“There are three ways of trying to win the young. There is persuasion.
There is compulsion. There is attraction. You can preach at them; that is a hook without a worm. You can say “You must volunteer; that is the devil. And you can tell them, ‘You are needed.’ That appeal hardly ever fails.”
(Kurt Hahn)
Long time, no news. I’m working in a school now, every morning, my role is to enroll the children in different kind of activities. The first ones were yoga classes, very funny and clumsy ones. They’re groups of five year old children, so it is not so easy to come with activities as I don’t speak Armenian and well, they are 5, so everything has to be very physical and practical.
This week I had my first homesickness episode, I just entered in a melancholic mood as I woke up with a very sad and beautiful piano song that someone was playing in some classroom next door. Homesickness in a sense of ‘what am I doing here?, not necessarily missing Portugal. Right now I define myself as a researcher and my search is focused on finding my place in the world. I have friends there, family and I feel privileged to have so. This enriches me and makes me able to conquer the world! (in a modest way, let’s say.. =) ) But I’m still looking for my place, where I can work on something meaningful, explore and have a nest.
Time flows with a different rhythm, I’m here for a month and a half but it certainly feels longer, life develops in unexpected ways when you’re away and I’m fatally attracted by the unknown. Life looks stimulant and curvy, you never know what will come next and I’m up for it. I imagine it could end tomorrow or I could end up being a 90 granny telling stories and pushing the small birds to fly. Actually I believe I’ll live at least until my fifties and again experience big pain. And if I survive, I’ll be more free. These are just personal superstitions, so there’s no point in explaining it.
Yesterday we were in Sevan, Armenia’s big lake, winter there when we arrived. The sun came up in the afternoon so I was able to put my feet on the water and listen to the water for a while. There’s no more beautiful sound than this, it makes me go deep to the center of me and come back to surface. We stayed in a cottage near the water, ate barbecue and pretended it wasn’t freezing cold. I woke up after the strangest dream and had to stay still for a moment to convince myself that this cottage was the real, that the paper walls were blue, as this was more a trip that an actual dream. It was disturbing and powerful, a full dive into my unconscious it seems. In those first moments I decided not to keep much details of it, let the waters of the unconscious sail their way. I have a heart wounded and filled with water. And at the same time I feel I have the heart of a lion. So I roar.
