EM CIMA DA HORA
My dear friend,
Tonight, I bring you a story of blue and white.
A school dancing with ancestral echoes.
Em Cima da Hora’s 2025 parade was a quiet opera.
A little out of time.
Yet full of soul.
Will you walk into its rhythm with me?
With warm firelight,
There is a quiet tenderness in how Em Cima da Hora carries its history.
Born in the first light of morning, its name a playful nod to lateness, the school grew into Cavalcanti’s blue and white with steady devotion.
Its roots have long been a meeting place for masters of the craft, Baianinho, Carioca, João Severino, and Carlinhos de Jesus, who shaped rhythm into narrative, turning the streets into open-air theaters.
Em Cima da Hora
The Poetry of Imperfect Time
As the 2025 Carnival drew near,
a different kind of dawn began to stir.
The theme Ópera dos Terreiros called the community together.
Not with haste,
but with the rhythm of a shared ritual of creation.
There was the scent of fresh paint.
The weight of fabric brushed by careful hands.
The deepening pulse of drums rolling in rehearsal.
Holding breath in the wings.
Two minutes slipped beyond the limit.
In the world of samba,
two minutes can weigh like a storm.
Yet the parade did not break.
Singers caught their breath and carried the song.
Dancers held the line until the final step.
And when the floats at last entered the Sambódromo,
they carried whole spiritual landscapes.
The dances of forró.
The presence of the orixás.
The voices of ancestors rising in praise.
Then came the moment when the spell trembled.
A float brushed the rail.
Time faltered.
Ninth place was the verdict.
A mark that felt both like a bruise
and a bloom.
Perhaps this is samba’s quiet truth.
It is not about flawless precision,
but about how we keep moving
when rhythm frays.
Em Cima da Hora reminds us that our stories live
not only in the shining moment of victory,
but in the courage to finish the song
even when time seems to slip away.
Carnival is not a march toward perfection,
it is a conversation with time itself.
And even when time slips away,
the story continues —
because we do.
Perhaps the truest beauty of samba
is not found in its flawless moments,
but in the way it teaches us to hold the line
when time falters
to finish with grace,
to turn missteps into music.
This is Nomadic Light