La Muse Blue

On Imagination

Often, illusion is better than reality. Sometimes it is not.

It depends on the feeling it elicits, the ideas hatched or the cravings it sates.

On Freedom: Epictetus

It is also about acceptance. The embracing of truth. And, we humans have troubles with that. Salman Rushdie‘s literary works connect the real life troubles of one’s expression of their own truth. We make up stories, myths and theories about everything, even and particularly about that which we are not so certain about.

Being in the dark irritates us. We must see the light in everything, even that which is unexplainable. Impossible to prove, not reliant on the so called natural laws we deciphered, still we must word it out somewhat. For long we believed that the moon is source of light. The spacial mirror of the sun is such a marvellous form of alignment that at night it brightens our paths if the sky is clear, as if it were the closest star.

darkness in photography

Curiosity drives human imagination.

So does passion, the uncontrollable pull of something towards itself. Irresistible. As our ancestors understood well, in spite of its vertiginous nature, passion blinds us. Isn’t it wonderful this place of hopeful imagination without boundaries? Those blinders create the lies we tell ourselves about the true nature of something or someone we are passionate about. At least temporarily.

sculptures at the Belvedere in Vienna

Imagination for the bigger picture

The problem with having answers to everything through words, a human invention itself, is that we miss the whole picture. Also the limits of our sensual perception enforce the iron gate of our ignorance. What lies beyond transcends our rational mind, the body and perhaps is what only the soul could ever experience, and that is why we invented the words sprit/soul in the first place, to explain the beyond, the rare glimpses of consciousness into something even supernatural.

I think that the arts like music, visual renderings of the artist’s experience and feelings, physical performance like dance, ritual rites, tell more than words will ever be capable of. These harmonious instinctive even crafts are the tools to comprehending our human nature. They take skills onto the higher plane.

Kis-Lev. street art in Tel Aviv Huber Scheibl art

Imagination to reach the depths

When illusion is not good for us is almost a moral question the eastern sages instilled into their practices. From the ancient Vedic scriptures through yogic to Buddhist traditions that inspire us today in our search of the self. Meditation is a tool to still the mind, to eventually remove the veil of emotional colouring from perception. So is mindfulness, regular reflection upon one’s life and how it aligns with one’s values, which may change over the course of a lifespan.

While modern science progresses it also regresses in some findings proving through their own methods set sometimes in the 18th century. Today, neuroscience in particular confirms what was known to work through practice, over centuries and generations of practicing some activity or non activity and the reflection upon that, an acute observation of oneself. The new science also shows that there is still so much we don’t understand.

ancient art in Rome

Hence, imagination comes handy even to the 21st century humanity. The booming sales of infinite work in fiction, fantasy, poetry swelling on social media, movies, with artificial intelligence enhanced coproductions of videos for our entertainment are the proof of our hunger for others’ imagination. Books, canvases, screens, stages, stones, marble, wood, glass and other materials and mediums cast out humanity in a profound breadth of expression. Even your voice, with or without lyrics can channel something beyond the meaning of what mere words are able to capture. I tried to capture that with my mysterious, cross-medium form poem bellow:

Millennial Fairytale ~ a poem(1)

Imagination to access the magical

Whether it is dragons, fairies or divine superhuman creations of our mind, now also avatars and other digitally transformed formless forms occupy virtual reality, the next level of human entertainment through stirring imagination.

Yet from my experience nothing equals the self-made experience in one’s own mind — the mental act of transforming reality yourself. Being a creative person, for me this activity seems natural. My mind slips into the realms only I fathom. It is magical. The spice of life. Taking that which is there, perhaps around me, surrounding me, and enhance it with the palate only my mind knows well. Sometimes, I feel like it is not even my own invention, it transcends me, dwells beyond me whispering its magic spells.

sculpture art in Rome street art in Rome

Just strolling though a fascinating city can do wonders, surrealities to be invented and told. Some places naturally, as nature herself does in the wild, tease out imaginary stories. For me these were Kyoto, Marrakesh, Paris, Rio, Rome, and many others in a more subtle way. Italo Calvino in his collection of imaginary journeys of Marco Polo captured human emotions through cities so palpably that The Invisible Cities kept Genghis Khan glued to his tellings in this masculine rendering of The One Thousand and One Night transcending east and west. Islands aroused all those living by the sea. The Hawaiians, Bermudans, the Greeks, … Just read the Odyssey and listen to the island myths. The far away, the isolated, all synonyms for the unknown.

nude male sculpture reframed in a contemporary city art by the Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik

Imagination like love fills the remaining empty hollows of my heart. The phantom gets you where you want it to go. Hovering the dark corners of the unconscious, entering the blissful with light-filled rooms, out onto the infinite ocean of pleasure we crave. We all crave pleasure in one form or another, don’t we? In some way dreams, those semi-conscious mirrors of something deep in the waters of our mind, answer this call. For the mind’s rational contemplation though the arts do a more clear job, we can connect the snippets of reality better than the filtered interpretations of our irrational dreams.

So let the mind graze on the green sprouting grass of your fertile heart. The more I do that, the more I allow the chest organ we assigned love to gallop all over me, beyond the chest, beyond the body, borderless, spreading the wings in free flight. We assume love’s residency, but is it ever at home at some specific place? Isn’t love essential in you, something driving human survival through the harsh life beyond procreation? Assuring the next of our kin does not make one’s life bearable, love does.

One Thousand And One Bed

Looking for some bedroom inspiration?

Whether you are remaking your home or contemplate how your dream bed would look like, then you may find inspiration here in my photo gallery bellow. The setting is also important, so I am including some entire bedrooms in the luxurious five star hotels and boutique bed and breakfasts from California, Miami, Rio, east through London, Paris, Marrakech, Bangkok, Japan down to Tasmania where I lodged. I noticed that the beds spur memories and so do I. The comfort lies imprinted deep in my mind.

luxury hotel design

When writing an essay on the benefits and traps of luxury lifestyle recently, I searched through my photo library for my favourite beds while traveling. The amusing and somewhat nostalgic findings in its vast pockets were rather abundant, so instead of overloading the essay with visual distractions, I share the bounty of cosy slumber here.

I split them by colour palate. Starting with light-toned design.

Being quite a globetrotter, I realised that I have probably slept in well over a thousand different beds so far. Perhaps even a couple of thousand!

I have bedded across five continents over the two decades traveling the world. I have not photographed all the beds, but these rather diverse bed and bedroom styles brought up memories of some of the most sound sleeps I was blessed to luxuriate in.

Like your bedroom darker or with some spark of colour, here we go.

Of course, my bed at home is the best, most comfortable one. Developed by a Greek physical therapist, it is made from all natural materials like coconut fibre for the ultra layered mattress, it is called Coco Mat. The frame made by Giorgetti binds Japanese touch with Italian knowhow in a high quality walnut wood and leather.

Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat

It is not pictured above, simply because it is mine and my secret, unless you get invited. Just imagine your own ideal bed and make it happen in your own bedroom. Floating in the cloud of dreams.

Bavarian bed

A nugget at the end. The above Bavarian bed nests you in the first class lounge at the Munich airport. Some lounges think of anything, even a nap before your long flight.

My Favourite Books: The Stars of My Library

You reveal a bit of yourself through the books you read, I do too.

I wrote on Books: the mirror of your mind and soul with the perspectives on how we tend to choose books we read and what these selections reveal about our character. Books are the window into your nature. Here, I offer my personal choices and journey to my library that may inspire your next reads.

