Going barefoot

To walk barefoot everywhere is to draw your own map. To me, this is my homeland. In our life here, in a border-less land, a country whose waist usedto be thin and then became thick without digesting what it took in. Such a country makes it hard for you to find a homeland within it. My oldhomeland, the country of my childhood, the homeland about which the poet said “A man is the likeness of his homeland's landscape”, has been swallowed bythe noise, by the occupation, by the blurring of its lines and the fluidity of its limits. Just like I use only those words which I know, my homelandis only where I step and accumulate and feel, that by which I let myself be marked as a map. Wherever I walk barefooted.
This is my privatehomeland, I attest to it with both my feet and do so willingly. Part of it isn't in this country, but in other places, and in the memories of a childhood notall of which was in this “here” which is slipping away from us and fast becoming real-estate, a victim of a rude takeover. After all this years, Imake my homeland accessible and portable, close and assured, touching and fulfilling. Any place where I go barefoot is stamped on me and is added tomy map, to the pattern on my memory, to the homeland which only I feel, the one which goes with me always and which I recognize without words, free ofthe times and their terrors. My homeland is the likeness of my barefoot journey. And I am there every day, unknown to others.


Ioram Melcer