It’s good to look at the sky. To raise your eyes is to widen your gaze, if only to contemplate the splendor of the extraordinary Christmas lights and the Cruz Conde street sound and light show. When the afternoon arrives, the tunnel of light, … what it has become is filled with people looking up at a brilliant universe of stars and thousands of LED dots. Cordoba lights up.
The images captured by the panoramic and sensitive eye by photographer Fran Pérez for ABC. Light has a powerful symbolic value, a universal metaphor for life, truth and transcendence. Without it, we would be different. The light begins.
In the Genesis account of creation, it begins with a command: “the earth was chaos and confusion and darkness above the deep, and… God said: let there be light, and there was light» and it is also an exit, from Plato’s cave, from apparent shadows towards true knowledge.
Saint John of the Cross merges with the “living flame of love” which captivatingly leads to mystical experience and Christmas, which is already approaching, celebrates the birth of Christ, light of the world. Shining is not the same as lighting. To shine is to shine, to dazzle, to stand out. The brilliance is itself, narcissistic, apparent and ephemeral. Now, to enlighten is to illuminate, to show what is hidden and to teach.
Giving light is for others; inspires, guides, reveals, transforms and endures, while childbirth opens to hope, rocks, cares for, understands, makes it grow, activate linkslove. The golden Christmas lights shine beautifully, but they also invite us to think about what we can illuminate and for whom. So the shadows that darkness threatens must be illuminated.
“By changing our skin or having it/we embrace the darkness/which dresses us in shadow/the flayed flesh”, laments Octavio Paz: the inequality of our peripheral neighborhoodsthe difficulty of accessing rental or decent housing, the many homeless people, the lack of employment opportunities for young people which limits a possible future and forces them to leave, unemployment, aging and the loss of population which overshadows us.
As the poet says, it is better to stay in “the light that does not lie to us” and find a cure. One of “Twelve Pilgrims’ Tales” by García Márquez tells the magical adventure of two children, Totó and Joel, who, despite living in the cramped conditions of an apartment in Madrid, ask for a boat as a Christmas present.
Their father told them that “light is like water”, you turn on the switch and it flows wherever you want, so one night they broke a light bulb “and A stream of golden light, cool as water, began to come out... Then they took out the boat and sailed at will among the islands of the house. It’s all about wanting.
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