Tel Aviv book store

How books pull me to themselves and when not

With each detour into an indie book store displaying a mind-grabbing title in its window, when a good review tickles my curiosity or a theme I am currently interested in or a thoughtful friend gifts me plenty of amusement bound in paper — my physical library keeps expanding. I rarely order online. I don’t use e-readers. I don’t like the semi-tactile, cold experience, plus I am unapologetically writing in the page margins my own reflections. You wouldn’t want to read a book I owned, unless it was a rare vintage pursuit. Pencil, highlighter and pen draw my creative self over bland typing on screen.

Well, there was one, attention worthy classic that I read in its entire page count on Kindle, Nabokov’s Lolita. Often reading while traveling, this ubiquitous gadget’s design allows for an incognito mode saving some disapproving or curious looks.

Sometimes at airports and train stations, I swoosh through the books on offer. Checking out local bestsellers, I rarely succumb to popular trends. These “hits”, whatever their star promises on the cover exclaim, rarely become those attitude or mind shifting reads that alter my life view or connect on a deep level. They are just page turners like thousands of others. I am into the brainy books, those heart and mind stirring metaphors of life.

Jean Cockteau wall drawings On Freedom: Epictetus

Diving into the Poetic Depths of Humanity

On the tactile side of reality we live through our actions, and not just in our imagination. The American poet Emily Dickinson wrote a beautiful poem about hope that during strenuous years, a prolonged illness, an injury, a broken heart or being caught in the screeching claws of war lifts us up: “Hope is that thing with feathers…” this line lightens harsh reality with fleeting optimism. I think it is more realistic to recognise the fragility of positive mindset whatever the situation. What makes the difference is what we do about the situation, how we get out of it safely and if possible unwounded. Be practical, not a dreamer when the stakes are high. Always stick up to your values.

Victor Hugo in Pauca Meæ comforted me in time when it seemed that my father would depart from this world prematurely. The beauty of the French language sensually sparks in poetry.

Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal showed off the dark side of human soul and I praise him for his fearless honesty. Would love to talk to that man!

French poetry

The Senegalese contemporary poet Amadou Lamine Saul in his exemplary French reminded me of the beauty and strains of love. I adore his catholic school learned elegant form of speech. His voice elicits such an avowing, sensual experience.

I read French poetry in its original, which is the best experience one can have. Poetry is the most sensitive literary genre to be flipped into another tongue. Perhaps it is its sometimes irrational, emotional charge and the contact with the unconscious realm that burden its translation. It can also be the metaphors culturally charged with meaning that in some other language could not find the same resonance.

bookshelf

On the similar sphere of human feelings, but rather spiritually Rumi connected love with the divine as nobody else did for me. I was inspired by his poems for my own. Asking my Persian friends how different his poetry sounds in English, I was told that it seems to them the essence did not get lost trough translation.

My countryman Rainer Maria Rilke, struck the spiritual accord with me in his masterpiece The Duino Elegies. Yet it was the English translation of his Poems from the Book of Hours [Das Stundenbuch] by Babette Deutsch next to the German originals when I realised that even Rilke cannot stir my love for that harshly strung language that German is (I wield a survival mode level of Deutsch).

It is the opposite with Shakespeare. Even the most profane translations into Czech did not do what his mother tongue does in his Sonnets.

Who brought me closer to the rainbow of human suffering alleviated by nature’s vibrations is Mary Oliver. In her collection A Thousand Mornings, her poem Hum, Hum connects the hard collective effort of bees and nature in its wholeness, good and bad, ever changing with one’s work on accepting the past’s wounds, facing them, not letting them to stop you through fear and denial from pursuing life.

best contemporary poetry

Books that inspired action, comforting reassurance

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf has paved the literary path for many female authors of the 20th century. Published posthumously by her husband, the co-founder of Hogarth Press in London, her essay on women’s emancipation and the repression of creative expression of the other half of humanity over millennia enriched the literary world in understanding. Part a memoir but mainly an illuminating feminist crescendo of I want to be heart as well, and I can do it skilfully!

Virginia Woolf A Room on My Own

Circe by Madeline Miller empowered me as an intellectual woman. The author took Ancient Greek classics and retold them from women’s perspective. Miller thus heralds our equalising century by flipping the past fictive accounts through the neglected gender’s perspective in focusing on female characters. Currently, there are more books in her growing stable and also by other authors, including male who switched the masculine focus to a feminine point of view.

female reader of woman writer French poetry

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a memoir by Gertrude Stein, the Paris-based American confidante of the greatest artists of the first half of the 20th century. The stories are weaved around this close friend of Picasso, Matisse, Braques, Apollinaire, Derain and other geniuses congregating at her Rue de Fleurs house. Stein not only inspired some iconic portraits, but also wrote portraits herself.

From the Nobel Prize awarded authors I was caught by Jon Fosse. A Shining is a tiny, but potent story of an archetypal journey of the author through life’s most challenging moment. Here, Jungian psychology, mythology, and universal struggle with life echo in a brilliant simple telling pregnant with metaphoric magic. Like a contemporary Le Petit Prince by Exupéry for grown-ups, but only an initiated reader can comprehend its abundant nuances.

Jon Fosse A Shining

Learning and Natural Sciences

From science-leaning publications Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses shifted poetically my attention to the instinctual feelings through which I engage with the outside world.

I am sumptuously enjoying an ornamental rendering of the story of human perception and connection with the natural world in The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. His take employs more ethnographical focus.

These urgent calls for humanity to open our senses to the magic there is between us and the crying nature of our era, strike the heart and open the mind to bliss in perception.

books on nature

The Italian theorist of the loop quantum gravity Carlo Rovelli taught me about the subject I reviled the most in school though his brilliant Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Without abstract numerical calculations, he drew from a person’s perception and that connection with experience is what lends his language a more humane lustre.

Eco-minded eye-openers were The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. I gave a Czech version to my dad, who loves trees as it rendered trees alive.

Satish Kumar enlightened my moral self on the importance of caring and the cultivation of the natural environment, personal wellbeing and values in Soil•Soul•Society.

Connecting human health and happiness with nature is the object of Forest Bathing, a popular tradition in the animist Japan that cropped across different continents. I bathed in the forest of Los Angeles Arboretum discovering some profound truths, in the Dolomites as well as around my Czech hometown. Artfully and systematically, Dr. Qing Li seduces under his wings a mindful experience within nature. He chairs the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine.

Greatest public libraries in the world

World Connecting Philosophy

Philosophy has always drawn my attention deep within and out into the universal mind world. The most influential and thought stirring were On Freedom by Epictetus, Cicero’s On the Good Life, The Stranger by Camus and Confessions of a Sinner by St Augustine from the western pool of thought. The last two you may object to as belonging to the philosophy window, yet their detailed and honest exploration of dark ideas were life-changing for millions and this for me personally is philosophy expressed at its greatest.

Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching grounds me through millennia-proved wisdom in this classic poetic foundation of Chinese philosophy. Creativity and Taoism by Chuang-yuan Chang brought art and poetry from east to west on board.

spiritual literature

Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book shook me through the pandemic, yet it was not until the events around me started to follow an invisible string only synchronicity could explain. I did not get mad only thanks to timely rereading this strange work between fantasy, dream, mythology, spirituality, psychology and art. Published posthumously, the decades-spanning oeuvre is accompanied by Jung’s personal paintings of fascinating mandalas pregnant with symbolism. I own also the XL copy where this mind-boggling art received the space it deserved.

Carl Gustav Jung book home office ideas

I need yet to find a contemporary travel writer who will rock me up or knock me down my chair yet. I welcome any suggestions!

