I love routine because it makes me feel safe. Life should be in order, so that I can predict what is going to happen at any time. Yet, an admonitory voice inside warned me: “Stop presuming you know what life should be like, just not to be in fear.” Fear of the unknown, I guessed.…
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Prompted by this excellent post by Andrew (thank you!), I read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The book navigates a succession of inner thoughts, feelings, states of mind in six disparate characters described with empathic but also stark accuracy, sometimes using mental images that may seem unrelated to a situation, but which provide such a precise…
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(Spoiler alert: do not continue reading if you plan to read the book) In my youth, after reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Demian and Siddhartha, which I loved, I enthusiastically started The Glass Bead Game. I found it incredibly slow and boring. I made two new attempts later, still boring. After re-reading those three books again…
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I have a mug on my desk with blue stars on it. Each star occupies an empty blank space in the shape of a star. Some blank spaces lack their star. I had this silly feeling that those spots had not yet found their match. But then I saw them for what they really are:…
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Reading Hesse’s Siddhartha again, I realised that I read books as I look at a river. I read and read until I find a sentence, a paragraph that resonates with me. Then I stop. I wonder why my mind focused my intention on that idea. I immediately discard it… ‘No, that cannot be me’. But…
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To me, nothing symbolises the ephemeral life like music. We can frame light and colour in a photograph, in a painting, but we cannot retain a melody. Music comes to us, touches our soul and leaves. Like those subtle notes in Beethoven’s fifth piano concert. They come, float casually in the air and leave. Like…
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I visited Lothlorien for the first time when I was fourteen. A part of my heart stayed there and never left. Lost back then, now found. There is a scene in The Lord of The Rings that is full of beautiful symbolism. In Lothlorien, Frodo, who is already feeling the heavy burden of The Ring,…
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What would happen if our starlight, the oracle that guides our journey turned out to be… well, fake? Somewhere over the rainbow, way up highThere’s a land that I heard of once in a lullabySomewhere over the rainbow, Skies are blue,And the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true… Over the Rainbow,…
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If there was a book in my childhood that I hated with all my guts, that was The Little Prince. Time and time again, some adult would try to push it down my throat with the excuse that it was a beautiful book for children. No it wasn’t. It was obviously a book written for…
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With water from the stream Galadriel filled the basin to the brim, and breathed on it, and when the water was still again she spoke. ‘Here is the Mirror of Galadriel,’ she said. ‘I have brought you here so that you may look in it, if you will.’ The air was very still, and the…
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The Introverted Tree 