Holding a lamp to lit the black hole
I received a bottle. It contains some words that are scrambled up. I try to assemble them all together. I have got few options: state mystical foreigner, mystical foreigner state, foreigner mystical state. The last one immediately intrigues me.
Now I can read and reflect on these final words: foreigner mystical state.
What is mystical and what is foreigner? For me mysticism deals with something that happens and you do not understand what it is. Something that happens but you do not get it. It is exactly this: you want to grasp it with your mind and since you can not identify it you start searching for external approvals, sorts of conventional certainties. One of these is for example your cultural identity. Which is your identity? Does it belong to a place? Is your personality related to a place? Of course it is. But which place must be the focus.
My obsessive need to find a place to stay has led me to break through my innate conflict to belong to somewhere and nowhere at the same time. I have realized that in my heart I had always been a foreigner, a stranger on a planet that pretends to find conventions. I wanted to swim in the flow. But where I was was definitely not MY flow!
To be a stranger in the land where you have been raised means that you create barriers dividing your heart from your actions. I have felt exactly like this. Which of these parts was my true land? My heart? My actions? One or both of them? They had not been working together as part of and facilitating this flow.
Researching my roots has been the most exciting and rewarding trip ever.
Travelling has given me the possibility to explore the treasure that I had been holding in my vest since always and never been aware of. I have understood that freedom comes from the chance you take to look for and find your roots wherever you are. Yes, because YOU are your own roots.
Your body incarnates specifically the land, history, inhabitants, geography of your life. This is the land. Your own country. The land.
For me this country continues to branch out through multi-flexible-endless interactions of human histories and territories where the time is created by your decisions and actions. It never ends, but it always begins.
Being a foreigner for me means searching outside of your treasured possibilities. You are a foreigner when you are willing to reduce your potential to a limited fixed number of conventions, what is wrong, what is right, what is what.
For me being a stranger means breaking these conventions and embrace your unlimited power to shape your next land and present time. It is like losing something or someone. It freezes external space and time. You have the freedom to change them though.
Space can be as much concave or convex according to your perspective as a hole can even be black just because is unlit.
You actually need a lamp to light a dark place. Then you can light or enlight it.
The challenge is to take the lamp and explore that hole. Try to discover it since that hole can be used to fill something else up. That hole is space and has an active role. The use you make out of it gives the time and shape to your space and land.
Abandoning my foreigner state means believing wherever I am I can welcome a new cultural potential. That is why I consider it mystical.
Paola Napolitano
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