Respite = a short break or escape from something difficult or unpleasant.
“I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death.” –Ernest Hemingway
Art by Marianne von Werefkin – Russian-German-Swiss Expressionist painter (1860-1938).
We are all unhappy people feeding on shines of never-ending stories of happier people around. Are we? Are they?
We are being consumed and trampled over over and over again.
After careful consideration and many well-built walls and some exquisite moats I declare that happiness does not rest with (other) people. Happiness starts with just US.
Yes, people create magic with a mere smile on a windy, bleak, hopeless morning that speeds away with every bit of light. Yet we are tired of being sunned over and then led into a haze of misunderstandings and apprehension…
Still we are totally unhappy and utterly happy in our own world. After bitter disappointments with the people I hold dearest, I place my every happiness in my carefully crafted dome.
“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.” – Oscar Wilde
I divide my happiness by seasons and I season my dome with everything I love and feels warm to the heart. In the aftermath of winter I put my glorious bike trips in the cold into odes to spring – my poems about the coming of the Sun, the ladybirds and the folstitia…One can never write too many invisible stories about spring and hunt too many lilacs.
I have there my beautiful early mornings drenched in autumn rains and also in beautiful snippets of music.
I have there the fairy tale books I read on cold, misty and pointless winter evenings… I have there my every expectation towards spring like a dull root waiting for warmth and birdsong to make it come out into the crude light again.
I can do whatever, I can solve everything, people can blow all their freezing-cold thoughts all over me, still they cannot steal my glow, they can merely break some windows, because I am protected by all of these small beauties awaiting me under my dome.
They say pennies are the mother of pounds. Small, insignificant pleasures like the new moon or a beautiful flower are the mother of happiness.
First you’ve got to see the moon to be over the moon.
Art by Rob Gonsalves.
Tenet = a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; one of the principles on which a belief or theory is based:
“Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.”
– John Keats
Art – “Lady in a Garden by Moonlight” by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 1893).
Worthwhile = useful, important, or good enough to be a suitable reward for the money or time spent or the effort made.
*Does the sun ask itself, “Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is there enough of me?” No, it burns and it shines. Does the sun ask itself, “What does the moon think of me? How does Mars feel about me today?” No, it burns, it shines. Does the sun ask itself, “Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies?” No, it burns, it shines.*
— Andrea Dworkin
Art – Enclosed Field with Rising Sun by Vincent van Gogh.
Romania is my country and Corfu is my home island.
I am caught in the magic of the island of cypresses, millennia-old olive trees and nymphs. The satyrs are not scarce either, they just resumed human form. If my words escape you, I would like to say that Greeks are very handsome and “warm”.
I want to relocate in a very small cottage on a mountain side, overlooking the sea and palm trees rustling merrily in the lazy salty breeze.
My single worry was to get up early (at 6 A.M. or so) to still catch the stars and then, the sun. And later, after happy hours of basking in its mellow warmth, watch it jumping into the waves on the way to the other realm.
October in Corfu is like late beautiful spring in Romania. Balmy air, birds chirping, tons of colors and fragrances heralding another spring. The one starting in November!
“Gradually the magic of the island (Corfu) settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals
I illustrate with my photos: the waning moon at dawn & later, the waxing moon at dusk; the clearest water that I can look into till my eyes turn blue & one stunning sunset; a romantic ship in the Kerkyra harbour & the highest peak – the Pantokrator.
Compassion = a deep awareness of and sympathy for another’s suffering.
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion.
– Eckhart Tolle
Art by Duy Huynh.
Glow-worm = a beetle, the females and young of which produce a green light from the tail.
“We are all worms. But I believe I am a glow-worm.”
– Winston Churchill
Art by Asako Eguchi.
Life is irregular and we need to do business in Equilibrium to simplify and even the rough facets of human interaction.
Sometimes you feel like you have crossed oceans and seas to find the one-of-a-kind orange tree adorned with gold leaves. Or maybe you have found the magic lettuce from the Bear’s garden*.
You are prepared to offer it to your customers, still they are not pleased and want more.
They want More because Less is what they do not understand: the core of your business, the “elusive” thing without which your product does not exist: Your MISSION statement.
Your mission appeals to the mindset of people.
Your mission creates connections.
Your mission creates promises you HAVE to keep.
Empty your heart of misgivings and fulfill your promises by following your business pattern and delivery system.
And keep an eye on the money.
Running a business is like running a show. It is either good or bad. In the beginning it is usually bad. So don’t sweat about it. But make it good in time…Make it so good that your first business show now appears to have been held for the Eskimos, a hundred years back.
“The past is a foreign country.” – L.P. Hartley
*Source of inspiration – The Story of Harap Alb – A Romanian folk tale by Ion Creangă.
Art by Rene Magritte.
Sweep = to clean especially a floor by using a brush to collect the dirt into one place from which it can be removed.
Sweep along = to make somebody very interested or involved in something, especially in a way that makes them forget everything else.
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
–Jorge Luis Borges
Art – Henri Julien Rousseau‘s tiger.
We are all Arya Stark and deft shape-shifters dancing on stories in order to survive. We are but one step into cruelty every minute on the way to achieving our goals.
Cruelty is not a shield but a system of betrayal.
We betray our shattered feelings and broken image of ourselves reflected in mirrors that don’t belong to us.
We betray our inability to live up to our vision and our words.
We give in to our doubts: “What if I am wrong, what if they don’t like me, what if I am not enough?” We betray our powerlessness of being happy in our own world. We surrender to an odd country we never dreamed about.
We betray our transcendent fear of living in a blur devoid of bounties we wouldn’t dare take with our own hands.
And we forget that “Anything can happen in a world that holds such beauty”- Peter S. Beagle.
Art by Christian Schloe.