Come along to Brazil

As it’s most common in my life, some of the best things that happen to me were not planned ahead. This is to say that I’m going to Brazil tomorrow and I would like you to come along with me. I’ll be posting about my friends’ work, about Mestres who have been supporting my work in Brasília, and of course about my own work there.

The feeling is strange though… I feel like leaving home to visit home… The facts that led me to this decision have been brewing for quite a while. But the main one is a hip arthroscopy that I have to undertake. This small injury have been bothering me for a few years and as usual with us capoeiras I postponed a proper diagnose afraid that it could have been something more serious. A silly behavior that we have, as the sooner something is diagnosed the better we can treat it. During my rehab time I’ll write about the importance of rest, overtraining, and training addiction, but for now I want to tell you about my plans of sharing this trip over my blog.

In the past few weeks I began posting about our NGO – Volta por Cima. I still have subtitled videos of interviews that I’ll be posting in the next few weeks. To follow these up, browse for ‘Learning from Brazilian Culture – TV Clipping‘ (this is the link to the first interview) and follow the thread. The transcripts for these interviews will be posted over each respective video. I also found translations for articles featuring our program in Brasília, so while I write about my visit to our program, I’ll also post these articles for you to get to know the beginnings of our program.

It’s been nearly four years since I left Brazil and I have never paid a visit since then and though I feel homesick, I also feel like home in Australia. An ambivalent feeling that Zygmunt Bauman explains in his book Identity as it follows:

The more one practises and masters the difficult skills needed to get by in such an admittedly ambivalent condition, the less sharp and hurting the rough edges feel, the less overwhelming the challenges and the less irksome the effects. One can even begin to feel everywhere chez soi, ‘at home’ – but the price to be paid is to accept that nowhere will one be fully and truly at home.” (Bauman, Z. and Vecchi, B. 2004: 13,14)

Even though I believe we can, and should, find inspiration within ourselves, and that the time when Brazil stood as the single Capoeira epicentre is long gone; I still think of Brazil as the place where we capoeristas visit to re-charge our batteries, to find inspiration and wisdom spending time with the Velhos Mestres, and within a non-dualist culture (though already heavily westernised too). And this is why I want to share this experience with you all. I not only hope to find inspiration and wisdom, but I also want to share it with you all.

Abraços e Axé!
Eurico

Note: To find posts related to my trip to Brazil search for the tags ‘Come along to Brazil’; ‘Volta Por Cima’ and ‘Learning from Brazilian Culture’.

Reference:
Bauman, Z. and Vecchi, B. 2004. Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Polity Press, UK.

Related Posts:
Related 4CT articles:
- Learning from Brazilian Culture – TV Clipping – RBI Notícias I;
- Learning from Brazilian Culture – TV Clipping – RBI Notícias II;
- Project Learning From Brazilian Culture: Brief History, Profile and Guidelines;
- Constructional Elements of our School’s Political and Pedagogic Project;
- Capoeira and Global Trends.

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