all alone she moves

Carry on, carry on until you reach the hallway made of gold

On trusting beauty. And benevolent clouds

Do people get accustomed to beauty?
Do people get accustomed to ugliness, squalor and dreariness? To pain and disrespect?  
It is proven that we do get used to events, emotions, objects, tastes, people. It’s a defense mechanism that, for instance, allows us to survive when a beloved person dies. We think at first that the pain is unbearable and that we are not going to be able to live without that person, yet after a span of time (sometimes ages, yes), we get used to that hole in our soul and we go on. We know that the abyss is there and is not going to disappear. But we also realize that we still wake up every morning and we are demanded to live on. Paradoxically a consoling - though awkward - truth. The same way, however, we get used to exciting, beautiful and thrilling things, those we thought would guarantee a constant degree of happiness throughout our life, which, on the contrary, after a span of time, (sometimes ages, yes again) become bleak and flat. It seems like we always need “newness” and to overcome this natural (unfavorable?) impulse, a fair amount of endurance and self-control is required. I once read an excellent article about this phenomenon which struck me and surprisingly turned out to make my life easier.

I was thinking about that article again a few days ago, as man I know, who is a pilot, sent me a picture of a sunrise, taken from the cockpit. He is in cargo business, so he mostly flies at night, and lives what I picture to be an interesting, yet somehow strange life. Though it´s a life of status and many privileges, I imagine how it can be lonely too, at traits. Surely dark, let alone for the fact that he wakes up to go to the airport when most of the others are dreaming and rolling under their warm duvets.

Some time ago, in the middle of the night, the flying man sent me an astonishing photo depicting intense blue, fluffy clouds barely disclosing a timid emerging sun. “Gorgeous”, I thought, with a dash of envy, considering that – again – that night I, instead, had “only” slept and as I opened my eyes the marvelous spectacle that the friend witnessed while jetting goods around was already over. 
I considered that my pilot friend sees this every day. Day after day. So I wondered if it´s possible that he still feels, really feels, the poetry of it (or was he only trying to impress me, showing how cool sitting with a whole plane underneath your butt and the whole sky around you is?). Paraphrasing, is it possible to wake up next to your long-term partner, day after day, steal a glance at a body abandoned on a mattress to then think “is this really happening to me? Am I this lucky FOR REAL?!”? Or are we all doomed to just fall into a reassuring, mechanical habit, where the sparklers are mostly the one you lit up on New Year´s Eve while wishing for a different pinch of salt than the one you use to pep up an insipid meal?

I did ask to my captain friend if he still feels the power of the beauty he flies thorough every night, and reassuringly he answered “yes, of course!”. Sometimes, he added, he has the urge to take a picture of a cloud for its particular shape or nuance. And because this is precisely what I wanted to hear and because I am so sneaky, I immediately crafted an extended syllogism for which, yes, waking up next to your beloved after years can still be mesmerizing. 

It probably boils down to the simple truth: it depends on how you want to live. 

If you let beauty touch you.

If that be a question to me, I would vehemently exclaim that, yes, I am totally open for beauty to touch, caress, penetrate, permeate, even scratch me! I am ready to give beauty a pass-partout to my soul and to each and every of my senses. But can you open yourself up to beauty without granting free access to ugliness and evil as well? This (rhetorical) question kept bouncing in my head like in an old-time flipper a couple of nights ago as I was relishing some lovely, special attentions. Quite trivial special attentions, actually. Like gently and silently putting down my phone as I was attempting to find out, around 3 am, when my next train home would be. No words to tenderly ask “…what are you doing?!”. Something maybe ridiculously small and simple, which I noticed, however, left me astonished. It was like putting balm on a sore lip. Like wearing sunglasses on a bright sunny day. Like taking a shower after a long run and then let yourself fall on a soft bed bed with your damp robe still on.

It simply felt right. It made sense. 

Realizing this, I cursed against those moments and people that stole from me the pleasure of naturally trusting this goodness without questioning the authenticity of it. 

This is what we are called to do with beauty: we are naturally inclined to relish it, to let it fill us with its greatness, its inspiration. 

Nobody questions the intentions of a sunrise. 

You don´t doubt the authenticity of blue, fluffy clouds, even if they can turn into dangerous, potentially deadly storms.

I don´t know how much the flying man really felt the sunset he sent me. Or why he shared it with me, but no matter what, I see it as a good sign: I like people who believe in benevolent, magnificent clouds. 

Speechless

Sometimes you are so busy browsing around Europe that you have just a few words left. Yet the impressions are always abundant.

 

The times, they are a-changing

(in my opinion, not always for the better) 

Eureka is just a street

It happens often. Mostly whilst working on boring excel lists, full of names and numbers and such dry materials. It happens softly: my mind just drifts away and brings me in that indefinite space called memory, so impalpable yet so vividly real as to make me feel the warmth of sun beams on my arms during a tepid and cloudy late winter afternoon.

