Yesterday afternoon the snow had finally begun falling from the sky. Mid-January, with barely any snow on the ground, was a runner’s dream in Canada. Despite the cold and rainy conditions that fogged my glasses with wet snow. I felt stronger with every foot strike that bounced off the pavement. I could feel the newly found kinetic energy I had developed beginning to take shape, like a foreign language I was beginning to learn, and still unravelling itself to me with every step. I was running with the experience that accompanies completing your first race of substantial distance, the one I never thought I could do just two short years prior. I ran my first half marathon last October, not because of ambitions to get in shape, but because I had to. Healing my wounded heart depended on it. I set out in search of radically redefining my perception of self. I knew most people in my circle wouldn’t understand the reasoning. Why put yourself through such needless pain? Grief has a strange way of subconsciously telling you how to survive its most turbulent moments if you’re willing to pay close attention to its harmony in the wind. Grief led me to a community of individuals with a commonality, unlike any kind I had yet to find in my day-to-day life up until then. We all love the feeling of truly being alive in the uncomfortable, weirdly comforting embrace of our sweat and pain. Running was a secret blessing in all our lives. Through the storm and uncertainty of feeling like an aimless drift in the ocean, I washed up on the island I was supposed to land on. Head first with my tights in the air. The sun had chosen to kiss its light on my forehead. Amid this rebirth that had turned me into a dove, I was flying higher than I could have hoped. Free as angels that invade our sleep when we dream.
As an artist, my sole purpose is to make others feel. Beauty, technique, and talent are irrelevant. The only technique an artist should master is letting go completely and going to where the heart calls. The only talent worth possessing is the ability to remind someone how to feel, to experience an emotion they were not able to reach before participating in a work of art. It takes two to make a life. Where the artist might give birth to the creation, it is the person stopping at the moment, breathing life into the art, embracing the present moment that is making the experience come to life because of the secrets it whispers only to them, because of the shift of energy and flicker of magic. Magic, however, is not some mystical compound that exists in the depths of our imagination. The endorphins that kick in after running a descending sixteen hundred, eight hundred and four hundred metre track workout tells me otherwise. The self-motivating talks we tell ourselves just when the pain is kicking in, usually for me at about the 8th lap around the track, have sometimes turned into character dialogue. Often they’re simply talking points to envision success. A lesson in self-actualization that simultaneously has nothing and everything to do with being an artist.
Carlos Enrique Cajina is a Filmmaker and Writer based out of Toronto Ontario. His intrinsic love of people and his curiosity on how environments shape the subconscious human psyche, develops into films and stories that are at there very core tales of people and the environments they inhabit. This curiosity takes him around the globe searching for narratives and stories that seek to overcome barriers of identity and culture. Its in this pursuit that often reveals what we as human beings have in common: snapshots of love, loss, hope, insecurity, and dignity. His work captures moments where something subconscious manifest’s and present’s itself. He recently published a personal essay ” Come Together” in the 34th print issue of the UK based publication Like The wind magazine
