welcome again to a proper name

If you've been receiving my updates over the years, shukriya, thank you! I’m now properly naming this space - olé - as:

Faraway is Close : story-journeys that dissolve borders

I'm testing out a new platform called Kit and trying on structure for size —jaja, don’t laugh — I’m actually quite tidy.

How does a nomad shape the wildness of creative journeys?

She tries. She tries!

From Mongolia to Bombay, from poems to plays, from silence to performance — Faraway is Close is where I share reflections and invitations shaped by journey, curiosity, the story-dark, and the surprising joy of decolonizing the self (and other tiny tiny projects :-)

Here, Idhar, Aquí:
land listens.
fear comes in for tea. (chai with Marie Biscuits, sigh)
the body becomes the poem.
creativity and cross-cultural experiences connect us.
and faraway becomes closer than we imagined…

barefoot or not - aagé, chalo, vámonos, let's get muddy with song..

do you want to keep receiving these emails?

If you're happy to keep receiving these story-journeys and poems, you don’t need to do a thing. You're already on the path with me. 🌍🪶

But if you'd like to step off the trail — no hard feelings at all — you can unsubscribe here. May you move towards what you love!

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here's a sample of what's to come

A story-poem from Peru

To stay or to go? Four walls or none? Here or elsewhere?

I found a poem I wrote in 2015 — looking back at a time in Peru when those questions were alive for me. Some poems are snapshots in time and out of time. This one feels like both.

If the November trip to Peru is calling to you, we’ll need to let Gaby—our guide—know by August 27. Details here.

This poem holds the places I visited: Ollantaytambo, Pisaq, Pumamarca... the sound of Quechua in the air… a presence Gaby calls ayni — a flow of reciprocity.

Excerpts below and a link to read more.

Four Walls or Elsewhere

by Shebana Coelho

I live in a room with four walls
and two windows
The windows see yellow grass
There are rabbits in the grass
their ears are stalks
Are they huddled
as rabbits huddle
- still in the grass-
listening?
or
are they running so fast
that what I'm seeing are
strands of grass left behind?
I think they are running
I think even the grass longs
for elsewhere.

in Peru
a woman sits
cross-legged on
what is left of empire
on a slab of pink rock
in a valley as green
as the first sight of the beloved

Read the rest of the poem here

a long time ago in Peru

in the end

It's a new moon today. I named the newsletter. Then it rained. Someone up there approves... ice-cream is in order!

I'm always up for hearing what resonated, what echoed, what hummed, what made a taka taka sound or what fell flat thuudddd... hit reply or write me at info@shebaancoelho.com

yours in adventure!
Shebana