Co-Equal
If you ever get a chance, always climb to the highest peak, building, or tower you can in any given city. The perspective from “on high” will show you the warts, bumps, beauty, and glamour you don’t quite get from street level. Something about being in the in-between, existing in the space between the birds and humans, sets the stage for exploring the seams and cracks of the places you visit.
Looking out at Barcelona, atop the Basilíca de Santa Maria del Mar, you’re rewarded with the distant vistas of La Sagrada de Familia, the Torre Glòries tower with its shape reminiscent of London’s Gherkin tower, and various other churches and buildings interposed between. It’s not altogether unfamiliar from the pictures of Lisbon from last year’s storytelling, but between topology and layout, there’s enough of a difference to matter.
The Basilíca allows access to the roof via a small door in one of the two main towers at the end of the church proper. It’s a climb up narrow stone stairs, pigeons occasionally dive-bombing into the nooks and holes in the walls not blocked by chicken wire, and with several stops along the way. You’re greeted with different views depending on your journey; the first stop is midway up the facade of the building and offers a just-above-building-height view into the surrounding squares of the Gothic Quarter. People mill about in the streets and plazas below, unaware of your existence perched high above. It’s a voyeuristic experience, to be fair, but one that resonates with a bemused attachment to the milieu below.
Climbing yet higher in the tower, you arrive at the roof, replete with stacked stone rudiment, plexiglass-backed stained glass, and the vistas you see at the top of this story. It’s breathtaking because, for the moments you’re there, you hear the world for what it is: a droning not unlike bees venturing forth from the hive. It’s not unpleasant, for there’s an underlying current of action and activity accompanied by the interstitial splashes of laughter, yelling, and cries from families and friends alike. So, too, the experience of staring out at a city grown from the sea and human experience is all-encompassing, a gentle yet firm hug of the collective that reminds you of history’s footprint on all our stories. For here, you’re genuinely in a cradle of exploration and mystery, a heady mix of the best and worst of who we all are over the centuries we’ve trod on this hallowed ground.
Winding your way from the interstitial space above the Earth and beneath the sky, you end up back in the church proper. I suppose I shall leave that story for another day as the church occupies a specific place in the narratives I tell, but I will leave you with this: sometimes, the sacred and the profane are one and the same. They aren’t opposite sides of the same coin as much as they are co-equal heirs to the human condition. The existence of a church within the press of humanity points to the fact that even if we raise buildings to be above the fetid masses, we’re still in the midst of them all. We can build higher and further away from the taint of humanity all we want, but we will always be surrounded by that which composes us.
As you wind through the valleys and corridors of your week, remember that you are as much part of the sacred story of humanity as the person next to you. Take some moments to climb up and look around, but remember that once you’re back down on Earth, you’re still part of humanity’s unfolding narrative, and that, my dear souls, makes life wonderful.
May it ever be so.
