2019 has been an amazing year.
After I got to experience the first big travels in my life aside from family vacations
(being at the OZORA festival in Hungary, on a camping island in Croatia and all around the mountains of southern Poland (2018) as well as visiting Morocco and hitchhiking along the southeastern coast of Spain (2019)),
I realized more profoundly about myself that the outward journeying went hand in hand with an even deeper journey inward.
Being and communicating with people from myriad countries of the world has fueled me with the most heartfelt desire to get to know myself and everything that’s within me even more. I began looking at relationships I had with people and myself(!) back home with different eyes as well and I realized how some friendships have long turned out to be not as promising as I thought they’d be.
In 2019 I got to fast during the holy month of Ramadan for the first time in my life and it bonded me tightly with a dear afghan friend of mine while also bringing me closer to the Buddhist teaching again.
Closer to the end of the year (1 year ago now), I embarked on a pilgrimage along the St. Jacob’s trail across northern Spain (Camino Francès) which involved me in 5 beautiful weeks of self-reflection, socializing, bursting out in gratitude and tears of joy and wandering/wondering in awe about what precious life it is that we get to be aware of.