BEACH BOYS: "Fun Fun Fun"

The landscape is captured in a frame of willows. They are sophisticated traitors, pretending to be part of a natural border, but ever planted there by man driven by the instinct to mark an individual territory on earth. We all need our own private spot. There’s the same gold-coloured carpet of wheat behind those glooming trees, invisible from this point. Still you know it is there, just like the shadows on the walls of the cave reveal that there’s a dancing torch light behind our back. Like the melody of a pop song, ancient wisdom is repeated in an endless number of variations.

Humongous white clouds roll over. I walk on. Do feet recognize the soil on which they stepped before? Can we literally walk back into memories? Like an uninvited guest coming in without knocking on the door, I see this flash of me and my childhood friends playing hide-and-seek in the corn field. I savour a taste of bread rolls and hot chocolate milk, which we used to spill all over the table when we laughed unstoppably for any silly reason and yet tried to drink from our cup. We raced on muddy roads with our bicycles, chasing each other until losing our breath, intoxicated by adrenaline and a sense of reckless freedom. We had not yet lost the gift of imagination and fantasy. We were many and any kind of people in one single day. A formula one racer in our go-kart; a radio DJ announcing the next song on our tape recorder; a circus artist jumping from the bunk bed on a floor full of cushions; a horse in the prairie. We played, on and on. We found 101 different ways to jump into the swimming pool from the side. We climbed trees like monkeys. We hunted insects. We put a cardboard box on our head, to protect it from the impact of chestnuts which the “enemy” was throwing at us from the other side of the attic. We had collected a bucket full of this natural ammunition in the forest earlier in the afternoon, after which we spent hours making our indoor camp to prepare for the battle. We were creative without even knowing there was a word for it.

SASH: "Ecuador"

Otavalo (Ecuador)

BOB DYLAN: "Blowin' In The Wind"

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

(by John McRae, 1915)

ENYA: "Orinoco Flow"

水能载舟亦能覆舟 (shuǐ néng zài zhōu, yì néng fù zhōu)

“Not only can water float a craft, it can sink it also.” There are opposite aspects of any tool or power.

DEPECHE MODE: "Enjoy The Silence"

Life has twists, and many different endings. It’s a rope, that fixes or strangles, that binds, entangles. There’s never a way back, not to the good times, not to the bad times. For times will never be the same again. We run to the other side of a hanging bridge of which the ropes have been cut on one side. A first wrinkle appears, like a crack on the ceiling. It’s the first time I notice it in a friend’s face. After growing up, we now grow older. And we grow elsewhere, for we may have roots, but still can be planted anywhere else.

It feels a bit strange to take a break from hectic city-life and retreat in a more rural hide-out called place of birth. Wearing new shoes is never easy and it takes more to find peace than just to slow down the pace. I recognize the silence of my childhood days. It’s as if I opened a long-forgotten box in a dusty attic and find the snoring of the fridge and the ticking of the standing clock in my grandma’s living room just as I left it years ago. What happened to those years? They passed by like the white clouds parading in the window. The yellow fields bow humbly. A pigeon rests on the roof. Time leaves no traces and the sky no impact.

I feel like spending some days of a writer’s life, or at least the hermit life I imagine it to be. Shelter inside, undistracted by the unwanted opinions of others, take a nap in between some paragraphs, chase lucidity in a forest of dark thoughts, having a bottle of wine for dinner. It’s not the right time for it now, but I did have that vision on a holiday last year, when I was lazing in a hammock in one of the lodges in the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. The vision of spending a month in a remote area, with the mere purpose of spending the day writing that once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece you always promised yourself to write one day. I worship laziness now and empty my mind; a fresh wind fills the temple after the monk opens the heavy wooden doors.

KREZIP: "I Would Stay"

No one is ever too old to learn or to appreciate some verbal creativity. How about this new word: staycation, referring to a holiday spent at home, in your own country. So I guess staycation is precisely what I am doing now.

PANTERA: "Walk"

路是人踏出來的 (lù shì rén tà chūlái de)

“Road is made by people walking on the ground." The solution to something, or the road to success, is found by going to places or finding solutions where there were no roads before.