In Rio de Janeiro.
Every Wednesday I would volunteer at Tijuca National Park.
I must have made a scheduling error that day, because none of the usual members showed up and I was the only one at the meeting place. After a while I quit waiting and started walking. I aimed for a place with a waterfall, which I had learned about a few days before.
There was no one at the falls. I sat on one of the rocks that were strewn about in the river. Time passed without me doing anything. As I sat there in a daze, the play of blurring my focus became interesting. The world around me became a glowing dot of green leaves and sunlight filtering through the trees.
As I blended in, surrounded by flickering dots of green and light, I saw a chameleon-like shape among the dots. It was swaying and shimmering, like a chigiri-e (is a type of paper collage, you rip paper with you hands), vague but chameleon.
Suddenly, the words of a classmate from junior high school who said to me, “You look like a chameleon,” replayed in the back of my ear.
Change – Transformation – Protean
I enchanted by the city’s vibrancy and landscape in Rio de Janeiro, and I had begun my search for a home . But I knew now was not the time to stop.
The chameleon became a symbol of this journey.
A few days before the waterfall day, I went to an exhibition that a carioca (a local of Rio, meaning like “Parisian”) told me about. There, he was deeply drawn to some of the ceramic works he saw. Looking at the caption, it seems that the artists are concentrated in a certain valley in the region. I decided to aim for there.
