Posts Tagged ‘codogno’

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Bath Portrait © Jim Korpi

If you have not done this you have only half lived in an apartment building, half lived in a city.
Lean back into a hot tub of water. Lower your head beneath the surface so only your face is above water. Breathe.
Your breath is the first thing you hear, deep hollow echoes from the inside of your chest. What follows is another dimension.
Here you are witness to the innards of a beast, not the pulse but the digestive process.
Every sink, toilet bowl and drain of every apartment in your building becomes a receptor for the sounds of its nighttime routines.
Riders on the Storm plays from the radio of an apartment close by and mixes with children fighting in an apartment beside the street. Dinner is being served, the clinking of silverware and the sliding of chairs across tile floors.
You can return to the slow rhythm of your breath at any time. This is a Buddhist exercise in apartment living.
You are in the womb of it all, the womb of the building, the womb of the city.
The slurred murmurs of all those anonymous lives around you are beyond your understanding. You hear your heart beat. The warmth of the water that surrounds you is the amniotic fluid you floated in before entering this cold, strange world.