香港/LuLu Island I

We’ve just got a new art unit. 
They say moving house is one of the great stressful things of life. Like divorce and death. 
All I know is that standing in this house makes me very, very calm. It has good juju. It's painted white like an elegant New York loft and it suits me. 
The place is full of possibilities, I think there will be a lot of work to be done here.

Everything was not there...

I returned to this island thinking to retrace my steps by following its streets. 

I might just as well have sought the edge of the horizon, the threshold where time begins and ends. 
I ended up on the pier, night was flowing on the sea. 
It was, to be sure, that leaden water I was looking at without understanding anything about the darkness coming down on me. 
Everything was there.  
Everything was not there. 
Only now do I realize it and write, not knowing why, these words that will give me nothing back.
Do you know how it feels when you become a stranger on the land that you were born and lived til you were twenty?

The arc of a life

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) in winter

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) in early fall

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) in later fall

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) in summer

And so it goes. Morning gives way to afternoon; afternoon to night. And we find ourselves in the end of November already. Leaves are mostly gone, so are bees, butterflies and birds. Nights are longer; the usual rain are here, there is more time for reading, or someone else's better words. 

Another 40 days or so, 2020 will be all over. Is 2021 will be better? I believe so, the sun and the moon and the stars in the chart told me so. We all keep up the high hope at every year's end.
Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don't know that we don't know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown.

香港/Paris

Because you can make a sentimental journey to a place that changed your life 40 years ago in the hope of finding some trace of your younger self, and then discover that this younger you has been living in Paris all these years, just as Paris has been living all these years in you...

The Brontë Country, Yorkshire

Charlotte Brontë,
author of Jane Eyre

Home for the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, was the wild sweep of England's Yorkshire moors. This land still untamed save for a few stone stalwarts like the picture here. The Brontë would leave their mark on English literature and in one another's hearts with their writings.

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will." —Jane Eyre

Follow, poet, follow right...

W. B. Yeats 1865 – 1939

.

 

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

—In Memory of W. B. Yeats, W.H. Auden

香港/Dublin

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling...—Dubliner, James Joyce