We are reaching the end of one more big expedition of Navegar Amazônia, this project that fills our eyes and hearts with truth and beauty.

The Argonauts of Navegar lived intensely a kind of fraternity, along these long days of intimacy and work. The eccentricities from each one reduced, noblesse oblige, in order to give space to something new, wonderful and touching: the meeting with this beautiful and proud crowd from the waters.

Master is the one that all of a sudden learns, Guimarães Rosa used to say. Our goal was never to teach to the communities who live in the banks of the rivers, but to learn together, trying to decode certain secrets whispered by the leaves, waters, that seem so mysterious. Nevertheless, these secrets will help us to understand Brazil better, this land full of contrasts and dissonances.

We keep asking ourselves, all the time, what the effect of this vast experience is, since there is something extracted from everything, in each one’s mind. Maybe the biggest revelation was to realize that the impressive landscapes, the dizzy waters, can’t thin the Amazon inhabitants. On the contrary, we feel in every person we touched, in every face we saw, a stress of the most essential qualities for a human being: humanity, dignity, moral sense, resistance. Since Belém, I have guessed that, observing Jorge Mautner’s vitality contrasting with the discolored vigour of Master Verequete, that is not by coincidence on the photos (an optic illusion?). He was wearing a sort of crow, when in reality (does reality exist indeed?) it was a mere dark hat.

Probably due to the effect of waters, that often surround us, I cried a lot, I cried too much, a deep and touching cry, plenty of pure emotion and dazzling on these days and nights spent in Amazon.

The photos, the movies, the recordings, will bring us a bit of the magic back, minimizing our homesickness and revealing the shared experience. I want more, though: I long to look at each gentle person I met again and that touched my heart in Tauerá-açu.

Mainly, I want to return to hug and kiss the nine pretty girls who didn’t leave me for a while, on those two days we were there and that don’t differ in joy or beauty from my little granddaughters in São Paulo, Carolina and Manuela. Why does Aelen from Tauerá-açu look so much, in her calm beauty, like my same aged Letícia, in Bahia?

Mysteries will always occur.

Navegar Amazônia is a party in motion, which will always follow us, everywhere we are. It’s simply delicious making part of it!