It took me a long time to understand why certain places, certain beings, certain animals accompany me, in silence, but persistently:
The whale and the puffin are among them.
They didn’t arrive as symbols to be named.
Rather like the light of an evening you never photographed, but keep within you.
It sometimes returns without warning. It still illuminates, without your knowing why.
There is something grave and tranquil in the whale.
It crosses oceans without a sound, as if its route had been inscribed in it forever, never needing to justify it —
but it happens, even to those who know, to run aground on 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 the point of being lost.
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, nor do I erase anything.
The trace remains, like the wake of an immense body passed beneath the surface.
The puffin, for its part, seems made of another breath.
Clumsy and elegant at once, curious, free. Faithful too, 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.
