It took me time to understand why certain forms, certain beings, certain places, certain animals accompany me, in silence, but with persistence.
The whale and the puffin are among them.
They didn’t arrive as symbols to be named.
Rather like that evening light you never photographed, but keep within yourself.
It returns sometimes without warning. It still illuminates, without you knowing why.
There is something solemn and tranquil in the whale.
It crosses oceans without sound, as if its route had been inscribed within it forever, never needing to justify it —
but it happens, even to those who know, to run aground at the edge of an ocean.
I see in it depth, inner silence, the weight of emotions we keep to ourselves, but carry far — sometimes to our undoing.
And then, there is another reason, wrapped in silence.
Whales carry within them a memory I have never quite left behind.
An absent presence floating in the water, somewhere.
I say no more, I erase nothing either.
The trace remains, like the wake of an immense body passed beneath the surface.
The puffin, for its part, seems made of another breath.
It is clumsy and elegant at once, free, curious, astonishing. Faithful, with a tenacious tenderness…
It always returns to its wind-battered lands, after crossing the oceans.
It is the observing eye, the climbing step, the heart that still wants to discover — even after the effort.
This is why these two accompany me.
And why this site borrows their forms.
Because they are both outside and inside. Like me.
