<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - experience]]> 10 <![CDATA[Mystical Readings (II): The Primordial Animal Spirit]]> We cross, on the back of words, our sea-cemetery and an ocean with plastic banks, to the American continent, where the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio says mass. On one of her usual walks of observation through the countryside, a god in the form of a deer announces to her that her only destiny is to write poems. In the essay Mystics (WunderKammer, 2025), Begoña Méndez writes that "God, like music, is something that is not understood and only felt." Non-human nature has always spoken to us; when we listened to it, we interpreted it as a divinity, or a previous existence of the soul. Méndez recounts the stories of poets and thinkers who accepted this call, and describes feminine mysticism as "a heretical and dissident practice that restored the sacred dimension to the flesh." The body, the object that contains us, whose physical element we struggle to separate ourselves from when transcending space-time, takes on the function of a medium between life on Earth and the afterlife.

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My parents are separated. They've been together since I was very young, so I can't say I carry any trauma from this episode. It all happened when I still lacked the awareness to know that my life had changed and to wonder if it would be worse. So now I have no memory of when they were together with which to compare the relationship we three have today. However, I'm not sure that—if I had memories—I would wish everything had been different. We are a normal (but not normative) family: the three of us have a WhatsApp group, from time to time we have lunch or coffee together, one asks me for the other—and vice versa—and they ask each other for help and favors when they need it. Aside from myself, I know they have a few things in common. They share certain ways of doing and seeing life. And perhaps that's why, coincidentally and unknowingly, they both decided to quit smoking on the same day, after nearly 40 years hooked on tobacco.

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