Take a look at this picture.
Where are these women running to? Could you guess it? It's Çıralı, south Turkey, near Antalya, on the beach at 6.30 at morning.
Mm, maybe it's not easy to guess. I will tell you: they are running to the next opening turtles nest that the volunteers have sighted. It seems it's a such important thing for them not to lose even a second of that event.
Well, I must to admit, I came back to Çıralı because I also was missing the little turtles fighting at dawn to reach the sea waters. This year I took a lot of pictures, like the year before. But this year I was quite interested also in all those that like me were there not to lose even a second of that event.
In other words, I wanted to understand, watching those people, what was to push me to wake up every morning and run to the beach to see the turtles fighting for living.
Yeah, we can say it is because people always like this kind of things, anytime the life of somebody else is in danger, people use to have fun, since the battles in the Coliseum. Well, at least in this case turtles always survive, because too many people are there watching after them, like tens of godparents for their baptism of the water.
But I guess the reason is another one, at least for me. It's because these little turtles make us little, more little even than them. And I find this condition healthy. It pushes me back to my proper human feelings. The world is full of people who believe to be important. And thanks to this importance they feel right to claim and impose themselves and ask always more without taking into account the existing natural balance.
But it's also probably natural for the human beings to ask always more and to feel always bigger. So, I find it healthy sometimes to find a place where Nature teaches me again that I am really just a little thing in front of something that has been repeated for millennia. It makes me feel little, grateful and responsible. And to save at dawn a little turtle slipped out from the sight of volunteers, is something incomparable.
But where I can really exaggerate is my own imaginary world. There, you know, I like always to exaggerate. That's why, this year, after climbing on the ruined castle of Olympos, den of pirates, I renamed it "my rock of Mompracem"!
Laura, another little turtle, looking for her new rebirth.
Ah, by the way, a few days ago it was my birthday. Just like any pirate, we celebrated with a good gin.
