It was a hot day. I walked the trail I had walked before but now in the other direction. My head emptied itself. I found a big snail. I arrived in Lund. I presented my blisters and the
snail’s slowness.
In the middle of my presentation somebody asked me a
question. I had just been talking about the suit project I did recently for
which I wore a 3-piece walking suit 108 days in a row, embroidering a drawing or text on the
inside every day. On the outside I embroidered a QR code so you could scan it
and see the inside from the outside.
A woman asked “Why 108 days?” And I answered I wasn’t sure.
It felt like the right thing to do. I quoted Thoreau who wrote in Walden
“Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old,
until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel
like new men in the old”. I answered that after 108 days I felt like that. So I
took it off.
She said that the Buddhist’ mala (set of prayer beads used
for keeping count while reciting a mantra) consists of 108 beads. I had no
idea.
Afterwards she walked with us in search of an icecream shop
but they were all closed. She told us she specialised in building labyrinths
and was constructing one in Malmö, made out of electrical wire. The firmness of her hug when we said goodbye broke the y-shaped branch that I had carried in my breast
pocket during the Pilgrim Trail walk.
I guess life is its own answer.
* You can read HERE why there are 108 beads on a mala. There
are many reasons, very interesting ones. This website says that “none of these
reasons are ... more or less true than the others. However, you may notice that
108 appears to be somewhat like a road map of reality in general, and the human
in particular.”
