am I? We are shaped, molded and trained. We are not born free... We must wrest this freedom from the clutches of an established order that only wants us to submit.