The Ministry of Saudade*
The most extraordinary thing happened to me on my flight home the other day: I found the joyful part of saudade.
I was fortunate to have the combination of a window seat, daylight hours and amazing visibility during a flight from São Paulo, Brazil with a stopover in Bogotá, Colombia. I found myself taking one photo after another. After randomly bombarding friends and family with snippets of what I had seen via WhatsApp, I decided to organize the perspective with a bit more intension and context.
Voilà, this short video that tracks the journey from the peri-urban edges of São Paulo into the Amazon basin, and then onwards into sunset and a dark descent into Bogotá.
It also tracks the paradoxical journey through both the joy and sorrow that is the imminently untranslatable concept of saudade. During the flight I had a soundtrack running through my mind that was a blend of stories from my past, present and future, backed by the imagined songs of Karen Carpenter, the Indigo Girls and Joni Mitchell. This is my usual mental state in airplanes, which is where saudades seem to lurk.