I have not specifically reviewed most of the books I read here at La Muse Blue. I tend to include the references while working with some of their concepts within an essay, musing or alongside a poem. Were I regularly posting my favourite books reviews, I would have to write an entire book with commentaries myself. For the gems I mention in this post enriched my knowledge so generously that I glimmer over each line as my eyes mindfully consumes the profound nonmaterial pleasure. My relationship with such books transcends me onto another plane of being. The mentions here are brief, you must discover their value yourself.

Viñátigo winery: quest for distinct climas of volcanic Tenerife

Viñátigo enchants you. Naturally and architecturally. Lush terraces wind upwards around a sunlight-hued chapel to the heavens. Today, like a scarf the frame is caped and wrapped with soft clouds around the cone of what might mythologically become the Olympus of Tenerife. My with bounty stud head turns around, descending around a circular aquifer to the rasta banana plantations scattered through the rocky land to the hanging gorges of Atlantic cliffs. A vista unique to only a few vineyards on the green planet spelled over my well-trod mind. Cacti mingle with verdant bush, cypress, dragon, laurel and pine trees, lichen, wild dandelions and lilies specked with sunrise palette bell flowers — on Tenerife the high desert meets the lower pockets of humidity and a fertile soil. Literally, a heart and mind twisting setting.

Canary island vineyards

Tenerife’s eternal spring is paradise above the hell of a volcano

There are over 400 years old vines on Tenerife. Never plundered by the vicious phylloxera like the European mainland, this island on latitude bordering Morocco and Western Sahara, rather unexpectedly promises climate-resistant wine production. Facing global warming if you want to grow new vines on Tenerife, you need to go high in altitude about 400 m and a bit more where the climate conditions are still freshly assisted by the trade winds.

Tenerife's biodiversity Tenerife vineyards

Together with just a handful of other local wineries, Viñátigo helms the mast in exploring the broad potential of the diverse terroir on the volcanic island. The Spanish keyboard calling name comes from the ancient trees in the Laurisilva native forests on Tenerife. This evergreen laurel thrives in humid conditions with mild climate. Like their northern neighbour Madeira, the Canaries nest in the eternal spring conditions. The naturally diverse landscape on Tenerife can stretch almost a 20 degrees celsius difference in temperatures between the sun basking southern shores and the soaring northern forests.

Tenerife's biodiversity

El Teide, the mighty volcano reaches through the clouds almost to 4.000 m above the Atlantic shores. The giant crowns the jagged landscape of the largest of the Canary Islands. Spain’s loftiest peak, its desert-like, almost extra-terrestrial surrounding landscape was shaped by the eruptions, last over a century ago in 1909. The volcanic setting blessed the challenging island with a fascinating geology (map bellow).

Tenerife, Canary Islands

Save the vines and find the balance: biodiversity and sustainability

The island’s distinct microclimates battered by the Atlantic trade winds from subtropical through Mediterranean to pre-alpine in the altitude stir the agriculturally curious to plant anything from avocados, bananas, papaya, passion fruit to a broad assortment of potatoes, including the ugly little spurts of volcanic rock resembling local black potatoes.

Many old vines in private hands are being replaced by avocado and banana plantings because of economical advantage and EU subsides. These crops require 150 l of water weekly. On an island with no river and a scarce supply of rain over recent years this unsustainable replanting needs to be addressed urgently. In comparison a grapevine needs around 600 l per year! The only sources of water being either desalination, underground or collected rain water in the omnipresent aquifiers on Tenerife, therefore viticulture seems like the most suitable option to keep going.

Viñátigo’s identity is about working only with the local grape varietals regeneratively and defending the typicity of the north face of Tenerife.

Tenerife's biodiversity

Natural and manmade challenges

The humidity up to 85% practically every day complicates viticulture on Tenerife so biodynamic approach exposes the vines vulnerably to the spread of mildew. It is possible to make biodynamic wines as our tasting at Bodega Marzagana in Orotava approved in their reds (the whites were a bit funky), yet it requires very small holdings where precise attention can be maintained.

Viñátigo uses biodynamic compost. Its man in charge of the viticulture confides “I am feeling myself more comfortable working with organic and regenerative methods. First regenerating the soils worked by herbicides and pesticides during a long time. If this works, we can start to understand better our place.” On their own vineyards as well as the vine growers they work with farm organically always on the north face of the island.

best wineries on Tenerife

Vines are grown all over the island, but mainly on the Northern shore the cooling trade winds and altitude support freshness in the wine. Most of the vineyards have been in the hands of families for generations and the wine was made only for at home consumption. The quality has shot up and the growing export numbers confirm global competitiveness of Tenerife wine. Thumbs up to the recent swell of well educated youths from the island, who passionately pour their hearts and savvy minds into the local soil.

Northern Tenerife vineyards tended by Viñátigo

One Family’s Imprints on and Above the Soil

One of them is Jorge Méndez from Viñátigo (the map above shows the winery’s current vineyards). The Spaniard with genealogy spanning half of the Western Hemisphere (the Canaries were an important trading centre between the Americas, Europe and Africa) is the third generation of his vine growing family who now directs the viticulture operations. He makes all the single vineyard wines, plus experiments with some techniques not as typical locally, but as our tasting revealed, oxidative style can delightfully highlight the nuances of the local saline white varietals such as Vijariego Blanco. Not part of the Viñátigo portfolio, he has made Xercos by himself since 2020. I hope he perseveres.

Jorge’s grandfather planted the pergolas perching on the steep, terraced slopes under a chapel’s protection from the titan towering behind, the Teide. The marks of three generations are rather distinct. His father Juan Jesús Méndez had built the winery cut into the hillside at the end of 1980’s, naturally endowing it with gravity winemaking and cooling. Local rocks were used in the construction. Jungle-like, sprawling greenery accompanies you while descending the helix-shaped staircase inside.

Vinatigo winery on Tenerife

Being a small-medium family winery is not easy or as romantic as it may seem. Jorge credits the Méndezes success to “a fluent communication so you can work in the right way with your family. Now we are running together in the different departments.” He also used to travel representing the winery in the export markets, mainly to Canada, Belgium, and even the Maldives. They also export to the UK, ever expanding their reach.

canary wines

Survival of the Fittest Tested Wines by Viñátigo

There are at least 24, but potentially over 80-100 indigenous ungrafted vitis vinifera varietals on the Canary Islands. According to Jorge, Vijariego Blanco has the greatest potential because of the great, elegant and beautiful acidity. Probably the ideal white varietal for climate change on Tenerife. Negramoll in the reds because of the elegance and juiciness of the grape.

Viñátigo now makes about 27 different wines. Jorge intends to narrow it down. The wise know the importance of focus. The other most popular white wines are Listán Blanco (also known as Palomino), aromatic Malvasía and Moscatel, Gual, Albillo Criollo, Marmajuelo and Verdello. To me and my sommelier sister, the most interesting were the mineral salinity showing wines made from the single varietals and vineyards. Such as Maipé de Taganana (from a marvellous rocky Taganana village vineyard in the Anaga Park where we hiked) and Laderas de Teno (mountain region called also the Machu Picchu of Tenerife) single vineyard wines.

Jorge shared an incredible story: “The word Maipé comes from malpaís, which refers to a lifeless piece of land covered by lava after a volcanic eruption. This specific place was covered by a landslide. The vineyard was buried by a landslide of El Monte de las Vueltas around 1920, leaving the once bountiful vineyard worthless. Over the decades, the old vines of Listán Blanco have emerged writhing from beneath the voluminous rocks that buried the vineyard a century before.” Survival of the fittest once again proves how struggle can make the most intriguing wines. At an altitude of 350 meters above sea level, this vineyard is protected from the direct influence of the Atlantic Ocean, but it still receives the north-eastern breeze of the Trade Winds. Blessed.

