#3. Splendid Swedish weekends

Sunday, the 17th of March 2019

It's 6 am in Åmål, Västra Götaland, Sweden 

and I'm thinking about the last two weekends and how intense and incredible they have been. I'm thinking about yesterday and my first feeling of the day is the burning need to write and let the unbelievable memories rest on paper until I can write about them because they are still fresh.

I love the idea of "words resting on paper" because of the etymology the word resting has in both languages of Germanic origin and languages of Latin origin. Both these groups of languages have shaped and continue to shape the indivual I've become and I'm becoming.

Old English ræst, rest (noun), ræstan, restan (verb), of Germanic origin, from a root meaning ‘league’ or ‘mile’ (referring to a distance after which one rests). From Middle English rest, reste, from Old English rest, ræst (“rest, quiet, freedom from toil, repose, sleep, resting-place, a bed, couch, grave”), from Proto-Germanic *rastō, *rastijō (“rest”), from Proto-Indo-European *ros-, *res-, *erH- (“rest”). Cognate with West Frisian rêst (“rest”), Dutch rust (“rest”), German Rast (“rest”), Swedish rast (“rest”), Norwegian rest (“rest”), Icelandic röst (“rest”), Old Irish árus (“dwelling”), German Ruhe (“calm”), Albanian resht (“to stop, pause”), Welsh araf (“quiet, calm, gentle”), Lithuanian rovà (“calm”), Ancient Greek ἐρωή (erōḗ, “rest, respite”), Avestan‎ (airime, “calm, peaceful”), Sanskrit रमते (rámate, “he stays still, calms down”), Gothic  (rimis, “tranquility”) [Wikipedia].

From Latin restāre, present active infinitive of restō, to continue to be, to stay, to remain, to keep, to lie, to remain (in a place) for a time, e.g. while travelling, or as a guest, not to leave or go away from [Cambridge Dictionary].

Words resting on paper means to me both staying, not leaving and stopping, taking a break, releasing. It is when all the words I'd love to say are said and all the feelings I'm flooded with are written that I feel like my soul can rest. 

Time to start then. Once again here I tell myself the words Lewis Carroll wrote for Alice when she had to start telling her story.

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.

Such a simple sentence, but enough to clear your mind and give yourself a direction.

Last weekend was the most inspiring weekend I had experienced in 2019. Saturday the 9th of March the public library in Åmål was open the whole day and had organised a crazily interesting event in occasion of the international women's day. Sunday the 10th of March the WWF Sweden Youth came to the Young Innovation Hub in Åmål in order to hold a workshop with the 2019 Åmål's Earth Hour ambassadors. Saturday the 16th of March the actor and director Erik Lundin came to the Young Innovation Hub in Åmål for the project Filmplats and I had the opportunity to understand the value of the presence of a director during filmmaking. Furthemore, this Saturday the 16th of March I had my first piano lesson ever and for the afternoon, after the Filmplats workshop, my friends and I had been invited to my guitar teacher house because he would have loved to show us his old guitars and instruments. These two weekends in Åmål have been so special and so full of listening to Swedish people talking in Swedish and of me trying my best to hold a dialogue in Swedish, so full of learning and inspiration that I really want to talk about them. 

I decided I will dedicate two separate sections to both the event at the library for the international women's day and the workshop with the WWF Sweden Youth. In this entry I'd like to talk about meeting my piano teacher, having my first piano lesson ever and seeing the house of my guitar teacher. I had never seen such a cozy place where music reigns so peacefully before.

The first meeting with my piano teacher happened last Saturday the 9th of March 2019 and it was a moment I will truly never forget.

Starting to learn how to play the piano has been a dream of mine for years. Taking piano lessons is something I've wanted so much, although I've never had the opportunity, and something that has never left my mind. When I started my trilingual studies in Bozen, in 2015, one of the things that made me the happiest was knowing that my student dorm had a room with a piano. I have some of the best memories related to that room. There's the day of my first birthday not in Treviso (my home town), on which one of the best people I've met during that 3-year journey played one of the most meaningful pieces for me on the piano of that student dorm's room 3.5 years ago: Nuvole Bianche, by Einaudi. Furthermore, there are the moments in which the flatmate of my first apartment in Bolzano told me that if I really wanted it, I should have played it. She played the guitar very well and was also keen on learning how to play the piano during that year. I've not been thinking about this in such a long time. That dialogue with my first flatmate has been in my mind for years because I know she was right. I've always been saying that that instrument meant the whole world to me but it has always been so hard for me to find the time to dedicate to it, especially during the first year of my studies. I had never been told "spending time on playing was ok", never been told "wanting to play is one of the most beautiful things in the world". Something else that is beautiful? Coming from a rural place and a family of farmers (my parents and older relatives have never really been playing instruments) and having the desire to see the world and to learn how to play, then visiting more than 20 countries by oneself in 2 years,  and still *never forgetting where one comes from*. 

