Day 58. Things

It doesn't happen when I consciously ask for something I would like to have, but when there is something that might come in handy, I often find it along the road just when I was thinking about it. Usually small things. Things I wouldn't buy myself. Like the black marker I thought about in order to get rid of the ugly orange branding on my solar panel. Or the small cotton bag when I wanted to have some things close at hand. Specific books. Reflectors for my cart. Sometimes it is almost scary. Today I was buying some food items at the Netto supermarket. I always have a plastic bag with food hanging on the left side of my cart but at some point the bag starts to falls apart. I wondered if I should buy one of the more expensive ones, but I didn't want to spend money on something with a brandname on it, so I didn't.

Only half an hour later I passed a picknick table and next to the waste basket there was an exact copy of the Netto bag I didn't buy earlier. There was a small roll of big blue new garbage bags in it which could be a nice replacement for my lost flat foldable chair/doormat/pillow. And there was something else in the bag. I didn't really need new shoelaces but my shoes were defenitely excited by the idea of exchanging boring brown for fancy red.

I like things. In the first package I send over to Vienna when I had collected too many of the rope balls I make every day, there are two big screws I carried along for a while because I was sure they might come in handy at some point. They didn't but I got attached to them, they screwed themselves into my mind so I couldn't throw them away. For now.

Things. "For people inhabit a world that consists, in the first place, not of things but of lines. After all, what is a thing, or indeed a person, if not a tying together of the lines - the paths of growth and movement - of all the many constituents gathered there?
Originally, 'thing' meant a gathering of people, and a place where they would meet to resolve their affairs. As the derivation of the word suggests, every thing is a parliament of lines." (Tim Ingold in "Lines. A brief history").

I walk alone but the people are in the things I encounter. They are connected to things. To specific flowers, tools, means of travel. To animals sometimes. To a kind of food, a specific drink, a colour, a smell. There is always an anecdote or a memory connecting the thing to the person. Sometimes a collection of things and people get connected. They form a line, a string, I roll them up in my mind and carry the ball with me on that day.

John Deer tractors, a light greenish blue, mountaintops, red bull, rabbits, roses, rivers, white polkadots on a blue background, the smell of beeswax, strawberries, donkeys, shiny things, magpies, stuffed courgette flowers, cats, a small paper boat, big chunks of cheese, watery vegetable soup, green sox, labyrinths, magnificient pies, acorns, four leaved clovers, hoopoes.


(todays story is for Felieke, Jan and Felix)