Naturhythm

Ce Billet en Français

Invaded by brambles and shrubs, kindly hidden by the thick undergrowth, how long when did it wait? How many winters, how many summers had it seen passing? Years, centuries…

This dry stone hut, beautiful in its rustic simplicity, suddenly appeared to me while I was cycling along a small, narrow and tortuous path, on which I was mislaid by sheer curiosity. In this early morning of summer, deep within in the increasingly dense thickets, the birds loudly greeted the first rays of the sun, which made scintillate the dewdrops along the thin wires left through my way by errant spiders.

The brambles scratched my legs, the branches of the shrubs whipped my face, as for preventing me to go further on, and I had for some time lost my landmarks, in this countryside that, however, I course since years, sometimes running, sometimes cycling, always happy to discover nature under a new angle, from a new point of view, under a new lighting.

I was considering, reluctantly, to turn back, when I discovered this hut, in a small clearing hardly lit by the first rays of light filtering through the thick bush. It was quite similar to all these dry stone huts that are so common in this area, where they were left by past generations who laboriously collected the stones within their patch and built, little by little, those incredible walls and mysterious huts.

This small lost hut was like any other stone hut, yet it seemed unique. Was this because of the back-light which encircled it without reaching it? Was this because of its modesty, or was it for its perfect integration with the nature which surrounded it? Was it by its strange obstinacy to remain upright along the centuries in spite of the assaults of the vegetation?

I do not know, but I do know that it gave me a strange and marvellous feeling: the feeling to have suddenly reached another world, far from the cities, away from the everyday concerns, out of time.

What I still had to do, of course, was to fully integrate myself in this “bubble” of wild and intact nature, which I did at once, by assuming the absolute nudity which appeared to me to be perfectly appropriate in this setting.

Since then, I very often furrowed the countryside in any direction, but I could never found again the small stone hut, lost in the bush. Did I only imagine it in dream? Fortunately, I kept these photographs!