Journey to Yourself

A woman from Lithuania arrives in bright, sunlit Cyprus and builds her independence from the ground up. Through a difficult passage and out the other side, Ruta's collage maps the whole journey: nature, flight, new friends, hard lessons, and finally meditation and stillness. From burnt to green, and now toward the mountains and a return to her own roots.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/15/20262 min read

But she does not hide the harder passage, and her honesty is part of what makes the work true. There is a wine glass, a broken heart, the markers of a difficult chapter that many people move through when freedom is new and the ground is still uncertain. A period of excess, of a heart that had been hurt and was searching for its footing. She places these on the map not to dwell on them, but because they were real, and because the turning that came afterward only matters if you can see where she turned from.

And she did turn. Toward the gold of the Buddha, toward meditation, toward stillness. Toward a quieter relationship with herself and the understanding that independence is not only the freedom to do anything, but the wisdom to choose what restores you. She describes the whole arc in three words that could be the title of her life: from burnt to green. From depletion back toward growth.

Now she is moving toward Kalopanagiotis, into the mountains, into the part of Cyprus that offers exactly what her collage has been reaching toward all along. She calls it a return. Back to your roots. The "Thank you" she pasted near the centre, the animals, the forest, the new team, all of it points the same direction. Her journey was never really about reaching a place. It was about reaching herself, and the map she made shows she has nearly arrived.

Her collage reads like a map, because that is what it is. A map of a journey toward herself, with every stage marked.

It begins with nature and with flight. The green of Lithuania, the country that shaped her, sits at one edge, and near it the word that started everything: fly. The package, the departure, the leap toward Cyprus. When she arrived, what struck her first was the brightness, a light so different from the north that it seemed to ask for a different kind of life. The blue sea, the island, the sailboat all appear in her work, the new world opening in front of her.

Her collage reads like a map, because that is what it is. A map of a journey toward herself, with every stage marked.

Then come the words she chose to write into the path itself. Independence. New friends. Career. Lessons. Creativity. This is the middle of the journey, the part where a person builds a life in a place that was not theirs by birth. Ruta did this with her own hands, working in a salon, becoming independent, learning who she was outside of everything familiar. The spa scene, the sense of care and renewal, belongs here too.

HERS

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Contact

hers@odyssea.com