Our trained taste buds were onto something. The soils in the Anaga and Teno’s Massif are one of the oldest geological soils on the island. The high degree of erosion here adds structure to the wines.

rose and sparkling wine from Tenerife white wine from Tenerife

They also make a few rosés and wonderfully light reds from the juicy Listán Negro, Vijariego Negro, Baboso Negro, Negramoll and Tintilla grapes. These are like the whites also blended. We spotted also sparkling pet-nat bottlings in white and red at Sibaris gourmet wine shop in La Laguna where we bought our first bottle of Viñátigo from the Lomo de la Era vineyard.

While viticulture arrived with the colonising Spaniards and the Portuguese in the 15th century, the most distinct vineyard feature — the braided vine called cordón trenzado — is unique to Tenerife. This traditional training of the stem and branches in the Orotava Valley protects from the whimsy winds and the soil’s absorption of the summer heat.

Old vineyards on Tenerife

In the winery we tasted with Jorge straight from the cement vats, clay eggs and neutral oak barriques used for the maturation of the wines. New seedlings were just being planted on the side of the winery facing the ocean.

winery visit in Tenerife

Jorge Méndez studied Agricultural Engineering, later he obtained a master degree in Viticulture and Enology at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, where he also worked in the Viticulture Departament studying the effects that climate change can have on the wines in Spain across viticulture decisions. A very useful experience facing today’s challenges. He made harvests in Argentina, Burgundy and Chile before returning to his family’s winery.

Tenerife's biodiversity

I further asked him what are the most unique qualities of Tenerife vineyards beyond the diversity of altitude and the generally volcanic soil?

There is a marked smallholding culture on the island where the mix of plots and soils is key in the search for identity. Thus, the different plots where we grow the grapes have different types of volcanic soil depending on the type of eruption and the geological era. From very young soils, that can be 20-25.000 years, that geologically it means nothing, to very old soils, like Anaga and Teno parts, that emerged from the deep ocean and are more than ten million years old.

In terms of climate, the north face of all the Canary archipélago islands enjoy the influence of the trade winds from the north pole being caught by our big volcanoes and hills, creating a cloudy and fresh north face conditions that give us the possibility to have thriving agriculture next to Sahara dessert. At the same time these winds can give to the wines this salty and savoury part.

All these attributes and the resulting wines whetted my palate for more Tenerife wine. Certainly, I will keep my eyes open seeking them more on the wine lists. The Northern side of the island is so wildly beautiful, and I recommend anyone loving hiking, surfing, wine to visit.

Unconditional Friends Make Us Happier

Good relationships make us healthier and happier. Cultivate warm interactions for blossoming happiness, a thriving wellbeing. This is the most recent conclusion of the over eight decades lasting, broadest longitudinal study on happiness by the Harvard University of which even the future US president John Kennedy was part of. The Good Life, a self-help book by the current directors of the research Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, sums up the complex results through cross-study evaluation, but a simple common sense would lead to the same revelation. Holy joy!

A good friend is like your favourite gelato spooned out in bed. They both make you happy in their presence, you want to devour the entire bucket of them, and you miss them once they are gone for too long. As with pets, we bond with these agreeable companions easily. Offering pure presence, yet unlike animals we keep as companions, the real friends fill the gap of unconditional affection. Los amigos, les amis, die Freunde, pravy kamaradi get deep with you without judging!

Friendship boundaries liberated

I am writing from a female perspective as an insight into the female approach to friendship. A friend can be better than just a boyfriend. Women naturally share more, and I love that we are unafraid to be vulnerable with each other. Men are too often cowards in communication. Flexing their muscles, professing control, but what you really need is an emotionally involved being.

wine with friends

I have an abundant dating history, good or bad I do not count, knowledge adds up. There was ever only one man I could talk almost about everything — my husband. Still, some things felt more alright to be shared only between women. Sorry, man! When I discuss something with a woman she gets me, feels me immediately, the empathy is there, no games if we are friends, not just social pals. With men it is a fine line, something needs to be withheld, so the fence between let’s be friends and let’s get intimate is not crossed. What a fine border that is, like grains of sand on a windy path! Plus, what kind of a man would spilt a burger with you?

Still, I like to have male friends for they show me a different perspective, restraint sometimes, encouraging me to express pure joy and go strongly for my dreams. I love the male spirit force. My first friend ever, when I was just able to walk was a boy. We had so much fun riding our tricycles, pretending to drive a car, playing Indian hunters with a bow and arrow (my favourite toys) and his family making videos of the two of us reminds me of those long passed, silly joyous times of little me before I became the big me. I have not changed much to be honest. It feels natural maintaining male friendships despite the challenge of a potential jealousy from my dating partner.

We need the yin and yang and a perspective away from our everyday coupling. I find the most evolved and strong the couples in an open relationship when spending time with others is never making you feel guilty and they do not try to make you feel so.

friendship

Yes, it happened, a friend fell for me. Being wise, knowing how valuable we were to each other as friends when crossing the border by kissing wound change and potentially kill it between us forever was worth being aware in that crucial moment. So beautiful that two decades later we spoke about it and it was not me who remembered, it was him and he was very grateful that I stopped him and explained myself for he can always turn to me like a sister. Once you kiss, you are not mere friends. The most tempting of cravings, to kiss another when you feel the confusing affection is the most fragile event for me. It can crush me and I cannot take it back. If we do not work as a romantic couple, then I cannot take you back as anything. What a shame. I was unexpectedly kissed by a woman in Singapore once as far as I remember and never saw her again. So it goes cross-gender.

friends

Growing and coping together

Your relationship with any friend changes as you both go through various life events, distressing or jolly, affectionate or downing. A new job, marriage, children, moving to another country, continent, a new mind, pandemic, all affect how you talk, and what is friendship about then communicating? Well, sharing meaningful, illuminating moments together, inspiring each other, showing affection and a good hug frequently do magic to your heart and mind! This is love, one of its myriad, beautiful forms, that inclusive feeling of caring about another being, shape, idea, something in the real or even imagined existence.

friendship

Unconditional support is what makes the greatest friendships last. If our egos are hurt or when we just lose it in the momentous tsunami of life, we are vulnerable to making mistakes, and hurting a friend might be one of them. As with romantic partners, friends are to an extent sensitive to our behaviour towards them. Naturally, it depends on your personality, innate character and maturity, as well as on your past wounds, the baggage we emotionally carry along our lifespan unless we work hard on releasing it. We are unique beings, but we share some universal needs like wanting to be loved as we are.

friendship

Seeing there people: being sensitive with each other

One does not have to be an extrovert to have a close friend. Introverts tend to keep a very small group of friends, but their pals are submitted to a much more rigorous trust screening. Such close friendships last longer than the superficial — let’s fill my available time — relationships. Even an outgoing person though needs to establish boundaries, because our time here is limited. And a good friend understands it, a great friend gives you space in solitude when you need it, and ideally you must ask for it.

friendship

Sometimes making a new friend is irrational like falling in love, at least with me. My intuition drives me to keep communicating with some person and I do not know why, perhaps a lesson I shall and need to learn from them, their personality, life situation? I am like a sponge. While we both might have a limited lifespan, the one of the myriad of differences between us is that unlike the brainless sponge I select how I fill my time. What attracts me to this person? We might share something and that is an easy glue, but what about when our opinions on many matters differ?

friendship

I like challenges and perhaps that is why I am inclusive of anyone who seems to have good intentions, values, something I deeply care about myself or they truly struggle at that point in life. Perhaps it is feminine caring trait, but I cannot let someone just drown in the mud, fall down the cliff, for I feel it my humane duty to somehow offer my help or at least virtual support if nothing else is possible in the moment.

