Rising Together
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Seville, where I’ve been treating a cold with bowl after bowl of salmorejo. Fun fact: gazpacho is sold in glass bottles in grocery stores. In the beverage section. It’s like V-8, but with a Spanish accent.
Rising Together
A while back, I was listening to one of my regular podcasts about foreign affairs (because I’m a geek that way), and in the ‘random trivia’ segment, the hosts commented on a news blurb they’d seen about a Spanish tradition called the castell. It’s basically a giant human pyramid; the goal is to build it as tall as possible, men stacked upon men, then send a small child scrambling up to perch on the very top.
The hosts of this podcast very nearly lost me as a listener, because they came dangerously close to making fun of the castell tradition.
Lee and I once saw a castell in Barcelona. It was … profound. Hundreds of men worked together to form themselves into a a tower, uplifting a tiny child, while the entire community thronged around watching, giving them energy and motivation.
You should search for a video on YouTube; when you find one, just remember that it’s far more powerful in real life. The men at ground level—with whom the bystanders are face-to-face—are working harder than anyone I’ve ever seen, just to maintain the foundation. The strain of their muscles is reflected in the agony on their faces. As each man climbs up and the tower grows taller, it almost seems like the men on the bottom are being slowly crushed into the ground.
The day Lee and I watched a Barcelona castell, in the last moments, when the child (maybe 5 or 6 years old) began the perilous climb to the top (the whole thing could come crashing down, after all), the thousands of onlookers went completely silent. All we could hear was the harsh, rasping strain of hundreds of men, struggling to breath and stay vertical. Someone would occasionally murmur an instruction to the child—move this way, step here, go that way.
And then, the child reached the summit, and the crowd burst into cheers. Lee and I both burst into tears.
It was the most literal, visceral demonstration of community either of us had ever seen. A group of neighbors were literally using their bodies to hold up their families, their friends, their neighbors, their entire community. It was unity, solidarity, social cohesion—one for all, and all for one.
Those podcasters I listened to missed the point—yes, building human pyramids might seem trivial, or pointless, or patriarchal, or archaic. I get that it’s not as obviously constructive as working in a soup kitchen or picking up roadside litter. But maybe there’s value in the triviality of building community just for its own sake: our communities are stronger when we work together, even if all we’re trying to do is lift up a small child.
Take care,
Lisa
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