Surrender

This week was one of those neon infused weeks which occasionally come at you thick and fast which also brought with it the true test of what I have been grappling with all year; surrender and letting go. Thanks to the enormous generosity of my wonderful family and friends who have pooled together to give me for my birthday a trip to the most remote film festival in the world, Fisahara, which takes place in about 2 weeks time in a refugee camp in the Western Sahara, I am about to really have to put surrender into practice.

Reading through the details of the festival last weekend and realizing that I need shots, a sleeping bag and a supply of toilet paper and such I did start to wonder if this was really up my alley.My brother Jamie travels and has lived in Africa, my Dad can wax lyrical about the African skies but I have always been more at home on the Champs Elysees than on a camel. Having followed the Mayan trail with my boyfriend years ago with a hammock and a trip through Guatemala during the civil war I realized that I am not an intrepid traveller. I need walls and a roof and such. How was it that a conversation in a private ski journalist comedy club that my cousin and I had accidentally fallen into in London in May resulted in me heading to the Sahara desert to stay with a family of refugees and watch films under the stars for a week?  I am going alone, which means for me I will have to be stronger than I think I am, there isn’t any dreadlocked boyfriend with his knowledge of jungles and things to talk me down from a panic attack, there will be me with a language barrier, most people speak Spanish or Arabic, myself and I. Lucky I am a mime.

Surrender. I wanted to find it this year and it turns out I needed to go to a desert to do it. Glancing up at my vision board on which is a photo of Luis Vuitton luggage piled up on a desert, a Moroccan rihad with an amazing green couch and a bird spreading its wings, I realized it was actually happening Life is magical, unexpected and tosses you up on occasion, only to land you on a camel with a headscarf.

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