Looking out over the waters to the pagoda perched serenely above the Sun Moon Lake, its lights beckoning through the night, I am moved by the thought that I was (very) young once. A few years ago, though it feels like time doesn’t even matter – no, it didn’t even feel like decades, it was another world, another life… Actually, we all who have been in love know it – the greatest distance between two points is never time.
In that different life the boy that was me was staying for a monsoon in Pokhara, Nepal, and looking out at the World Peace Pagoda suspended above the lake, dreaming, when my Russian neighbour said simply, it’s a magical place. How fleeting youth is, how quicky time flies. How eager we all are to be grown-up with debts and mortgages, to laugh harshly off our dreams of youth. Now – in his proudly unkempt kurta-wearing place, an impetuous young man, freshly hurled into the world of business, leans against the rails and contemplates the waters, fighting hard to reconcile himself with his dreams, to have the courage and conviction to go – forge – his own way. Comfort comes into your house a slave, a servant, then becomes a guest, and then a master.
It was by the water (the Mekong river, the Mediterranean…) that I first had a glimpse, an intuitive knowing of another world existing other than our increasingly mechanical and empirical one – a shimmering vision of freedom, a world that was still magical, and within it, at its heart, that sacred bud – possibility. It struck me when I was sitting by the marina on the Turkish mediterranean, eating a simple sandwich cobbled together from the local grocer’s, and looking out at the sea at night, that – we are condemned to be free. It is better that there is no grand sweeping narrative, no ‘answer’, to life, than if if there were one, and all our lives would be judged by it. That would make life a fascist concentration camp, which as it is, we are already trying hard enough to replicate.
in another life… Pokhara, Nepal 2008
The price of comfort, stability, acceptance, and even admiration, is conformity.
It is a high price to pay.
Fuck materialism and any other -ism. Isms are dangerous. Our idealism, our freedoms and hopes should never become dogma; it should always be self-conscious, humble, kind and light-hearted. One thing I have discovered on my travels – those with a sense of humour are rarely capable of purposeful evil.
Dream house found – Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan.
Such reassuring joy in a few short verses, which is woven around a questioning man – maybe a curious passerby, a woodcutter perhaps heading up the mountain. ‘Why do you, sir, choose to make your home in these mountains?’. The poet smiles. Outside, peach blossoms and falling water, and his heart grows quiet with a joy that words, with their steely logic and cold sharpness, can’t quite describe. Words disect unity like a body on a surgical table. Words deconstruct. Sometimes, solitude and quiet says a whole lot more. There is great beauty in a transient moment, which once you grab at it, you lose it.
Bohemianisms 