I have so many pieces of life connected to the piano as an instrument that the moment in which I met my first piano teacher ever right before work on the 9th of March 2019 will always be dear to my heart. I want to include this moment in the story of the last weekends because it was a weekend immersion in Swedish for me and it started with that moment, in which we spoke only Swedish (or better to say I tried my best to hold a dialogue only in Swedish) and it was awesome. She even asked me if I want to live in Sweden, question followed by the statement: "Italy has such an awesome weather". I get asked this question a lot and I'm happy it makes me reflect and smile. 

I was so happy I had managed to express myself a bit without having even prepared what I wanted to say that I can't express the happiness I was feeling when, one week later (yesterday), we had our first piano lesson. It really does mean the whole world to me and I'm extremely thankful for the opportunity I got thanks to the European Solidarity Corps to finally start taking guitar lessons and, once concluded my Bachelor thesis, piano lessons. I'm thankful I have this time of my life in which I'm getting to know myself as much as I can and I'm learning as much as I can, while finally finding my own focus. I also really want to save the memory of the first song we played. My piano teacher asked me at the beginning of the lesson whether I knew it or not. Of course I did. It was the European anthem, An die Freude, Beethoven. She will probably never know how much meaning that piece has to me - or hopefully one day. It is one of the nicest and first memories I have of playing my guitar when I was 11. The song whose notes I could still somehow recall when I took my guitar in my hands again so many, many years later. It's the piece whose words I'll never forget, which I can hear in German in my head while I'm thinking in Italian, talking to myself in English and answering to my teacher in Swedish while we are practicing. So much meaning in such a simple choice.

I'm infinitely thankful also for the moment in which my guitar teacher asked me -during one of our lessons-whether my friends and I could have been interested in seeing his old instruments. I can't express how surprised I was yesterday when I saw his living room! I felt like I could literally fly and I can still see myself jumping because I was still doing it when I got home and told Jonas - my flatmate - about An die Freude and the time at my teacher's house. His living room was a piece of art. Way, oh my, way better than a museum of instruments! In a museum of instruments surprise always comes with pain because one can't touch the exposed instruments. I'm sure I'll hardly ever see such a piece of art of room in my life again. I didn't even know so many different guitar could exist at all. My friends and I followed my teacher during his explanation and I tried to write down all the names of guitars and instruments he was making (I'm literally checking all these names in the internet, ECOSIA browser, right now): baroque guitars, dobro guitars, lutes, mandolines, tenor banjos, tenor guitars, cuatros, domras, octave guitars, charangos, parlor guitars, one flamenco guitar and I'm pretty sure this is a mere summary of just some names I was able to write down. Boy I was almost forgetting the Fado guitar! Dear Lisbon, I miss you so much. 

I still can't believe the time we had yesterday with my guitar teacher happened for real. Honestly, if someone had told me some day before yesterday that this would happen to me I probably wouldn't have believed them. The living room of my guitar teacher truly was better than a musem but the best thing is that he always has an infinite quantity of stories to tell. We always speak about very important topics like racism, mafia, politics, guitarists and the history of music. The time with him was a live museum. A museum of stories, where music and words reign.

Before we sat down after he had explained to us all the names of the guitars and their origins and showed us discs for record player, he lighted 5 candles, 2 on the table where we were sitting and 3 on a smaller table. Story after story, minute after minute, from light, outside it became dark. Little by little, the darkness wrapped all of us gently and I felt that my soul was accompanied into resting while we were talking. After 4 hours I felt it was hard to keep on being concentrated on the Swedish talks we were having but my soul was truly speechless in front of what was happening. We had so many stories to tell, so many views to exchange, that 5 hours had already passed and we would still have kept on talking. It was indescribable. 

The last I want to tell is one of the stories he told us yesterday. He was visiting a Syrian family that he described as "very, very kind". The time must have been less than 10 months ago, because he referred to that visit as close to the Swedish elections (September 2018). He told us that during the visit he spoke with one of the children of the family, who asked him: "But if the Sweden Democrats win, will we have to go back to Syria?". Then he told us what the child said afterwards: "Do you think we are welcome here? I feel we are not welcome". Finally, my guitar teacher told us what he told the child: "I am Swedish and I want to tell you you are welcome". This was one of the best moments of my life. I had never been able to speak about these topics with someone way older than me before and I really think I will leave the description of this moment to the word indescribable because as I wrote before, I still can't believe the time we had yesterday with my guitar teacher happened for real. I truly think, once again, that the time we spend talking, playing, exchanging ideas with others is one of the best miracles that can happen to us human beings.

"An die Freude" "Ode to Joy"

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder*
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.