Marina Dego: The Horizon is Always Ahead

To Ushuaia and back, beginning of 2024.

It’s a long journey the one we undertake to look for the perfect place, the one where our restlessness will find respite and things will come together and make sense. The landscape changes swiftly, we cross real and imaginary borders with an endless desire to learn, to improve, to reach an horizon which keeps moving a step ahead of us. Curiosity is what keeps us alive, it comes to us dressed of dreams and visions, in the language of children and the ones who are not afraid of change. Driven by nostalgia, a yearning to return, we might then realize that the perfect place is actually a no place, but rather a state of safety, stillness, presence, one that , after much wandering, we will find coming back to ourselves, rooted to the ground, with our eyes open to the sky and the infinite possibilities of life. 

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.”

T.S. ELIOT