Mona Ki Ngi Xica

"Brown babies"

An incredible documentary about the babies born in Germany after WWII from a German mother and an Afro-american soldier:

 

 

O sodade na coração

Kingfisher

Misunderstandings

The other day I went to this cinema I love which has two rooms, one on the groundfloor and one upstairs. There were only two people in the hall, a mother and her child. Then the guy who checks the tickets showed up and with the most serious face asked me: "Is it for The Ugly Duckling?". The lady waiting in the hall burst into laughter. I answered no, I was actually there to see "Fill the void" (a film about the Jewish ultra-orthodox community by Rama Burshtein, herself a member of that community). "Upstairs", he said. As I took the stairs I heard him speaking to the lady: "I saw the child and thought you three were together...", as if excusing himself.

 

I love the Ugly Duckling. Maybe next week.

Erlkönig interpreted by Jessye Norman

Korea, one year later

Almost one year after I visited South Korea, tension is high in the Peninsula... I had a look at the pictures I took during my visit and found this one taken in the Haeinsa Temple.

 

 

Food for love

They say, in several languages I know, that love goes through the stomach. I happen to live with someone who could be a chef and cooks five-star meals on a daily basis.

 

An old friend to whom I was describing on the phone, this Saturday morning, the luxury breakfast awaiting me on the table, observed that from an early age I have been well fed, first in my family environment and now by my partner. Gourmet meals have always been something normal in my life ever since I was a child.

 

I looked at the fresh home-made bread on the table. Bread, the most symbolic of all meals in the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, which nourishes body and soul.

 

The smell of fried king scallops reached my nostrils. I said goodbye to my friend and indulged once more in a delicatessen experience.

 

Bread (food). Love. What else do we need to live well?

What Iranians wish

Sleep and noise in Geneva

Some people would like Geneva to be like a cemetery. A group of citizens came up with a creative initiative to try to keep the city alive: www.notrebruit.ch

 

©www.notrebruit.ch

 

 

 

Pierre Rabhi

La modernité est fondée sur une rupture avec la nature et le désir, c’est-à-dire l’intuition, la sensibilité, la sensualité (…). Aves les grandes promesses technologiques, nous avons manqué de générosité, nous sommes allées contre les lois de la nature. L’intelligence manque : elle ne se mesure pas au nombre de diplômes, mais à la lucidité que seule l’intelligence de la vie possède pour éclairer notre regard.

Interview, Am, 12/2009

On ageing

An enlightening article by Tim Kreider on the issue of ageing: You Are Going to Die

Two dreams come true in a few days

I started 2013 by fulfilling two dreams in the Western Cape, South Africa.

The first was seeing great white sharks from up close. That happened on the 2nd Jan thanks to a 3 hour boat trip and cage diving with Marine Dynamics from Gansbaai.

A couple of days later we were driving near the ocean when I misread the map and we took the wrong road. When I realised this we were too lazy to drive back to Mossel Bay, so we just kept going and decided to do Route 62 instead. We ended up by visiting an animal park - usually I never visit this sort of places, I like to see animals in their natural environment, not in zoos/parks. But for some reason for this one I decided to make an exception.

Then, unexpectedly, a second dream came true: I was able to cuddle two tiger cubs.

As if this weren't enough, there was the incredible beauty of Capetown,...

... its wildlife,...

Dassies

Proteas

... and its incredibly sad history.



District Six Museum

Mandela's cell, Robben Island Prison

 

Nicolas Bouvier

Le voyage - intérieur ou extérieur - n'a pas de sens s'il n'est pas justement un chambardement constant des attitudes que l'on avait au départ. Ou un ajustement. On ne voyage pas pour confirmer un système, mais pour en trouver un meilleur, auquel on fera bien d'ailleurs de ne pas adhérer trop longtemps. Ce qui importe c'est le passage.

Nicolas Bouvier, Le vide et le plein

On trying

"Day 51

The only real failure is the failure to try. And the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment. As we always must. We came here and we tried. All of us in our own different ways. Can we be blamed for feeling that we're too old to change? Too scared of disappointment to start it all again? We get up in the morning, we do our best. Nothing else matters.

From the diary of a character of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Today on BBC...

... there was an article about the horrors of wildlife trafficking.

There was this image...............................................



"A tiger cub rescued from smugglers in Thailand en route to China."



