opening newsletter // open love letter
this first newsletter is actually more of an open love letter towards the ecosystem actively resisting the world as it is today that I feel I’m lucky enough to be part of. So here it goes, with my heart still firing up in the mountains
Dear all,
Dear, those who were at Banff, cracking me open day by day, but also those who weren’t, the ones that are here back home - I guess after eight years in Brussels, a big part of my gut feels at home here. This letter, though, is also for those back in my other home, in Torrelodones and Madrid. Dear all, all the people I love and loved, through all the different shapes love can take.
My whole body is filled with an effervescent feeling of hope and refreshed meaning. I want to thank you all for making me feel so seen. For showing me to simply be, just by being yourselves. I want to thank all the people involved in making Jazz & Sonic Arts happen, staff, faculty and participants in equal measure. But I also want to thank friends here in Brussels, who have been so insanely supportive the past years, encouraging me so hard to believe in my work. I want to thank everyone for daring, and by doing so, inspiring me to dare as well. Sharing this letter is so so so so scary. I normally only write letters to my friends and lovers, and 50% of the time I end up not giving it to them.
It takes so much courage to exist in this way in this world. The past months, I kept trying to escape from doing what I actually love to do, running around like a chicken without a head, or behaving like an ostrich. Let me insert the image: still running around, like a chicken, though much faster (up to 70km/h for an ostrich, can you believe it?!), but then suddenly trying to hide by burying my head underground. Issue: my whole body stays on the surface, and everyone can see it. As my head was underneath the surface, I use to believe no one could actually see me. Turns out, you see anyway. I hope this very poetic metaphor helps you understand where I was.
Under this feeling of total “all-over-the-place” vibe, with an urgent need to “get my shit together and put it in a backpack” I landed in Banff, totally not expecting that the experience would reopen my heart so wide. Being there, surrounded by all of you, the mountain, the quiet, the deer, the sounds, your visions; has given me so much strength and courage to keep going and dare to be.
Intensity aside, yet under this renewed sense of hope, I want to urge everyone to keep creating these spaces to share, think, feel and resist together, being role models to each other. We urgently need places of this kind, and to keep building constellations of care, from far and from close, people to talk to that we know can resonate with our thinking. Keep cultivating a deep sense of respect despite the differences. Keep talking, communicating. Small things in daily life can be so meaningful and transforming for everyone. Small actions of support and resistance are essential in the running times, I feel more than ever.
I will finish by thanking you all again, for putting so much of yourselves in what you do, for your resilience and resistance, for daring to show yourselves and sharing what you do, your meaning, the message(s) you carry around in the world. Thanks for speaking your truth through sound, body and words. I need all that inspiration to resource myself and to keep going, to keep daring to be.
With love and a firing heart,
ale
P.S.: I guess a I see a newsletter as sort of having an invisible, multidimensional penpal (is that how you call God?!) to whom you tell your life, how you feel, what you do, your struggles, your excitements, what you read, what you’re thinking about and so on, and to whom you throw questions that will probably be answered through other channels in life. This is how I envision for now this newsletter, as a sort of public private (or private public) space with all of you out there.
