A few years ago, I used to go to the swimming pool. After swimming for an hour, when I left, I rested for a few minutes on the shore of the nearby lake.
At one point the lake was poisoned and dead fish floated gently on the surface of the water. I looked carefully at one of them and was amazed how such a beautiful thing dies, how man does not care about this beauty and is always in a hurry to do something else, killing everything in his way. But at the same time, I was amazed at the ease with which nature creates and destroys, things of a beauty and complexity that we cannot comprehend with our minds.
After a while, the lake was dried up and a bulldozer kept digging into the shore for a summer and an autumn. Where the lake had been, a thin stream of water remained and a rich reed grew around it. All kinds of birds that I had never seen before came and nested in the reeds. I bought a pair of binoculars. I was happy.
Then the bulldozer drove away leaving behind a concrete wall. The lake was flooded in place, the nests floated gently on the surface of the water.
A rat was killed on the street where I live. I watched him sink into the asphalt with the passage of time, and the cars, until he became a kind of impression, which, however, was still him, had texture, expression. It seemed that change was a continuation of life. Not of his life, but of the life that passes through all of us.
These observations linked, in a strange way, in my mind, human violence, death and beauty.
I have made a habit of driving slowly and photographing animals killed by cars on the road. But as the photos piled up, my interest in the subject waned. The inner state brought by the contemplation of the lake dissipated.