Martha Graham

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. (...) You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. (...) [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Epilogue

“A long curved wash of ripple

Left there its fingerprint

One long-before-time lost day.

I turn a dead sea’s leaves

And touch that day and look.”

Judith Wright

My time in Australia is coming to an end. In a couple of hours I shall be starting my 33 hour trip back home. For the moment everything is still fresh in my memory, but what will stay of this trip as time goes by and memories blur? Maybe I will remember when I was walking jet lagged in the Botanic Gardens in Sydney and saw the Opera House for the first time; or my first encounter with a wombat in Tasmania; the koalas in Cape Otway; the Central Market in Adelaide; the train to Alice Springs - the way Aboriginal children kept smiling for the long journey while spoilt white children would make scenes; the first time I saw Uluru on the horizon, the omnipresent ochre colour and the outback roads; the heat in Darwin, the rock paintings in Ubirr and the minutes I had Gunlom for myself; the bays of the West coast; brushing my teeth under a waterfall in Karijini, and the way everything became hot there - the water, the steering wheel, everything; the evening ceremony at the monastery in New Norcia; the many sunsets. Or maybe I will remember many apparently insignificant moments – sitting on a couch in Federation Square, crossing the road in Canberra or finding refuge from the heat in Alice Springs’ shops.

And then there are the people I met on the way: Jiayin, whom I met in Tasmania and later on the train to Alice Springs; the Israeli couple of farmers in Coles Bay who couldn't figure out how googlemaps worked on their iPad and asked me, of all persons, to help them out; Nathalya, Dave and Stephen, who not knowing me from anywhere opened me the door of their houses; Heather and Yvette in Victor Harbor, so concerned that I would be stranded on Kangaroo Island; Fei Hung and the expression on his face when we met again in Monkey Mia; Kate, in New Norcia, who found me a room to spend the night; the girl from the petrol station in Kalbarri who re-opened the station for me when I told her I had almost run out of fuel; that guy in Meekatharra who laughed and said "An espresso?? Forget it mate, you are in the bush!"

The bush. This word will never sound the same. Big wide hot spaces full of life, where the notion of time is different, penetrated by a powerful light and a deep silence interrupted only by the sounds of nature, undisturbed by man or technology or anything else, obeying ancient rhythms known only to the wise. When I visited the Australian Museum in Canberra I saw pictures of the scars left by the wounds that the Aborigines open on themselves as they progress in knowledge and understanding of the universe. Later, when I was in Uluru and Kata Tjuta, I noticed how the surface of the mountains seemed to be cut by shapes which strangely looked like the Aboriginal scars: it’s a sort of elliptic shape, a bit like the leaf of a tree, or an eye. I interpreted – but this is only my interpretation, I do not by any means pretend to be an expert in Aboriginal culture – that the Aborigines opened those wounds because they wanted their sacred landscapes marked on them, part of them. I come from a different culture/background, I am a whitefella, and yet I understand that need so well! I do not want a collection of exotic moments. I want what I lived marked on me, I want it to participate and mingle with everything that I will live next, to keep living in me, to stay present like a scar.

 

 

These are my last hours in Australia, and this is what I wish.

Rottnest Island and the quokkas

As I feared, Rottnest Island was full of teenagers who finished school and had boiling hormones. But they seemed to stay in the settlement near the jetty, as soon as I rented a bike and rode to other parts of the island it was very quiet. It’s a small island, only 11x4km and it’s not spectacular, or maybe I have just seen too many spectacular places and have become blasé. However, it’s a very pleasant place with some beautiful beaches (I did some snorkeling again), clear waters AND: an animal I hadn’t seen before – Australia surprises me to the very last moment. Meet the quokka:

The quokka is a marsupial; it belongs to the family of the kangaroo. Since the island is so small and receives so many visitors, they are used to people are not afraid of getting near you, you can even touch them, they are very curious.

One of the bays of Rottnest Island

The island is only 19km away from Perth, but it felt as if it were very far… The Western tip is amazing. On my second day I got an SMS from the ferry company saying that because of the bad weather the schedule had changed. I ended up returning to Perth a couple of hours earlier than expected. The trip was horrible, they distributed paper bags to everyone "just in case" and the service stopped in Fremantle but they put me in a shuttle that dropped me at my hostel. I had to wait one hour or so for the nausea to go away.