Something deep inside made me crave hearing the song I would play every morning during my Erasmus in Valencia in 2009. I dance while cooking, I revel in nostalgia, I feel good. I’ve been in Portugal for a month now and there is no denying: this is my happy place. It also feels like a special time in my life, having a lovely balance of being very social as part of the job, and spending plenty of divine hours in solitude. The mind wanders are insane.
In the heat of siesta I doze off travelling back to Australia, riding on the back of a motorbike in Thailand and back to Nepali nights filled with thick air of candles burning in the living room while we lay scattered on the floor, listening to a friend reading aloud from Anthony Bourdains Kitchen Confidential. All those places I haven’t visited in many years, not even in my mind. What a treat! I love nothing like a good old walk down Memory Lane. In between river dips and reading books, there is plenty of time for exactly that.
Dusting off the nooks and crannies of my memory, it’s so funny what comes up. Those ‘empty hours’ are not only filled with nostalgia, no no. New thoughts pop up too. Thoughts I’ve never seemed to have the place and time for. Deep dives into my inner world without preparing myself to travel down there. I’m not sitting on a pillow to meditate, I’m just staring at the trees and listening to the breeze and off I go. Observing nature as a portal to journeying within. Tripping on the reflection of the water on the trees, peeing in the middle of the night under the starriest sky, the thick brush strokes of pastel colours on the mountain when evening comes. The more crumbs of peace of mind I gather, the more I feel like I'm on one long and luscious date with life.
Comments