The first question

For a long time I have been thinking about walking to the COP 26, the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow. In 2015 I walked from Barcelona to the COP 21 in Paris and it seemed only natural to go on another long walk from my home, currently Amsterdam, to the next big gathering of people who care about the planet.
I bought a boat ticket, I got myself a new suit to walk in, I made a rough plan to walk along Hadrian’s wall and then up North, I got my walking cart ready, checked my tent.

When it became clear that being vaccinated still doesn’t mean you can enter the UK and start walking, I wondered if it made sense to go on a long slow walk, surviving outdoors and living as simple as possible, but first be forced to take an expensive test and stay 2 nights in a city waiting for test results. It also brought the bigger question back: if my protest is in the walking, if I want to raise questions on the road, how important is it to walk to Glasgow and be there during the COP26? 

I am not sure yet if I will go on a three week/350 km  walk but whatever happens, I will commit to wearing my walking suit, a three piece business suit, starting October 14, the day I had planned to leave Amsterdam on foot. I’m planning to wear it and walk in it until the time is right to take it off again. I’ll be embroidering the suit daily and posting here.

I want to ask you for your input and help. The outside of the suit will be embroidered with questions, big and small ones. They don’t have to address the climate crisis, I think everything is connected and even though we urgently need to find some answers it is just as important to live some questions without rushing the answers. Also: questions are more powerful than statements.

I’ll start every day by embroidering a question on the suit and then I’ll walk them around and see what happens. I’ll post about it here.

If you’ve got a question you’d like to see embroidered on my suit and accompany me through the day, please mail it to me (monique.besten@xs4all.nl) or respond here or to one of my Facebook posts. It can be in English or any other language if it is your mother tongue or if there's another good reason for it being in a different language. 

If you'd like to make a donation for this project*, that would be much appreciated (but is not the most important thing). I’ll quote you in my blogpost and I’ll send you a high res photo of the embroidery and your question will accompany me on my future walk.  

Here’s the first one that will be embroidered: Where did we go?

 

* paypal button in the right corner of the home page