Entrelazados: How Others Shape Our Journey
The morning light streams through my window at a gentle angle, casting soft shadows across my kitchen table where yesterday's photographs are spread out like fallen autumn leaves. It's just past 9 AM on this Friday morning in Barcelona, and the city hums with weekend anticipation while I sit contemplating connections—not just between images, but between souls.
Yesterday's reflection on invisible anchors has shifted overnight into something more nuanced: an awareness of how profoundly we are shaped by the people who enter our orbits, however briefly.
Somos como ríos formados por todos los afluentes que nos han tocado.
I realized this while editing photographs from the harbor yesterday afternoon. What began as a project about place has evolved into a chronicle of relationships. There's Mateo's weathered hands showing me how to read the water's mood. Elena's eyes crinkling with laughter as she corrects my Catalan pronunciation. The unnamed woman who brings coffee to the fishermen each morning, her silent generosity captured in the steam rising between exchanged cups.
Each of these connections has altered my course, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. Like tributaries joining a river, they've made me wider, deeper, changed my direction.
"La madurez no viene de los años, sino de los encuentros," Elena told me yesterday as we sorted through shells she'd collected. Maturity doesn't come from years, but from encounters.
How true this feels as I prepare my exhibition. The photographs I'm most drawn to aren't the technically perfect ones, but those that capture moments of exchange—the passing of tools, shared glances, hands reaching toward each other across the divide between boats.
Perhaps this is the essence of evolution—not just what we discover within ourselves, but how we're transformed through connection. The self isn't developed in isolation but through countless interactions that leave their marks, like water shaping stone.
As I move through October, I'm beginning to see my growth not as a solitary journey but as a collaborative creation, a tapestry woven from threads contributed by everyone who crosses my path.
En cada encuentro hay una semilla de transformación. Somos, en parte, creaciones colectivas.
In every encounter, a seed of transformation. We are, in part, collective creations.
Sofia