Portrait Photography

I had a long conversation today with a friend who shares a similar background.

It’s fascinating, as both of us forgot the language. She has already recovered much of it, while I speak almost none. And yet there is a silver lining: it allows me to encounter everything anew. To rediscover the language as an adult, its sounds, its textures, its meanings, measured against a lifetime of experience. It feels like meeting it for the very first time.

Since my childhood, the country itself has also changed. It is free now, still not perfect, yet moving in the right direction.

What strikes me most is that, despite spending most of our adult lives elsewhere, we both feel an immediate sense of belonging the moment we return. You sense it as soon as your feet touch the ground: your roots are here. That memory is cellular; it lives in the body.

I feel such ease communicating with the nature here, reading its moods, its messages. Even without having lived through all its seasons, I can describe them as if they were still inscribed in me - their atmospheres, their subtle emotions, their secrets.

At first, I felt reluctance toward the weather, it is so much moodier, grayer, and rainier than what I had grown used to. But once I let go of that reluctance, the weather itself became my teacher. It is the perfect companion for understanding the passages and portals hidden in this land. It reveals the nature of its people as well - what moves them, what breathes life into their dreams. The weather allows me to see what I came here to see.

Before, I imagined returning only in summer, believing it to be the best time of year. Now I understand it differently: every season carries its gift. Now I get to choose my season - and in choosing, I choose them all. Each one has something to teach me about the land that gave me life.

vägi
Estonia, 2025

"If only a person could carry their homeland,
like violets, and take it wherever they go!"

Only people who've had to leave their homeland because of bad, dictatorial governments—whether it's them or their parents—really get this feeling.

| NFT maker & AI artist | Interested in poetry and art |

https://linktr.ee/HadiPourhassan