We met at Friday as usual…

We were sitting in a circle… very close to each others… we were trying to conquer the cold outside with the warmth of our intimate conversation.

Today's session was about the power of symbols… how  are big meanings represented in little actions or little things… freedom can be represented by bird's wings.. A country by it's flag.. a memory by a piece of paper or a photo.

For any artistic form of expression, we need to know how to express things with their symbols… because this is one of the elements that gives depth to our art work.

Each one in the circle was asked to get some thing that represents him or her… we put our things on the floor and each one started to talk about how is he/she represented in that thing.

stories flowed… one after the other.. layer after a layer…. how many layers do we have deep inside our selves… how do we hide our thoughts.. fears.. dreams and longing in the way we dress or in the things we carry…..

After telling our stories, we had a reading exercise… a short story that was followed by a set of questions about the symbols… how it reflected the author's life and feelings.

Being very full with meanings… we did a writing exercise that started with this sentence ” people think that I am……” and each one of us wrote his own thoughts.

Writing is still a challenge for the youth… they didn't develop their style yet and they always think about writing as a school assignment. This time they spoke their minds freely.. after which I introduced them to facebook notes and they were very curious about how to customize security settings.

At this part, we were done with the writing part and the photography session started.

Each participant had to pick a piece of paper that we prepared before the session.. each paper contained a single abstract word: belonging, fear, love, colors, waiting, etc.. they were divided to groups of 3 and each group got a camera and were left for 1 hour outdoors taking photos that express the words they had.

We were amazed by their creativity !!!

Then Seif introduced them to some rules of photography to help them develop their shots and creativity.

By the end of the day, Seif told me that he didn't expect that the youth had such layers deep inside… I smiled… I was actually overwhelmed with their stories….