Behold vs beware

Tell me.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver

When I was a child I dreamed of a house in the countryside near the hills and near the woods. I could see it in the details of my mind and every time I felt a sense of nostalgia and melancholy that, even afterwards, I could not explain.

It was like a faded memory, far away.

As children we know many things about what makes us happy and integrate it with our higher self.

I also knew that I would wait for a long time. My parents loved the city I loved the free land, the wilderness, the forests, the hills and the animals, the small communities.

I became obsessed, I looked for this fantasy home everywhere, I drew it, I built it with some cardboard.

I was looking in the reality in which I lived as the equivalent of what lived in my mind.

One day, my uncle told me that I would find this type of houses only in France or England because they were very old houses.

I went to the library and looked for every possible book and something inside me started to grow as soon as I saw a magazine showing a photograph of what looked like a typical piece of countryside from the South of England.

It may seem strange, but at the age of 8 I started planning to have a house in the English countryside.

I felt like a person from the 17th century lived inside the body a 8 years old child.

Nowadays, these actions are defined as part of the Data Collection process.

I would have had to wait more than 40 years to see my dream come true. I never gave up the dream, in fact I built it step by step, with hard work, failures and expectations. I arrived in Reading in June 2018, I slept for 4 months in a small kitchen in a sofa bed. I kept telling myself, ‘the house of my dream is close and already on the way’.

And I found it very quickly.

Today the wooden white fence is being made by Andrew, a local carpenter, and the shy cherry tree near the fence is all in bloom. It has become my symbol and the symbol of my life here.

Despite the contrary winds it stands small, proud and flowering in front of the neighbours. The slow blooms are the best.

You can dream about what you want, but when you start committing it to the paper then it becomes more formalised. You collect data to make the foundations of your dreams. Ideas can turn into a home, into a career, into a family.

We need information and stimulation.

Behold the possibility and go general, sometimes without details, and look what life brings in front of you without judgment. Life is supposed to be fun not an emergency all day, every day.

Behold a future and give it a design, behold that spring has come and sun is shining. Start with what you already have, at your fingertips, inside your home. Make it beautiful for yourself, this will help you to enjoy the present moment and this, exactly this, will lead you directly to what you are looking for.

I know it.

I eradicated everything to follow a dream, a feeling, a vague distant memory of a photograph inside a magazine.

Bruna for Intermundi®