Perhaps that not knowing, that mystery of a stranger in a mess pulls me in. A curious being, I might be an outlier, but if we all had opened ourselves a bit, gave a bite of our time to the service of others, we would create a better world though every embracing action we manifest. Of course, there is a limit, and we need to draw the line when the other is too needy. What we shall inspire is something that took me decades to figure out myself – to accept and love ourselves so we can give ourselves in healthy amounts to others. Not to just keep giving or receiving love, it is about extrapolating the feeling, liberating others from their unwelcome burdens. Similar to collaborators at work, exchanging experience and knowledge is part of the deal between friends.

friendship

I cannot limit myself just to my immediate family, sometimes I am being called somewhere else and I cannot explain why I do it. I am simply not a calculative person, manipulative games and strategies put me off, they feel so inauthentic. I like to play, and with friends, well anyone, it is fun to join in a play, to be kids for the time being, but there are rules we all understand. Of course if a family member needs me, I am all in if I know my presence can make a difference. I am a responsible adult and that makes the difference. Life is tough, but the balance of friendships can ease it off.

Not always a smooth ride, challenging freindships

Friendship can thrive between siblings, even with our parents, but that can be the most difficult friendship of all. There is just too much baggage and social conditioning attached to family relationships that complicates our feelings. Expectations tint relationships with the potential of disappointment and certain pressure conditions the bond between two people. But what we all crave is unconditional acknowledgement that we matter, love, and being supported through our hard work. Motivation, purpose, values, sharing.

Opera evening at La Scala Milano

I lovingly offer my poem on friendship here:

Dear Free Friend

We are scattered star dust

On this selfist lone pole

Of love combusted by separation

— pristine loyalty

Is a rare glimpse of divinity

Illuminating from your heart’s heat

Filling my cold hands in January

With genuine care shared

Tenderly, volunteering humanity

In this world of scarcity

— the lack of unconditional love

Affection is our saviour

Our Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the Sun

Like Abraham the father of us all myth-makers

— in oneness

We need more of your shared joy

We want more of your embraces

We crave pleasure, while we kill

Seeking approval through annihilated nil

But we thrive when you believe in our will

Carving through life a patient dedication to skill

— unique yet bonding

Pristine awareness of selfless love

Delightful co-existence between friends

Who respect each other’s private realms

Only then the balance is just right, not skewing

Enough liberty to harbour love given generously

Without feeling oppressive, wrapped away in itself

Some friendships end bitterly though

And it is sad to see you go, cutting the bond

Of potential caring for another human soul

How whole we would all feel!

~Joy

friendship

I found this wonderful awareness building interaction in Evolving Wisdom.

Essential Matters: A Quantum Practice

This is a simple practice to help you focus on your “essential matters” and the “essential matters” of those around you, consciously creating deeper connections in your life.

I’d like you to choose someone—it can be a friend, a colleague, or a stranger—and I challenge you to talk to them face to face, and do not allow the conversation to simply float upon the surface; push it deeper by asking questions that matter and that inspire compelling and passionate responses.

Ask about their favorite places in the world or in their homes and yards. Ask about the best things that ever happened to them. Ask about the objects they possess that mean the most to them, the books and movies they love and that have changed and formed them.

But don’t be satisfied with the simple answers to these questions; ask them why these things matter. Ask them to tell you the stories behind their answers.

And be prepared to answer those same questions yourself, and to tell your stories.

When we share our stories with one another, that is when we truly connect and recognize ourselves and the Universe in one another.

That is when we move beyond separation and opposition and into partnership and power and possibility.

I encourage you to try this practice every chance you get, and with everyone you know and meet.

I think you’ll find the experience to be profoundly elevating and inspiring every time you do it.

Sometimes we do the above without thinking, it is just natural to ask such bonding questions to show people they matter. With friends we need to keep such conversation going, for we all evolve and change. I don’t like to just scratch the surface, it is the depth that fills me with meaning.

Musing on Darkness that is Beautiful

Art celebrates darkness in its own obscure way and perhaps this is why we need it. Great art mirrors humanity better than reason does. The entire colour palette of emotional being is accepted and used. Focusing on the desire to be happy, I wrote much about light. Yet, in this challenging year globally and internally, it’s urgent to unwrap and accept the other side of the spectrum.

The polarity was made by our culture. Therefore, here I would like to cast some light on the darkness we perceive as bad. In the West, we misunderstood because of our mental divisionism by duality. It is not just the cartesian separation of body and mind that is flawed in the view of the tricky to obtain evidence by our limiting scientific methods. It is that persistent antagonism cannot inherently find the middle ground. I learned by living in the east and reading much of the ancient wisdom from China, India, Nepal, Laos, Japan to the peaks of Tibet that acceptance, inner calm and awareness guide us from the gloomiest days out on to the bright sunshine.

” Beautiful days do not come to you. You must walk towards them.” Rumi

Clear vision: adjusting your inner eye

It is the attitude, the point of view we adopt when looking at the world and our selves, that determine the proportion of joy or sadness we feel. The more we give up on the light, we spiral into depression. The more we lie to ourselves by ignoring the pains of reality and naively believe in a just goodness, painting all in golden curls of the great life that is not wholly that, the further we get from truth.

Proportions matter.

Manic-depressive individuals go through the peaks and deepest gorges of emotions.

The super-rich if not vigilant might be robbed of their wealth, betrayed.

The poor giving up, blaming their unhappiness on their destiny, won’t see the joys in their simple life.

The Known Unknown

The law of change helps to comprehend the potential of the dark and so does art. The gloom can push us, it is an appeal. Fight! Take the weapon of your inner strength, resolved in your control. Find the villain within your mind, name it, face it and defy it. Is it anger, fear, guilt, injustice, …?

These emotions are trapping you, they strand your joy, suffocating instead of expanding your inhales with oxygenating freedom. You are larger than this. Pursue the life in love. Trust your instinct, and not necessarily what others tell you is best, because you might not open up yourself wholly to those outside whisperers.

Make music out of it, paint it (as I did bellow), write it (journaling is as good as poetry) or put effort into fixing something we selfishly ravaged like nature, it feels liberating.

You have a choice even in the starkest situations. These can be excruciating choices that will haunt you later, but whatever you see as the greater, more positive option in the moment shall be held in your heart as the right decision if that was taken in good faith. You cannot think and feel for others, it is their responsibility, but children are still innocent, so they always must assume the greatest weight in any decision one takes.

The Calm Beauty of Darkness

Ironically think of a bustling metropolis, where beyond a soundproof apartment and a deep basement do you find most calm? It is at a cemetery. I am drawn to these oases of silence in cities from Geneva, Paris to Tokyo. I am not afraid of death’s presence on these fields of eternal rest. Somewhat it feels relaxing. I just sit on a bench there, shaded by a tree in summer, and I exist, flowing with the moment encountering dark truth. I appreciate my being while sitting next to death, an abundance of changing reality in the form of graveyards. This nothingness embalms my soul with comfort.

Also inside a chapel, church, even a cathedral, all those temples made for the spirit to cosy in and find a safe connection between one’s humble meaninglessness and the infinitely aspiring grandness above us. I must admit though that my favourite, most uplifting church in the world also contains abundant natural light. The Grundtvigs Church in Copenhagen is an astonishing work of architecture and understanding of human needs.

Visiting monasteries in the European countryside grounds me like a deep meditation.

These are places that accepted darkness, can you see that? The shrines to dark necessities of life and death cycles perpetually ticking their divine clock on their own terms. Some healthy people are killed by a car, a plane crash, on a bicycle, while some unhealthy lifestyles still keep you springing well into your 80s.

