Socotra: unspoiled, unexpected, unrevealed

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For some reasons I end up always travelling across islands.

I am not choosing them.

They are choosing me.


For some reasons they end up being always on my path, and I have no other choice than taking them!

Not that I have other plans anyway.


I am not obsessed with islands( and besides, even if I would be, would I be conscious of it? obsessions are so often unconscious gifts of our minds). I love travelling them, that’s for sure, and I love the way they call me through space.

I think every island is different. Every islands is like a little piece of earth floating through time. It’s a world separated from the others, and yet so connected to the others. It’s so independent from main land, and yet so relative to them.


An island is like a human being.

They can be so different from each other and during their life they can still evolve in some many ways, they can change to such a far extent and still be the same.

…they can build so many streets, bridges, buildings and change substantially the way they are. They can take care of the voices from far that they hear in the silent nights or leave them unheeded, as they come from such remote areas that you can actually pretend that they are not there.


Every island is a single and unique-irresistible to me-universe…to be explored.

Like for human beings, yet there is always land that hasn’t fully revealed its soil to the bipeds.


That’s why I have always loved travelling islands. I have travelled a few in fact.

I met strong, sour and tough islands. I met kind and precious ones, wild and deep ones and very civilised islands.
All very enticing and like a an “island anthropologist” I travelled them…

I went across them, I penetrated them… all the way up to their multiples truths.

I came across a lot of searching and a lot of travelling.

I was sometimes tired and needed rest, sometimes I was so lost in the dark that I couldn’t even see my own steps.

Some other times I had to pull up myself and go.


With Socotra it was different.

As always in such cases, it was very different from the very beginning of our encounter.

I realized immediately that this was a different island, and at first, I was scared.

An island that I have never met before and that I did not know at all yet. This island was so intense, so wild and rough in its unspoiled nature and still so elegant in its multiple spaces.


The Known and the Unknown are melted in a unique time and space in Socotra. The unexpected is the air you breathe. The unrevealed is the dragon you suddenly perceive flying over your head, and disappearing quickly behind the cliff, before you actually have the time to achieve a real perception. The deep light of the Middle East' sun and the darkness of the mountains’ caves, blend together in the tangled forests of the interiors…hiding fantastic creatures, yet undisclosed to the human eye.


Even now, only writing about it, a shiver of magnetic attraction and desire of exploring pervades me with fear. I felt in love immediately and knowing it, it was even more inspiring.


I am digging inside, more and more, seeking for the innermost recesses of it…

Whose’ this unknown and yet so fascinating subject? With every new sight, I am discovering a new corner of it, a new unexpected part of an hidden alcove.


I will not use the word special to describe this, as it gives in our minds immediately a judgment, a value “perhaps this one is better than the others”. No, this was just different, unique, either you love it or hate it.

I loved it.



…and while walking alone through its forests I could hear the Nocturnes of Chopin playing and while walking in its shores, I could read verses of Neruda engraved in the sands.

One night, while I was meditating behind the fire, in front of the sea and with the deep forest’ sounds at my back, I had a clear-cut perception: I knew about this islands and I had always known about it, only I had never travelled its spaces in such a spread and wide possibility.I had never entered in such a deep and true way in its intensity.

I realized that for a long time I had been waiting for this encounter and it was exactely what I had been searching for.

I knew who that island was. I knew that person since a very long time before.


And there I remained.

I laid down, resting with myself.

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