It was a warm night after a hot day in Zakopane. Just before sunset. And there was a cable-car, and a second cable car, and finally a mountaintop, with gorgeous ski bowls awaiting the winter’s snow, now all green with grass sprinkled with little furry bluebells.

Up on that mountaintop was a line drawn in the minds of human beings. They had decided that one kind of people lived to the left, and another kind to the right. But there was no real line in the mountains. Only futile attempts at hammering short stocky poles into the ground between the rocks.

Somehow it made a big difference to people on which cliff they sat. Because one cliff meant you sat in “Poland” and the other one placed you in “Slovakia”. To the goats and the hoverflies a bluebell was a bluebell, regardless of which side of the slope it grew.

As I sat with my feet in Slovakia and my behind in Poland, I thought of the seemingly innate human desire to separate. Borders are drawn for those beings who feel the necessity to own, to limit, and to classify. Borderless is chaos to most people and unity to most animals. Borders require straight lines, defined areas, and natural separations such as this mountain. Perhaps mother Nature, who saw the big picture, thought it a good joke to create a planet that was round?

(Kasprowy Wierch, Poland / Slovakia; July 2015)