Where palace is above the monastery. Ode to Bussaco.
The expanses are without edges. The images are different in their reflections, to the north they are more natural and honest, pure. To the south, they dissolve, mingling with different, sometimes incompatible in their expressions, but nevertheless in the end a whole and complete image.
This great land as a woman — discovered, but never known to me. For how can one know infinity? How can you touch eternity being temporary, seeping through fingers and gradually disappearing like sand?
The cross on the peak, carefully assembled by someone’s hands, with fine shrapnel of broken stones. This is Cruz Alta at the very top of Druid Hill.
The same one that the church cared so much about and that the Vatican has so carefully hidden from people’s eyes. The hill that greedily absorbed the bloody cocktail of the lives of many and brave. A hill that sheltered the unfortunate. Finally, a hill — a hideout of ancient secrets kept by elders, clothed in robes and chanting with wise oaks.
And at the peak of it all is a cross. This is it. Bussaco.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary only when we stop noticing the infinity that is lost in it. That is the cornea of a loved one’s eyes one would have to forget the past experience of eye perception. Just as to see the mosaic of planets, stars, comets and asteroids in the eyes of a loved one, it is necessary to give up the very scientific concept of the universe. Give it up fully and completely. For good.
In other words, one must look at everything with eyes closed, but with the doors of the soul wide open. Thinking like this, it makes much more pleasant to watch the moon with its almost amber-coloured sickle cutting through the darkness of the higher infinity.
So simply, without disturbing any living creature on the entire Planet, sitting on a large boulder covered with living moss, I try to look at the world. Without looking, and for good.
It is not easy, because every moment divided by the even contraction of my heart muscle takes me farther and farther away from the beautiful nature of contemplation of the beautiful.
Sound. Somewhere below, perhaps far away, at the very entrance, at the stairs leading to the spring someone has left here to help anyone wishing to enter.
Ablution is an ancient tradition intimately connected to being itself, to the idea of our existence. Without ablution, it is impossible to be cleansed. This is what the earth needs water for. For purification. We need it so that we can say, we are clean in our intention to receive the Holy Spirit. Banal, but no less sacred, water is needed to come home to wash away people, thoughts, deeds and actions.
Another sound. Already much closer, perhaps only a few meters from where my critical mind wanders. I pay no attention. Here, in this forest, I am in no danger.
The first steps come to mind. Times of discovery and epiphanies, memories woven from the threads of moments past. Giant sequoias, whimsical shadows of curved oaks, bats flying off an invisible chain, obeying the inexorable movement of the sun. Then everything seemed different and was felt differently. Air to the lungs. Light into the soul. Staff in hand and move. This is how I penetrated this forest many years ago, this is how I remember myself then.
September. The month when the French were still trampling the sacred lands of Portugal. A year when sarcophagi were still being damaged for fun, and shrines were being desecrated in ignorance. The year of the occupation. The years of occupation. 65 000 is a large number in itself, and when you consider the insane slope of the mountain on which these 65,000 were raising bayonets, it becomes uncomfortable with the gravity of Bussaco’s historical plight.
This, however, is only a smaller part of something larger. Man is ridiculous in his zeal; he is willing to give his life or take another’s, believing it possible. Everything in this world will disappear. In battle or in peace, in agony or in repose, these are only details, nuances of no importance. Time knows no forgiveness, no leniency. And no matter who or what it touches, all that is born must find its end. The dead fight the dead, naively believing they are alive. But that’s a mistake. They are alive because they are temporary. Alive while temporary, while belonging to the time. They are alive because they are mortal.
105 hectares of sacred land were first protected by a papal bull from women and promised ex-communication to anyone who encroached on the plants inside the five-kilometre wall. It is these, the plants, that have always been treated as Gods here. Both today’s servants of the forest and the druids of the time.
By word of mouth, humming in the dark grove listening to the rustling of the leaves and the cries of the birds of the night. Seeing God in all that surrounded them, finding temples in the groves and the dense darkness of the forest, novices in those who sought the truth within, not outside. Counsellors to warlords and soothsayers to queens were the ones who started Bussaco.
Here, in the silence of my own thoughts, only occasionally will I randomly bump into passersby. Hour after hour without watching time, I can afford the luxury of enjoying freedom. The very one that suits me — the freedom of being here.
The old monastery of the barefoot order protrudes incongruously from under the belly of a beautiful palace. A palace echoing all the balls, orgies, intrigues, voices and sobs of the past. How could something like this be erected from the ruins, from stones soaked in prayers? And by the hands of the craftsman who built Mr Carvalho’s magical Quinta in Sintra. What was it? A desire to dominate, or a demonstration of the ultimate fall of the monastic orders in Portugal? Both, I am sure.
For a little more than a thousand years, monks of the various orders had adhered to the same rules when entering this forest. Silence and contemplation. So did the Benedictines in the VI century and the Carmelites much later, and so do I in the XXI century, with the hope that this practice will remain in these lands forever.
Here one does not want to say the words, just as one sees no need to listen to them. Here others have the right to talk. The oaks make their monotonous speeches, the wind indignantly contradicts them, and brings its own, windy arguments. The owls discuss the past day with surprise at night, and the leaves falling from the trees hit the dark backs of the bats flying by. Here is a world within a world, a universe that has recreated itself in its own likeness. The endless repetition the druids taught us about. The cycle of events and things, the infinity of the serpent devouring itself, the ancient laws of Hermeticism in action here and now just as then and there.
Vanity is one of God’s guards protecting Him from us. Vanity makes us run, rushing toward the goal without noticing anything around us, it makes us live as if only the goal is important, only what we have deemed important. How can we exist in a state of running, without being able to stop and look around to understand the truth, see it and consider it? How can we believe in ourselves more than in the One who created us? How can we tear down sacred places so that we can build our palaces, castles, and shrines out of their rubble?
But it is rightly said — we are human, and we can do anything.
After 35 years of life in this body, I have learned a very important thing. I learned to be silent and to contemplate. In a seemingly modern world, I have become like those who breathed this air hundreds and thousands of years ago.
I wash my face, tired of unnecessary emotions, at the very edge of the forest. I empty my pockets and head of anything that makes noise, anything that might distract me and disturb those for whom this place is home. In the silence, I enter and thank in my heart the very ones in long robes who, not knowing me today, have been able to convey this rule through the ages.
God loves silence. It is in silence that He is best seen. In silence is the peace of His creation, the harmony of His love, the glory of His being.
We always know the right way. There is always a voice inside that will tell us. It is important only to hear it and having heard it, not to muffle it, so as not to destroy the temple inside ourselves for the sake of building a palace outside.
The expanses are without edges. Without time. Without haste.
