Postcards

Sunday morning, I wake up still with a kind of whirlwind of voices inside me, after 4 intense and pleasurable days with the group of participants of the Open Dialogue training in Paris. I am not from France, but I spend some time here because of work and the fascination for the country, I don’t deny. I live in Lisbon, but I am Brazilian.

My home references seem to somehow accompany my wanderings around the world. In every place I go for work there is a kind of connection that fills me with good feelings so that the distance from family and old friends can be softened. Working with dialogical practices, or rather, with people who actually practice dialogically in their ways of being with others, nourishes me and invites me to look at my wanderings as an opportunity to expand my feelings.

Back to Sunday, I decided to visit one of the best known antiques markets in the city. I could not imagine the diversity of objects that I would find there. I like to revisit the past and try not to see it as something essentially nostalgic, but to remember that my present only exists because of everything I have lived through. To look at myself today is to look at the people who make me up, who have left part of them in me, to honor my experiences and my relationships.

While walking through the endless aisles of the market, I came across a box of postcards. Real cards, written and sent to someone years or decades ago. I stood there fascinated, taking them one by one in my hands, noticing the handwriting, how they started the message, and how they ended it. Even without mastering many of the languages that were there, the punctuation told me something, the dance of the letters, the length of the sentences. They were words addressed to a great friend, a great love, someone from the family. Mostly, the desire to share the joy of being in that place.

I once heard a concept about love that made perfect sense to me: love is when we have the need to share a joy. Those cards spoke of the desire for love to reach out to the other. What effect did it have on those bodies, on those lives? I thought of a dialogical body, a body that feels, a body that travels literally and metaphorically. A body that responds to another body. A body that moves through the world, through the joy in sharing the beautiful experiences of life, in receiving news from those who are far away from us.

What happens to us when we share feelings? Who will be affected by them? We don't know. They can cross oceans, hours, days, months, decades and even centuries. I felt at home that Sunday, in the presence of my family, of the words of love that always reach me, no matter where I am. How wonderful this dialog, this wave that happens through the responsiveness of life.