The loss of one thing is the becoming of another.

The silence is astounding. Occasionally, an airplane passes thousands of metres overhead. Aside from my digital camera and our modern attire, we could be in a timeless place—unchanged for generations. We spread out to look for the source: a small vein of rock not easily visible in this world of grass and stone. One of the children shouts out in the distance. She has found it.

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Neither from here nor there, belonging and not belonging.

Outside, the clouds are breaking. It’s the day after the storm, the humidity is rising towards the clearing sky and the beams of sunlight are stretching over the larch forests. Swallows swoop over the village.

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We cannot go back and going forwards seems equally precarious. But perhaps in meandering sideways—interwoven between languages, cultures, ways of seeing, something new can be born, and is being born.

The water laps against the shore. Alpine flowers in bloom, the midsummer sun high above us. That smell, I can never forget—particular to the high mountain terrain, the summer sweetness that comes and goes so quickly.

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The cracking whip echoes through the valley. Giant cowbells ring like an alpine symphony that belongs nowhere other than here.

This day, Chalandamarz, is one of the most significant traditions in the Engiadina. It is a cultural symbol of alpine continuity dating back to Roman times, when paganism was practiced and before the Christianisation of Europe, a ritual that has persisted while much has changed. Preserved by remoteness.

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A remote alpine valley, a knife maker, and the beginning of a new chapter.

The air is dry and cold, far colder than feels appropriate for late August. But we are above two thousand metres now, and I’m reminded of it as we stare out in awe across this Alpine amphitheatre animated by rock, forest, and light.

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The Vielha tunnel is a dark abyss. One that hypnotises you with its mythical and mysterious nature.

Straight into the belly of the mountain. Five kilometres long. The only way back from Spain to France. I took a deep breath, feeling the temperature drop from warm early autumn to frigid cold as I rolled into the darkness. I felt the adrenaline course through my veins. This is why we are here. This is adventure.

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This is the edge, the space that those who are drawn to extremes will speak of, the experience of being truly alive. I hit the water and sink to the depths.

There is a certain eeriness to the feeling of floating in a body of water which you can’t see through. It is an experience which I would imagine to be similar to floating through space, a vast emptiness, o vazio. A sensation of being completely supported, yet simultaneously vulnerable and exposed.

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Silence reigns in the high altitude.

An engulfing, all pervasive silence. It's perceived not only through hearing but through all of the senses, as well as something deeper, residing above and beyond the material world. I hear a rushing sound in the distance, initially mistaking it for traffic, but it is only the wind passing over the rocks. The cold creeps in gradually. It promises to take over the night.

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It is a way of being which is shaped by intuition in primacy to intellect, in service to nature’s intelligence.

Five days without sun. Water covers everything. It sits in muddy puddles on a potholed track. It drips from ferns that unravel slowly across the understory of an ancient forest. It cascades down a narrow valley, slowly carving through the clay and schist, gently turning a hydroelectric wheel round and round, providing a slow trickle of power to a small house that is almost unnoticeable to the outside world, nestled deep within the hillside.

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Their names etched into the stone, weathering into memory, like language itself.

I study the surface of the rock, as if reading ancient hieroglyphics. This is more than some local school kids marking their territory. In a small way, this ritualistic expedition is a practice that binds them deeply to their ancestral place, to the Fextal.

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