Mauritius

We sailed into Port Louis sliding by a white old Chinese fishing boat in a late afternoon sky, dark and heavy with rain. Fishermen with long hair waved at us from behind the red Chinese characters written on the hull of their boat. I went for an early run on our first day here and it felt like being in India.
Beautiful graceful and fragile women were on their way to work in their saris and other traditional dresses of bright colors. The light fabrics were blowing
in the wind. A young Indian man was praying on a bench with his eyes closed and a girl was singing quietly but with an almost hurtful passion on the stairs of a cafe still closed. I did not understand the words but listened to her for a long time. The day was just starting. I felt speechless, like watching a silent movie.

We are planning to visit the Grapefruit garden with giant water lilies. Maybe we will go to the green mountains with waterfalls and peaks that look like cones and have strange edges, surprising for European eyes. Rain is a constant part of our lives. Being hot and wet doesn’t seem new anymore, I think I’ve gotten used to it.

Even back in this sometimes suffocating civilization, we stay connected with nature and use our knowledge of it. We drive on the roads in the dark and we know our way looking at the night sky. We are getting good at knowing the direction each constellation is pointing to. We followed the Southern cross to come back to the boat from the north of the island last night.

The change between being at sea and being in port seems too harsh to me. Our lives seem to go into the two extremes. Silence and only water and stars and sun and wind and clouds around us… and then, fancy shops and restaurants and busy people in the ports, surrounded by all the trash that come along with the creations of our consumer societies where so many things are for sale. We don’t even know the difference between what we need and what we want. I am torn in between these worlds and at moments I would like to close my eyes and escape if I could, go into a monastery… but I also get fooled by all the shiny lights, just like most of us do… Still, deep down, I know I prefer to be in touch with the light of a single star in the sky, like Venus, the first star at this time of the year on the Southern hemisphere, alone on the horizon, long before all other stars. It means more in its simplicity.