Small is All
I am 5,000 miles from home, under lights of a distant city. I follow the gesture of my son’s hand, pointing to cats under bushes glowing pink, yellow, blue beneath the cathedral’s stained glass. Pete shows me his Barcelona campus, where he is finishing a study abroad semester, and my eyes rest on birdhouse-like structures that campus officials have constructed, he says, a tiny town village for city cats. There is food, water. My eyes burn with hot tears that I hold back, grateful to be witness to this small act of care. “Small is good, small is all,” I am reminded, recalling the words of adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. “The large,” she writes, “is a reflection of the small.”
I used to travel like a hungry animal, circling every possibility as if it was prey, as if swallowing experiences would expand my one single perspective and give me understanding sufficient to make sense of everything, despite my one life being such a pinprick in the canvas of all the lives that have been here, will be here next.
Walking in old cities, I am always aware of the thousands of feet that have fallen where mine are falling, under every circumstance I can imagine and many I cannot. I stand in front of undulating creations by Antoni Gaudí, learning that he was a doctor before he was an architect, that he lost two siblings and his mother before early adulthood, and that his reverence for nature and religion inspired La Sagrada Família, Barcelona’s most visited cathedral. It remains under construction more than 140 years after the first spade of dirt was turned, and is still unfinished, like me, like all who draw breath.
Nature, its waves and winds and creative chaos, inspire leaning pillars, the spiral staircase, ornate applications on every surface. I think of the smoothest granite, the round hip of a river’s bend, the sublime iridescence of bluebird feathers, crystalline light of dawn on snowy mountain peaks. I see them all in this structure, homage to all that nature and the divine conjure. This kind of beauty is wild, and its nature refuses to be collected or owned or even described. Like most things that move us, it must simply be felt, reflected upon.
I feel at home after trailing through a labyrinth of ancient, narrow streets into Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art. I expect no more than the permission of present time, nothing to conjure up or remember from an art history textbook. Opinions can be suspended, as I release the the brain’s autoset scanner, as it works to sort and remember and offer up data, even ideas about “like, don’t like.” Instead, I walk and observe and see what it feels like. I am delighted to find an exhibit of an artist my son has referenced, his story coming back.
Banksy is famous for street art, for graffiti-like temporary images that got notice in the 2000s, especially the silhouette of a very young girl in profile, looking up at a balloon floating just out of reach. All is black ink except the bright red heart-shaped balloon, which she either released or lost. There is no evidence for either answer. Bansky agreed to sell an original depiction of his temporary street creation in an art auction in 2018, and the piece brought $1.4 million. Immediately upon finalization of the sale, from inside the frame, an internal shredder ate the drawing. The half-shredded piece fetched $25 million in October of 2021, begging us all to decide how hard we will strain against impermanence, the will of the river, the nature of most things to refuse to be collected.
We walk home, passing hundreds of shops and homes, weaving through throngs of people, in the wild warren of living. One of these souls thought to put food out for the cats. Another once envisioned a structure that would need millions of small pieces of mosaic, bricks, hours of labor to be completed. Perhaps it never will be.
I am not a good sleeper, and I make peace with it here, where we live by more of a rhythm than a schedule. I let my body prefer to be awake. In this state, I see all life as a stream of small gestures, nothing more, and pray to the cat angel, Gaudí’s creative ghost, Jesus on the tallest spire, to help make the small acts, including my own, kind.
