Home sweet homeland...

When I'm here I have this overwhelming sense of being at home, but overwhelming isn't quite accurate. In fact, this time, returning here, it's this strange feeling of simply being back in the element that is so familiar, like being back at an altitude where you breathe easy, or (I can only imagine), a fish that's back in the water where it belongs... it's less dramatic than that... so maybe it's a plant back in it's native land... I'm grasping for allegory, my mind is working on comparisons and some narrative coherence... but my being is simply being. It's here, and it feels like home. All around me, I hear my language, people whose faces I recognise...

Though it takes my tongue much longer to form the sounds, all around me I hear the flow of this beautiful language, and it enters me with ease. And though sometimes it trips as I clumsily aim to articulate myself as clearly as I can, still it surrounds me, and the sounds and cadence of it stay with me, inside of me, I can hear it working on the inside. How strange and wonderful.

Arriving here, just as spring emerges, it's such an interesting sensation, somehow mimicking my own emergence, return to this life. A remembering of language, and rhythm, and place... recognizing all the images and signs that form my ways, my points of reference in life, beyond time.

A somatic experience of adjustment, immersion back into a place and culture I knew, and know... and yet need to orient myself in again, in this time and place, as the person I am today. It's hard to describe in words... a bit surreal, especially as these last few years, the prevalence of everything being documented and visible on the internet, has made it possible to see so much of what's going on here, virtually. I've spent so much time watching from afar, following happenings- exhibition openings, book launches, workshops, concerts and gatherings... now I'm here.

Plenty has changed here, yet so much remains the same... the streets are here, the old churches, the monuments, the babushky selling flowers on the way... even my favourite restaurants... Yet I feel like a different person almost entirely, from who I was 15 years ago, which of course I'm not, but this trips me up if I think about it for too long :). I feel a strange sensation walking these streets, recognizing things, yet remembering it all from that person who was here as a university student, as a recent graduate, as a young adult, being formed so much at that time, by every experience, every moment, a very strong imprint on the future me.

I have so many враженя to share ;) If I could type in Ukrainian as swiftly, I'd love to do that more. My mind has started to переключатися -switch over already.

Anyway, what I had meant to write about, was all the gorgeous onslaught of beauty and new impressions that have found me, but I needed to find a way to articulate the internal happenings that feel so big right now. (That Sagittarian with Scorpio rising combo ;)

Especially today, after an entire day of walking in my absolute favourite place in the city, on the first real Spring day.

I am whelmed up by this gorgeous entity of a city, and by Spring herself.