Lydia
Collins

What I care about is learning about the connections between my body and the sense of being alive. I care about feeling alive, about remembering how incredible it is that I am alive. Everything else to me is trivial. I want to reduce the noise of things in life that take me away from the goal - aliveness, presence, love. Life is noisy, but we have agency to focus on that which gives us life. 

I don’t want to be in spaces that feel dead to me, which is something I’ve been very aware of lately. When I’m in a space that buffers my sense of aliveness it is suffocating. It dampens my senses, it distances me from my body. It’s the feeling of being in an office for 9 hours a day just to say that I was in an office for 9 hours a day. It’s sinking into social media. It’s talking to a friend who blatently doesn’t feel joy for my happiness. It’s 
The piece that saves me when I am in this mode is that I remember that it is teaching me what non-aliveness feels like. When I am in alive spaces and the difference is so palpable. Both spaces exist in life, but I can put my energy and heart into those which are alive. 

I felt alive today at the Humaitá drum performance, where the blast of dozens of alfaias reverberated through the concrete and shot up my bones into my chest, altering the beat of my heart. I felt alive because I felt altered. 




I felt alive last night when I was playing pandeiro at my friend’s birthday party, finding where my beat fit in with the berimbau and guitar.



I felt alive when I watched the golden hour bounce off the brick and cement landscape in my uber home from the Humaitá performance. I sent a photo of the light to my crush and she said that I embody the essence of that light.


I felt alive last night when I presented a video my friends and I worked on. 



I felt alive this morning when I woke up and looked outside and saw this view of my friend’s garden. 

I felt alive when I put this flower behind my ear when I was walking to a bascillica in a small historical town in Minas Gerais to meet my friends to watch the sunset. 


I felt alive when I was sick and my friends brought me cachaça with lemon and honey in bed to make me feel better and fight off the germs.


I feel alive when I make things in groups. 



I feel alive when my house is full of good people.

I feel alive when I hike up random hills with music and 2000 other people who also feel alive when they hike up random hills with music. 

I feel alive when cars don’t fit in the street.

I feel alive when the architecture of a space is a direct reflection of the social need it needs to serve and the architecture doesn’t try to do anything else. 


I feel alive when I have a good hair day and my curls work. 

I feel alive when the sunset alters my heartbeat. 






I feel alive when I dance.


I feel alive when I sit for hours at the bar with my friends. That’s IT! That’s really it. 






For wraps, an inspirational quote about life. “For those who have faith, life never has an end.”


Keep living. 


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