blog moving day

i switched blogs!

the new blog is up already, here the link:

virtual notes

bakery surprise

there is a new shop in town. and of all possible locations, it found its place in the very street i walk down every morning when i go to the bakery.

so from today on, my morning bakery walk will be flavoured with pastel colours, and will lead past south france houses and across an autumn river.

yummy.

this cosmic touch

solstice today, tonight
the sun touching the northern brink
the seasons switching
like ample lights, like flowers
green then pink

the sun, the earth
the angle that makes the difference
a cosmic touch of an asteroid
some millions of years ago

shaking up life, spilling it
into myriads of fragile, frantic
shapes - form
following function turning

into this chloropyhl green
sun yellow stawberry pink
earthly combination of genes
named cosmea

planted: today.

~

feathers and notes

it looks like the moon. it is the sun, on a misty june morning. rising, like a song. rising, like the realization that one day, we won't be there to see it.

i never lost anyone close this way, until now, she said.

i thought of you when i read the news this morning, i answered.

later i listened to him play, listened to when god created the coffeebreak. esbjörn svensson. strange to get to know someone so playful that way, through leaving. strange to listen to those tunes, induced by his fingers, now.

~

and strange to receive this unrelated and fitting mail just today.

But there was a strange moment, too. I was startled by something hitting the kitchen window so hard it almost broke the glass, and when I looked there was something white on it. I went outside expecting to see something that someone had thrown at the window, but lying under it was a large dead dove. Some of its feathers were stuck to the window. And this dove has young, but fortunately they are nearly grown and probably will be ok. It was a shock, though, and a reminder as I buried her. We must do what is meaningful with our lives, before we follow the dove.

feathers and notes.

and the meaning of life. on monday. without coffee break.

Marazzi

until some months ago, i didn't even know about the world of tiles. well, i knew tiles, simply as they are part of every bathroom and kitchen. but i never gave them much thought.

then came the idea to renovate the bathroom here. which developed first hazy shapes in January, with reflections on oldnew, followed by a tile of thought in February, when i visited some bathroom studios and tile galleries.

those first visits, they left me clueless, with the myriad of options on sale: aubergine wash basins and glass tiles. square bathtubs and granite plates.

then i saw them. those natural stones. they don’t even have a proper name, just a code: “MJ9W". but they are amazing. they are produced in Italy, and were delivered like fashion designer dresses, in huge white boxes, with silk paper between mosaic layers, together with their companeros, white tiles for the wall, and dune-structured tiles for the floor.

yesterday, i prepared the natural stones for the laying. it felt like opening a box of candy. those stones, they hold so many facets, so many variations to lay them: in strings of flexible height. or in a column.

that's what we tried today, the tile workers and i. it felt good, to join the little work crew for some time. to be part of the cutting and laying, of this process that turns an idea from a sketch on paper to walls in stone and mortar.

"this will look like a designer bathroom when it's finished," i said to the tile layer, still all excited. he smiled, and corrected me. "this is a designer bathroom," he stated. which made me think that seen like this, even the tile factory fits in, with their name that sounds like a designer label. Marazzi.

iris

"i have seen them in italy," she said. "in all colours. they grow there, wild."

"they will open soon now. and then be gone in two weeks," i explained, once again wishing they would stay longer.

"that's how they are."

it's one of the things that keeps irriating me: the way they take a whole month to develop those exquisite petals, how they open all of them at once, in a spectacle of sheer abundance - and how they then turn to plain green again for the rest of the year. all this effort, for such a short while.

i shook my head. "like fireworks - sparkling in colours, then gone."

"just like us, when it comes to it," she concluded, and smiled.

sichuan, here

life is so fragile, and the ground underneath our feet, as solid as it might feel, is holding its own tensions, carrying our world while moving with the powers to destroy it.

what a painful week. the pictures of Sichuan, when i first saw them, i could hardly connect them to reality. something terrible had happened on the other side of the world, in a region i couldn't even place. the impact of the news reached me later, deep in the night, in the safety of my bed, in a dream.

i am inside a house, in a living room, one that feels like a mix of my parent's home, and the home i live in now. there are wooden floors, a woven carpet, and a table with flowers on it, surrounded by chairs. all is peaceful – and then everything starts to shake. i am terrified, frozen in shock.
when the shaking ends, i don’t know what to do – and finally make myself step forwards, towards the window. outside is a piece of green land, and on it, a collapsed hut. the wall and roof lay scattered on the ground. has someone been inside? i can't tell.

that’s when i woke, still shaking and disoriented, thinking there was a quake here, while i slept. i got up and then finally realized that it wasn't even 5. so i went to bed again, and could sleep a bit, but the dream remained with me, under my skin, all day.

i tried to avoid getting back to the terrible pictures of people buried under buildings, schools collapsing. and then Burma, and the taifun. and the US, with all those tornados. what a time of dreadful disasters.

that was Tuesday. and then yesterday, there was this oddity that the electricity was turned off for 3 hours, for some major maintenance in this part of the city. they sent a letter last week, announcing it, and it went off and then on again 3 hours later, just like predicted. still it felt strange – it made me realize how many things are connected to electricity: the lights, the computer, the tv, the oven, the water heater, the washing machine.. so many elements of the day.

later, when the electricity was back, i browsed literary blogs, and came across a link to a blog from china. it’s from the magazine Time, with several posters, some from Sechuan region. here the link: time-blog.com/china

one of the posts – "In the disaster zone"- really touched me. i still try to avoid reading much about the quake, after i had this terrible dream Monday night, but this blog has another, more personal approach.

typing this out now, and looking at the dream again, makes me think that what i am really trying to avoid is not the news and the pictures, but the deeper truth they carry: that our life can collapse in a moment. just like that.