There is a cave on a lonely stretch of the Sardinian coast, not far from Olbia. A man has been living in it for about twenty years.
The waves come in hard there. It is not a sheltered bay and the sea never really quietens down, so the sound of it is the first thing you notice and the last thing you stop hearing. He has had it every day for two decades. He doesn't call it meditation, but it does what meditation is supposed to do.
He has not always been there. He was a hippie back when that still meant something, and he went where they went: India, Goa, and on from there. He read philosophy, and he lived through the history the rest of us only studied afterwards. Get him started on the years on the road and he will talk for a long time, and you will not want him to stop.
At some point he walked out of industrial civilisation. Not angrily, as far as I could tell. He left because he wanted to feel something he could not feel inside it, his own release or his own transcendence, whichever word you prefer for what people go looking for once nobody is telling them what to want.
The part I did not expect is that he is not isolated. People find him. They come more or less all year round, carrying some spiritual question of their own, and they sit with him and listen to his life. He has more visitors than most of us have friends. He just has no address.
I went because I wanted to understand how twenty years of that is possible. I am still not sure I do. But he is the calmest person I have ever photographed, and calm is not something anyone can fake in front of a camera.
First published on Instagram.