It is truly difficult to try to describe the journey and the landscapes that pass through one’s eyes and heart when one chooses, despite everything, to depart. The first journey is the essence of countless smiles and tears, crossing places that seemed so distant, yet so near. The most distant places to reach for our heart are those ways of thinking and seeing within us, from which we have already irrevocably established convictions and certainties. These are the most difficult places to reach. I had to necessarily enter the most hidden places of my heart, those most “secure” ones that feed personal desires and others’ expectations of appearing strong, in order to understand my smallness, my fragility, and learn to love it.
What is weak, rejected, and removed from our age is the point of contact that opens to purity and intimacy
Changing Perspective
There is nothing more difficult for man than changing an established way of seeing, of thinking: changing perspective. In Africa, one does not only leave… water wells, basic necessities… one receives, one is enriched by that need which helps us enjoy human relationships and such goods that have become taken for granted. One can learn to embrace a life as the most precious of things we hold tight in our arms; one learns to remain silent, to listen… to give oneself freely as the only way, in our ephemeral vanity, to warm another heart that needs me, needs you, just as we profoundly need one another.
Perhaps We Have a Nearsighted Heart
The meanings observed tend to appear blurred, and vision improves by reducing the distance at which one looks. Setting out on a journey means leaving many of our firmest certainties, the expectations of others, our most “faithful” convictions, to reach that part within us suffocated by induced needs of appearance. Drawing near to other hearts means discovering our innate need to be loved; our nakedness in the eyes of the other. What is weak, rejected, and removed from our age is the point of contact that opens to purity and intimacy. This is Africa. Every journey will be my first journey…
