A Thinking Spot

Thinking Spots

MUC - III (Thinking Spots)

A view from the bridge

A joint view

Muretto

Lockdown solitary coffee

A Thinking Spot

A thinking spot

A thinking spot

Alone in the park

Then came that gloomy and cold Sunday afternoon, when you took your son to his first volleyball match since you came to live in Austria and, understandably, few minutes before entering the field, he said he would prefer you were not there, among the crowd of frantic parents, as he was feeling nervous and full of doubts. So you decided to take a walk around the desert campus park, warming up your mobile camera and reflecting upon the meaning of parenthood.

(Made and processed with my mobile)

A Thinking Spot

A Thinking Spot

One of my favorite thinking spots is the window in my children's room. From there I can look into the courtyard of the "court" next door, where another thinking spot is found. Leaning on the mast of an old barn no longer in use, someone put a couple of chairs pointing at the direction of the sun before sunset. The position was not taken by chance. In wintertime, our nearest star is so low on the horizon that a small piece of meadow surviving among the walls of a typical Lombard village center has little chances to be lit on a sunny day. When the sky is clear there's a short time frame in every single court for sitting somewhere and soaking with light.

Until not so long ago, from time to time, I could see an old woman sitting on the bench and smoking her smelly cigar while staring at the sun. I like to think that from that seat it is possible to look at another thinking spot, somewhere among the roofs of the surrounding houses.

A thinking spot

A thinking spot doesn't necessarily need to be a place where to stop and sit. It can be any place that starts a story, a stream of thoughts that flow, one after the other, through our mind.

Having lived my youth in a hilly country, where olive trees are grown on terraces of dark brown soil grabbed from a stony porous substrate, a dry-wall, wherever I find it, works fine to this purpose.

Backup required!

I'm starting to lose memory or, put in a different way, not to remember all the things I've done so far. Blogging doesn't help in that sense. You drop pictures and thoughts at a certain rate. These accumulates and, as time passes by, you forget the best and worst under a heap of other daily publications.

A good example is the picture below and the words that come with it. I posted it on the F-blog in September 2008, upon invitation of Ulf Fågelhammar, before he set sails for his brainchild project: 591-Blog. It was taken on my last day in Backnang, in the Swabian District of Germany. I spent the whole Summer 2008 in that little town not far from Stuttgart. I've already written about this experience in another post: "Backnang, Summer 2008".

Well, even though I consider this picture one of my luckiest shots (I didn't move a single grain of sand of the napkin set I discovered during my lunch-break walk), I can't remember if I ever posted it here, on my blog. Leafing back through the posted pictures has become now a long lasting task; search tool doesn't help. So I thought it would be worth starting a back-up procedure and, starting from very my first post, taking note of all the pictures posted, not to repeat myself. It's a personal engagement. I don't think anyone would ever argue to have seen these pixels before but ... you never know.

"My experience here is almost finished. I'm feeling sad.
I know I won't have other chances to be here again,
alone with myself and my thoughts.
I've found this place, in a corner of a schoolyard
and soon felt as it was my "thinking-spot" here.
How strange ... 
Everywhere I go and spend more than a couple of days,
becomes part of my imaginary homeland.
I can't explain.
I must either be a nowhere man or citizen of the world"

... been waiting so long ...

I forgot to post this picture for some months after I put it in the "draft" queue of my blog. Digging around its folders, today, I spotted it and though it was about time to give it to light. I think it dates back to one of my last travels to Goteborg (if not "the" last). The current downturn does not allow me to travel so often anymore: my last years photo albums are a precious resource not to make this blog running out of pics. This picture has something that fits with long lasting wait. So ... it was worth publishing it in any case.

Thinking Spot

Thinking Spots

These are "samples" I took with my falling apart and half blind mobile phone on the island of Branno, few months ago. I use to make these short journeys on ferry boats from Saltholmen peer, in west end of Goteborg, when I'm lucky enough to have a couple of hours left before sunset. Ferries and small islands become my thinking spots. I can't find better places to meet myself alone.

Photographs, (C) Tiberio Fanti

Behind the glass of the small red wooden cabin on the highest top of Branno an open book, two candles, a window, an island, then another island and the ocean.
How comes this kind of relic, half scrap of plastic, metal, Ni-Cd & silicon is still able to give me emotions?