Life is not fair. All we have is the potency of now. The present is all we have. While we know this, we hang on the tight ropes of our past, even when we thought that we had forgotten long time ago, we do not wipe out the wounds inflicted upon our heart. We cannot choose our mother, father, the place we were born in, but our suffering can empower us. One can live with scars, and I learned to love mine, for each means something. Unlike a tattoo that was chosen, I fell prey to circumstances, but I smile at the memory of how it happened. These accidents were amusing. They did not kill me, they taught me something profound about myself, my personality’s tendencies and the need to slow down and yes, do not carry a sharp knife to slice an apple at school! Today it would be even impossible! My intention was innocent though, no killing of my teachers and the students I did not like for some silly reason, most likely an irrational whim.

Fair Judgement

I’ve no doubts I’m a very good person. My core is light, I relish in helping others in need. Yet, I also must be honest and admit some dark feelings and ideas when the storm crushes in. As it did literally from the Barjac fields this autumn. The olive orchard swayed under the Mistral’s vicious pull, the vines humbly bent to the earth as if hiding from the wrath of the gods out there in the air. I was in a small french country hotel in the midsts of all of this ceaseless ramble. Naturally, I could not sleep.

Fiercely, It screamed for truth loudly all dark night long.

After a couple for hours of frustrated ceiling gazing I felt a sudden impulse. A good sign for a poet. So, I lit up the bedside table lamp, grasped my notebook and penned a poem. It had to be in French with no regards to grammar, just free flow, unhinged.

Mon identité blessée

Ne peux pas s’endormir

Ca tempête d’automne m’embarrassé

La nature vivant me pousse a fléchir

Sur tout que n’est pas vrai

L’enfant chercherait de l’amour caché

Devant ou derrière des mes rêves?

The present is the inner storm only, the dreams are of the past or future, not now.

~Joy

American abstractionism

Self-wounding

Ever so many layers to peel off

Until I can ever get even closer

To my very true core – who is this

Woman in men’s clothes stuck in her past

A thinker so profound that her sleep

Disturbs her stream of creation?

I take a sharp knife to help my self

To cut the peel off — stabbed, I’m bleeding

From the forgotten wound, asking

Why have I stored that pain away

From the light of my days? Why is it hiding

In the dustiest corners beyond

My disturbed mind’s sweeping reach?

Clean up, it’s time, the dark corners of dust

My suffering burst through my flesh into the world

I just can-not go ahead whole without

Looking back again, whether I want or not

I am good, so good a person in fact

That I must admit the rotten part of me.

~ Joy

I am attracted to darkness in music and poetry in particular. Sometimes in nature, even in certain dilapidated architecture that mysteriously lurks at my curious mind. In people it’s the mystery that’s the darkness I am drawn to, not them being mean or vile towards others who don’t deserve to be treated unfairly or painfully.

Here we are in winter 2023, the winter solstice just marked the shortest days in our annual calendar. We might well be at our gloomiest, most nostalgic state of being. The options are to either invite the dark in or to resist its natural pull to cave in to our deep selves. That conflict and indecisiveness causes trouble. Should we not face ourselves during the darker months of winter? Far less distractions outdoors lure us into contemplation, self-discovery. An adventure through fears we must meet, greet and defy.

“The cure for the pain is in the pain.” Rumi

contemporary photography

Summer solstice was the day I got married to a good man who loves me unconditionally more than anyone else. This initially happy distraction blinded me to some of my old truths and what I was genuinely seeking in life. I was not able to appreciate his attachment. Yet, once I followed my intuition, magic happened and I slowly, gruesomely, flourished into a full bloom. It is still exhausting, painful and it aien’t over yet honey, but I am resolved to push, to savour my inner spark, that love within me I can never lose and can only give. Joseph Conrad wrote in his Heart of Darkness: “The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as in the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.” The future depends on that journey through the dark forest. Just go.

Dark Necessities

A poison is the origin of life

And it can kill you all the same

For,

Without one the other couldn’t live

Could not exist, nor feel full

— beauty and pain —

Like wine that eases my intoxicated mind

But kills my brain cells over time.

contemporary African art

I read that Saturn’s icy moon

Enceladus evaporates hydrogen cyanide

From under its frozen surface

So, maybe one day the snake bite

Becomes my soul and flesh

An animated DNA transforms death to life

Ice to water like our great friend

— the Sun — the grand destroyer

Protecting us from cosmic radiation

In its spare time.

dark necessities wildlife photography

I trust the Sun — space is existence

And it must be freed for the new

To come away from the filling being

This persistent antagonism

Creates magic in the universe

And within me as I struggle

I tear my skin into shredded atoms

So joy can spur from my bones

Renewed through self-destruction.

I invite the beast, devour me as you please

I won’t resist your ravenous pull, eat my lips

Blackness fills my veins, my face erupts

Into boiling lava rocks splurging, rushing

Over the landscape of my skin

The Earth’s core shaken through

Every part of me, every part of you — We become one in the savage space

The beast and me, sublimated into the aether.

Most reactions simmer below the surface

Repressed feelings morph into pain

My body an ocean of organic matter

Always available to become

Something else, some body else,

A karmic evolution through transformation

Shaped by emotions and the soul

~ Joy

I am a huge fan of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I can sense their presence in my unique poetic ears. The French poets whisper their desires, unafraid of darkness, yet I am freed from verse and gender in my era. By inserting structure only where it feels right, it is the vast, incalculable depth of meaning that matters to me, beyond rhythm and measure, accompanied by silence. Here, I intended to transform data into something more meaningful than physical possibility in some far-thrust time. The necessity of the life-death cycles on this Earth centre this poem in a positive message yielded from its gloomy opposite.

contemporary art Miami

This dark poem was inspired by music, low visibility winter mornings and this NYT science article:

“A poison is the starting point for most theories on the origin of life on Earth and it seems that Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus hydrogen cyanide – vapor (gas) can be combined in different ways to produce amino acids, which are precursors for proteins as well as nuclear bases and sugars which are needed to make RNA and DNA. Enceladus has a subsurface ocean that makes it among the most promising places to look for life elsewhere in the solar system.”

Even wine could potentially find life there since scientists found “the presence of an alcohol like methanol, organic molecules like acetylene, propene and ethane that could power chemical reactions to provide energy for microorganisms living in the Enceladus ocean.

Initial analysis identified not only water but also carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The eruptions pointed to hydrothermal reactions below the surface, where hot rocks meet liquid water.

Enceladus is an intriguing place but not the only place. Other moons like Europa, which orbits Jupiter, also have under-ice oceans. All ocean worlds are extremely exciting,” Dr. Craft said. “They all have a little bit of differences from one another, but they have a lot of similarities.”

Fascinating. Now, Mr Musk, can you X-fly me there? In a couple of millions of years perhaps? But first someone needs to craft the elixir of youth, plus an immortal suit to power me through the ages.

Divine Aspirations

I love sunshine. Who does not? Sun gives us joy, plus we have had divine aspirations under its powerful rule. Beyond mere observation, just feel it, modern science proved that the less natural light (sun) we get, the lower our mood sinks. The seasonal mood disorder troubles the sensitive minds of Nordic natives, hence their compensatory high consumption of alcohol particularly during the winter months, fancily marketed as hygge. Here, in Central Europe as well as in Northern America we are not immune to the lack of daylight and so therapeutic lamps and Vitamin D drops come to aid our low altitude sinking down further.

divine aspirations

I am beyond needy for sunlight, I thrive on it, I seek it. I am more addicted on its sublime touch on my skin in late spring and early autumn, nakedly caressing my body than anything else on our wonderful lively planet. Nature cannot subsist without the sun’s proportionate giving, and I am nature, you are Her too. I have divine aspirations. These offer me not just hope, they fill me with joy. A book I read recently The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram cannot more eloquently express my own intuitive experience of engaging with the natural world.

books on nature

Him and her, the Sun and Nature, the most wonderful couple on and beyond the Earth. I envy their liberal yet reciprocal love. Either gives so much pleasure to us.

