Dedication

Looking Out
Originally uploaded by Blue Dragonfly Girl

I found out in an email that a friend of mine just died in a motorcycle accident early this morning. Like me, he was in his late 20s.

I hadn`t seen him since high school, but we still talked on the phone every once in a while and laughed a lot together while we caught up on each other's lives. The last contact I had with him was a few text messages exchanged on his birthday last March. I met him when I was 15-years-old at a meditation retreat in New Hampshire. I was smitten with this curly-haired boy and his sweet smile.

I can't believe he's gone. He wasn't in my daily life. We lived in different parts of the country and our paths didn't cross much. But he has had a place in my heart since we were teenagers.

I feel that overwhelming sadness and pain at trying to comprehend that someone whose presence-at-a-distance I took for granted, is now no longer here.

I recall lines from a publication I have been reading about a program for youth in conflict with the law in Porto Alegre*. I'll roughly translate a bit of it here:

"...we were able to confirm that a majority of them [adolescents in the program] lived with death as a daily presence in their lives...It's hard to find one of them who in one moment or another didn't make reference to someone close to them who had died and most often of a violent death. Relatives, brothers, uncles, cousins and even their parents or neighbors, friends or fellow gang members." (p. 108)

I realize how privileged I am to be 28-years-old and mourning, for the first time, the death of someone I care about, who was my age. It overwhelms me to imagine the depths of the losses experienced by the adolescents that I will be working with through my internship...
 
I start tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM. 

In yoga people often dedicate their practice to a theme or a goal or a person. And so, I want to dedicate the next four months that I spend with these youth, who have been through so much already in their young lives, to the memory of my friend, who is gone from this life far too soon.

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* Craidy, C. M. & Gonçalves, L. L. (2005). Medidas sócio-educativas: Da repressão á edução. Porto Alegre: UFRGS Editora.