It happened just a few moments ago: cell F17, VLOOKUP and…swoosh, I am on Telegraph Hill, it´s late June and I am sweating because I surely know that San Francisco is all up and down, but I did not expect Telegraph HILL (yes, that could have been a hint, true) to be that high. I don´t know it yet, but this city has already absorbed all the love that I am pouring out of my elated heart, the love that some big hands are sadly incapable of holding. That this city is slowly becoming a necessary surrogate, I slightly sense already, but on the streets of San Francisco I don´t want to listen to anything else but the noise of traffic and the chit chat of Californian girls coming out of one of the perceived millions of Starbucks I see downtown. I want to inhale the dust of the stores of Chinatown, cramped with goods wrapped up in cellophane as some strange post-modern, urban bales. I only want to lightheartedly spend money and time in high-end stores at Union Square. After all, here everything seems so cheap and I am happy, I am a very special tourist killing time waiting for the working hours to pass so that I can go to the Mission and meet up with the friends. And then afterwards go home, that home that is not really mine, where I have been invited after a “hearthquake”, to pretend that things can be ok nonetheless. That home so fucked up that every sensible person would just run-Forrest-run, but where I nevertheless so much want to belong.That home on the hill, with the view of the Golden Gate and the many unhealed, itching scars. And the wild garden. And the white front porch with the wicker lovers ‘chair, where I had my vegan dinner on a mid-summer night, content and carefree, because he was sitting next to me.

That home on the corner to Eureka Street where the enthusiasm remains just the name on a sign, or even more just a distant illusion.

Cell F17, VLOOKUP. Back to the secure world. It might not be as exciting as the one of infedele memories but at least it´s not like constantly balancing on the brink of a precipice. 

Modern bliss

Sikh-ing Dil

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

- Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji

A few weeks ago at an international gathering I met a guy who cracked me up: a self-confident young man with an irresistible British accent, a long nose, gorgeous smile and light brown skin. He is full of energy and wit and he looks like a skillful womanizer, though he says he only enjoys the challenge of getting a telephone number. 

The hours spent with him and his friends in a few occasions were so pleasant that I was looking forward to seeing him again at a party on Saturday. He had given me his card and mobile number last time, but with a guy like that, I thought, if you in fact use that number, you´re like yesterday´s bread. So I never did.

His way of talking to people and flirting with girls together with his attitude and self-confidence craved into my mind the idea that he is some kind of hipster from an alternative London district. Therefore the omni-present beanie on his head despite the hot temperature of the overcrowded bar, I thought.

As a teenager I had a boyfriend who never (never!) took off his baseball cap. Not even as we were plunging in his swimming pool. So this British youngster wearing a beanie made me curious and, as he came to me the other night (probably while hopping from one woman to the other) I asked him to show me his hair. “I can´t. It´s long”, he replied. My hair is long too, not a reason to hide it, I thought. And then he added "I am Sikh", taking off his beanie and revealing another cotton cap, protecting his hair.  Millions of questions corwded my mind within 20 seconds but it was definitely not the best location for a philosophical talk. We then agreed to meet the day after and I let him go back to his flirt-marathon while I went on talking to my cool Tartar friend. As I left, he was dancing quite closely to a Romanian girl. Pretty, by the way. Good choice. 

The next evening started with him coming late - very late - (he had fallen asleep) to the appointment and, on top of the delay, having trouble finding the agreed meeting point. I normally get so pissed off by disorganization that I was really tempted to blow everything off and go home, but eventually we manage to meet. Or at least I think we did, for the young man standing before me me looked exactly like the one I had met a few times before. But he was also another person. Much shier, not so fresh and bold. During the evening, his attempt to concisely explain to me his "religion" ("I don´t like to call it religion") was more than a little confused but his tone of voice and the way he tried to express his ideas struck me: it was full of respect and...feeling. Just charming.

My British friend was my first contact to Sikhism (but not the last: sounds like something I am going to further explore, let alone out of curiosity) 
My sikhy friend. A funny, witty (sham?) gangster womanizer. 
Sometimes. 

Tschüß

DumboDreaming

I dreamt of Dumbo, last night.

Or, actually, I dreamt I had a cute little baby elephant that everyone adored and even my bank consultant wanted to take a picture with.

And since last night I could not fall asleep, torn by the dilemma whether or not to accept the offer to move into a new flat abandoning the one I have shared with friends for 7 years, I decided this morning that the adorable baby elephant that eventually made it into my dreams was Dumbo, encouraging me to hold my feather tight and…fly. With no fear.

So it looks like I am probably moving into a new place, my place!, in January. 

Clap clap and thanks, Dumbo.  

Tiny beautiful things

I have the impression that the quest for happiness becomes more and more complex as years go by. Adults (me, jaw-dropped, in the first row) are mesmerized by the capacity of kids to find the most common things whimsical and magnetically fascinating and I have heard many parents proclaiming what a bewildering experience it is to re-discover the world through the eyes of their offspring. No breaking news for sure, rather a trite consideration that has found in the past centuries revered voices, for instance that of William Blake, who urged us to rediscover the child within ourselves.

I have stopped being a child many years ago and I don´t have toddlers running around chasing ants or talking eloquently to a potato chip, so basically it seems like I am doomed to be a quite rational grown-up, nailed to the idea of life as I decided to regard it. Yet, last night I was playing tennis (very generous definition of my attempt) with three friends of mine in a poorly lit indoor court and there I was, my knees slightly bent, holding my racket tight, looking at my Indian friend across the net smiling his gorgeous, elegant smile while getting ready to serve. And suddenly it started raining and the ball was flying over the net in very creative twirls and my Canadian friend was doing her funny jump-serves and my London mate was running wildly around the court yelling “Mine! Yours! No, no, mine!” and that rain…the rain kept tapping tenaciously on the plastic roof, producing a warm, reassuring music, transforming those apparently meaningless bunch of minutes into…pure bliss.