Our ancestors appreciated those mundane, ever available gifts, with more gratitude than our tech-savvy society does. Urban distractions and the smog hinder the sun, other stars and nature. The artificial parks are not enough, the wilderness offers more. Just read Walden by Henry David Thoreau and other sublime hymns to wilderness to feel that magic pull. I am an animal and you are too, just slightly different species from the wolves. Yet we share so much with them. It is just our ego that alienates us from the wild as something primitive.

divine aspirations

But how comes that our “developed” society is less happy than people in those natural lands like Bhutan, as those further from the wild tend to suffer more. It is not just about longevity, quantity, but about the quality of joy, not just life overabundant materially. For all we need is safety, shelter, clean water and food to subsist and genuine relationships. Doesn’t power, influence, money hinder exactly that truth, that genuine expression of camaraderie, no class boundaries, no racial profiling, just pure connection. Alright, enough wine for now.

Atlantic sunrise

Back to rationality. Perhaps only those wary of its dangerous rays and age creasing marks on the skin shy away from his reach. Sun is masculine for some reason, perhaps because the moon, luna was symbolically viewed as feminine, not the source of light and heat, a mere reflection in the paternalist society’s parade of order, we created gender even of that which is genderless.

Enough politics and feminism, below is my sun-charged poem on Divine Aspirations.

A glaring faraway fire

A ball thrust high and falling

Below the horizon at winter’s five

Running further on the leash of summer

Ruled by a divine routine of life’s calling

The hauty clock guarding time

Order for the mind’s wild vast fields

The artists roam so free, but in strife

Like van Gogh’s Arlesien life

Lucky, never lonely, always

In the company of other stars

So one feels a ravenous desire

Burning the wanting soul alive

Ripped apart flesh into hopeless ash

The heart is a thorn, you fool

Imprisoned by your own gloom

But I swoon to climb high

reaching beyond the clouds

through pains, sorrows, feeling nigh

Flapping my wounded wings

Towards the sun with the birds

~Joy

There are countless songs on burning (Ludovico Einaudi In a Time Lapse, in Georgia Cecile’s sensuous voice or Elvis, the greatest of greats in music) for some reason or no reason, we associate passion, desire, love’s initial fire even with that of incineration of a firm substance into the finite ashes. The speeding up of decay, closer to death or nothingness. As dark this may seem, it is beautiful, which a dimmed light is more than a bright sharp day, isn’t it visually? Like a poem by Beaudelaire, the angst of Rimbaud’s unrequited love, there is beauty in this necessity of life and death cycles going on and on.

Books: the mirror of your mind and soul before and now

What are you reading now and what books attracted you, literally, lured your heart like the mythic sirens over the past months? Analysing the books we have read recently, unless they were listed for for research or work, tells us wonders about our current mental state. From the emotions we suffocate inside instead of letting them out the fire pit of the heart, the dilemmas faced and now one must reconcile with and the ‘inappropriate’ thoughts polluting the inner judgemental moralist ego, the ambitions motivating the social climber — in short that desired, yet unacceptable part of you that cannot be spelled out. Is it fear or anxiety about the current state of the world affairs, is it safety of your loved ones, is it your own legacy, anything meaningful? Our subconscious and unconscious choices puzzle psychoanalysts.

what you read

What the books you read tell about you

Generally, if you are a keen reader not just for entertainment but out of following your sheer curiosity, the key to you may dwell in your library. Recent research by psychologists concluded that “your story choice tells a story about you“, wrote Wendy L. Patrick, JD, Ph.D. in Psychology Today.

Just scan the titles and connect with what they call out from your inner self. You might be surprised that the books you read point like a therapist to your real desires, unfulfilled dreams, life philosophy and overall connection with the intellect, the spirit and the world. I asked a few friends what book/s have changed their life and got quite fascinating, rapid replies. My question was inspired by the board pictured bellow at a Los Angeles book festival.

best books

Books you read by choice are not what you had to read

The books you read were either chosen by you, for you or forced upon you. Which ones do you finish the fastest? What ideas do you memorise for longer? It get even more complicated, what I read for pleasure differs from what I gulp out of sheer intellectual curiosity. Free will is still involved anyway in the choice making and the pursuit of the text until its end.

When I was given Goethe in high school, I did not get why the teacher was so obsessed with the The Sorrows of Young Werther. We were fed the theoretical analysis, but life’s experiences have not yet provide enough in order to grasp the meaning fully. I did not see the in-between the lines nuances. It only came to me in my thirties. Paradoxically, Goethe’s title did not equip in itself the youth with the hindsight necessary for lowering one’s emotional clouding of the breadth of the situation Young Werther lived through. Read a book too young and you might not fully comprehend the weight of the story. I missed the core message which even the mature author only later, more distanced from the semi-autobiographical story was himself able to recognise: “It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.”

For the greatest books are not just about the story, that is a cover up for something deeper, meaningful and important to transmit through the written record. Enriching for the literary world, Goethe did not kill himself because of unrequited love, but overcame his suffering through personal development while writing poems, plays and novels. Struggle with an unrequited love was a popular theme int he Italian opera, and while the book was banned in the birth country of the opera as it was in Denmark and some parts of today’s Germany, it inspired other authors like Mary Shelley and Thomas Mann.

I inclined to very different books in my teens, twenties, thirties, let’s see where I veer in my 40s. With life’s progression towards its certain end at some point, prematurely or timely, and with more languages acquired, I am able to broaden the scope of literature passing through my brain.

I have ripened enough to feel the breadth of Shakespeare, to engage rapturously with Rimbaud, to get Karel Capek beyond his humour into the serious implications for the future – well a century later now, the current world, understand the passion of Neruda (the Chilean Pablo, while the Czech Jan was even more nationalistic) and take Proust more deeply than his memory game with a madeleine, the French pastry I love the most just hot out of the oven. Being able to read Milan Kundera‘s original Czech titles and his later originals in French encouraged my acquired language self to become more confident in my own literary output. So did Nabokov, the Russia-born in English writing maestro.

traditional pastry Greatest Czech authors

How we choose what to read

I read a lot, not digitally as much for I relish in writing in the margins, colourfully highlighting what grips me, bookmarking physically the pages that I want to return to. It just does not work on the Kindle or iPad. I tried, but the only book I finished on these electronic devices was, not surprisingly Nabokov’s Lolita, which was rather practical when reading in public spaces. Something does not connect with my brain as tactilely as a printed book does.

It is not enough to buy a book, to put that gift on the shelf, just to touch the bound typed paper, to download the e-book into you virtual library. All this hasty acquiring of content just does not sit within you. Just the catchy title might not tell what the story really is about, how good is the writing, how it flows, and for that one musts use the experience and one’s own brain, leaf through in a bookstore. An intention is not action. Books fill us up only when we pour the content mindfully in.

A book lent from a public library still can have a greater impact on your life than owned copies piled in your closet. Impact and reading is about the process, and maybe that inner necessity to underline, to highlight what touches you, what you want to memorise, sometimes scribed over in personal notebooks.

