In the fire of Light. To Rafa Redondo (1941-2025)
You left us “with the palms of your hands to the wind, with no other handhold than the air, where the Being, my true home, breathes”.
You were an attentive companion, inspired witness to the Silence, vibrant voice of the Presence “of the pure Witness that in our depth breathes, palpitates and cries out to be expressed”.
You fulfilled your full aspiration, the aspiration of all beings, the photon, the fire and the air, the stone and the water, the tomato, the blackbird, the bonobo, and the Homo sapiens-demens that we are: “choosing to desert from oneself, leaving your home and homeland, to recover the one’s Self (to be back to it). Cloak woven of Nothingness, warp of my resurrection. Empty shroud of the death of death”. “To be Nobody, just the hollow where the Other settles”.
You are free at last. “Free before the fear of the nothingness of death, unable to grab our disposition to be nothing, the smallest and sweet Francis of Assisi had a secret: to give everything. He knew very well that his detachment, that experience of Emptiness, is liberation, because nobody, not even death, can snatch away the presence of the Self that dwells in death itself, in the chosen poverty of choosing to be no one, to be No One”.
You can now “live that nothingness by being nothing”. You are no longer no one. You are already No One. “Nothing in no one. All in No One”.
You have finished the silent trip to the center of the being amidst all its turbulences: “letting go, surrendering, detaching, dis-appearing, leaving almost no trace, while our little character burns in the fire of the Light”.
José Arregi, Aizarna, 12 de abril de 2025
NOTE: all phrases between quotation marks are direct quotes from Rafa’s book El brotar del asombro. Intuiciones, fulgores, pensamientos… [The outbreak of astonishment: intuitions, glimmers, thoughts], Mensajero, Bilbao 2012.
Translated by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler