Every comparison would be aspirational. I guess we wished we could be compared to beautiful, bright and graceful, sensuous and brave animals but we seem to lack the effortlessness that comes with nature.
I wish I could be compared with a crow.
Crows are remarkably intelligent problem-solvers who can use tools, recognize human faces, and even understand cause and effect relationships. They’re known for their curiosity and enthusiasm about novel objects and experiences.
Despite their individual intelligence, crows maintain strong community bonds. They live in family groups that work together and even hold “funerals” for fallen members, showing a sense of the collective good that does resonate with my stubbornly public-minded values.
Their reputation for fairness appears in how they maintain relationships through reciprocity and remember those who have helped or harmed them – a form of integrity in their social world.
Though not conventionally beautiful like peacocks or graceful like deer, crows possess a different kind of elegance: the beauty of adaptability, resilience, and intellectual engagement with their world.
Crows remind us that there’s a special kind of grace in curiosity, in paying attention to details, and in maintaining ethical relationships with others.
Also, I find it increasingly difficult to get out of black clothes.
Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow’d:
In Lethe’s lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
Photo: Ponte de Lima (2017) I have spent a lot of happy and not so happy days in this place during my childhood and teenage years. A village which is known for a legend of forgetfulness has helped me to know a little bit more of who I am.
This is not a good photo. I couldn’t get out of the car and attempt a proper photo, the letter box stands right by a traffic light and words on walls and urban equipments tend to vanish quickly, so you get them when you spot them.
Pause and reflect on the [your / mine] path
That’s how it reads to me. That’s what’s lacking, the time to stop and try to see the direction.
even though I feel at home in most places I travel to, even though I can’t wait to leave, even though it now looks mostly as a theme park, I sometimes can’t help but feel that Porto belongs to me because I belong to it.
Stories from A Closet of Errors 