Therefore, audio books are not for me. I listen to them occasionally, while taking a bath and just want to soak without scribbling, while driving or commuting, but still, during these necessary activities I prefer to unwind with music. To cancel the noise of the urban life, rather than filling my mind with more chatter.

poetic life

Further, you are more limited while traveling than when you are studying at the education centre’s library or clinging to your home library. While e-books solved the length, weight and extra space in your luggage issue, they are only good if you get as much from the reading as from a printed edition.

Ponder, why you picked this book for this journey or the destination you are carrying it along? The reason why you travel somewhere might be that book or whatever you are longing to escape. An emotion, the past, some life situation you are not ready or do not want to face?

What book changed your life?

When I discover something myself coded into the story, it feels like a grand discovery, firing my passion and connecting me more with my true self. Then, to those book lovers like myself I know I nudge: “you must read this book, so ahead of its time, brilliant, life-changing!” Such a line hints on the greatest review that a broad reader can share.

reading

What I read recently were a curious blend of essays, classics, women’s memoirs, ancient and folk myths, contemporary neuroscience, eastern and western philosophy, poetry, psychological and spiritually leaning fiction and psycho-somatic nonfiction. Some I enjoyed, with others struggled through. The later were either poorly written, did not connect with me or I had to read them for work. Not all were connected with real life experiences. Imagination still casts spells over us, mystery, sci-fi, fairy tales keep us wondering and wandering away from real life. While not my genres of choice, I savour most the authors’s tales where relatable life lines along with the imaginary through metaphorical renderings.

Reading is not just escapism, entering the fictive story, but for me it musts be connected with the reality even if just through a feathery touch, with the productive not just seductive desires, conscious emotions and experiences of not only of the author, but also of the reader.

reading room Study room ideas

Books: the mirror of your mind and soul

The books you read mirror your state of mind and the stage of personal development you are currently in. They inspire action or at least a whiff of awareness into our now more connected life.

Peak at your bedside table or your kindle library, scan the titles and reflect upon the content of these books. Take a free day or a Sunday afternoon to graze on these hand-picked snippets of yourself. More than a curated cv, these stacks of printed papers may whisper important insights about what you seek in life. Your mind is savvy, subconsciously the brain signalled you what book to choose.

On the tactile side of reality we live through our actions, and not just in our imagination. We learn about ourselves the most profound lessons only when aware of our actions and mindful about our reactions.

Adventurers tend to be impatient, and I am too sometimes. Practicing calligraphy as much as meditation, yin yoga, ikebana, pottery or other crafts requiring your full attention, pulls the muscles of my patience into their stronger core, and so does reading.

open reader Men without Women

Global bookshelves

Traveling also inspires my bookish selections. It intrigues me to read a book about the location I am visiting. Such as Men Without Women by Murakami awakened my sensibility about Tokyo’s quiet residential neighbourhoods and the mystery of yakuza’s tentacles in the polished Japanese life. On a similar note is Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun.

Traveling to Asia for most of the past two decades, eastern ancient knowledge has appealed to me since my teenage curiosity spat me around the world dozen times.

If you are curious to discover more, check my next post in which I reveal a bit of myself through the books that enriched me, either changed my perception, view of life, or challenged my preconceived ideas.

As much as the library at your home, your personal journal is the gateway to your true, perhaps outwardly masked self. Rereading your thoughts illuminates the deep scars in the soul, highlights your strengths and weaknesses to learn from.

My final question is: are we what we read or more how we read?

The books you read are just clues and you only have the answers. Nobody else can analyse that for you.

Attraction to the Unknown through the pen of Haruki Murakami

Murakami employing his signature gloominess though the characters’ nostalgia enters yet another echelon of the metaphorical realm in South of the Border, West of the Sun. “There is no middle ground. Probably it is a word you may find south of the border. But never, ever, west of the sun.” This urgency he inserts here alludes to two polar possibilities. Either you live in joy or in the no man’s land of death. Hence there is not in-between. The choice is happiness or decay. Nothingness though carves holes like a worm though the abandoned characters heart — “the living desert”.

Photo by Paulo Cupido contemporary photography

Through the critical lens of identity of Murakami

Each of us can understand the Japanese author’s allusions individually depending on the breadth of our reading, experience, level of spirituality and awareness. For the last arches over the writing perception of the main character — a male owner of a jazz club in this auto-fictional smudge of Murakami he so often relishes in. Either he writes about music or running, but always with a perceptive narrative flow that murks in mystery. I love Haruki Murakami’s depth of characters. Still, a common thread connects many of his previous leading figures, but that you shall discover after further reading. I recommend his Hemingway’s namesake themed collection of short stories Men Without Women.

You long for more revelations in the slow-paced unwrapping of the triangle of characters. Love triangle in some way, but his estrangement from his wife is not just about finding a new lover, it is about turning back time, coming back to his childhood. It is about midlife crossing, the reckoning with one’s past and certain hopelessness when facing ageing and mortality in spite of that. An unhappy man comes at first better off in reality through commitment to a woman that loves him wholesomely. His wife’s family props his business that he makes into a magazine feature success.

After years, expanding further into two locations though keeps Hajime so busy with his dream that he estranges himself from his wife. “Just as with people, with bars there is time to leave them alone and a time for change. Being stuck in the same environment, you grow dull and lethargic. Your energy level takes a nosedive. Even castles in the air can do with a fresh coat of paint.” Ouch! Murakami strikes deep into the dark side of human relationships and how hard it is to stick to a continuous long-term commitment when the juices just stopped flowing years ago. “I’m confused”, Hajime confides in his wife who observed his detachment.

While who they are remains consistent, they are the same people just with a different shadow, a heavy emotional baggage lurking in their presence. But none is freed from its creeping chains.

Japanese literature of Murakami

Throughout, music expresses life’s emotions, conundrums and struggles via lyrical inserts smoothly gliding into the Tokyo jazz bar’s setting. Nat Cole sings: Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue. It isn’t very hard to do… Not just the songs entail symbolic meanings in South of the Border, West of the Sun, so do the characters’ names. I also relished learning more about classical music in particular in Murakami’s conversations with the Japanese maestro, the conductor Meiji Ozawa in Absolutely on Music.

Attraction to the Unknown

The maturity of hindsight allows for more philosophical viewpoint sharing between Shimamoto, the main protagonist’s (in the first person narrative) childhood friend grown into a beautiful, yet with secrets veiled woman in her ripe years. Still, she does not seem to relish her allure. Something bothers her so much that she suddenly disappears after a number of encounters at his bar. “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I am gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything”. How beautiful is human irrationality! Murakami keeps his confusion going. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just a shadow. The real you may be somewhere else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago.” Loss pierces the narrative, yet the greatest loss of all comes from somewhere the reader might not suspect.

Attraction to the Unknown contemporary photography

In South of the Border, West of the Sun, philosophical questions pop from the mouth of Shimamoto, but also Hajime’s own mind entertains unanswerable curiosity and desire to know, what he might never, ever know. The title is taken from a song, the favourite lyrics of the two teenage souls sharing an intimate friendship. Childhood’s innocent expectations about life’s magnificence pour from Shimamoto’s heart: “I’d always thought something great, something beautiful, big and soft was south of the border.” The illusions of her youth dispelled, she had broken into nothing deep within, a hollow tree. She is gorgeous physically, classy and well dressed, but her inner world has burned down into ashes, literally. It seems that either of the three characters struggles between attachment and detachment without finding a permanent solution.

Shadows creep along Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun. This is not a lift me up story, but a realistic depiction of life’s unhinged turns and twists through broken shards. The prevailing uncertainty sprouts into a mysterious garden, so one might assume that Shimamoto does not even exist. It is a strange reality, but not unlike Kafka’s whom the author admires.

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