“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
It has taken me half a lifetime and a little over 100 days to realize that this where I belong. Because I eventually had to come home.
Largo dos Leōes, Porto, April 2018
References
And the World is different. And it’s summer in February even though it’s still the Northern Hemisphere.
Photo: last Sunday, somewhere in Gondomar
“When I die I will return to seek
The moments I did not live by the sea.”
Sophia De Mello Breyner
Selected Poems, translated by Richard Zenith, Carcanet Press, 1997.
even though I feel at home in most places I travel to, even though I can’t wait to leave, even though it now looks mostly as a theme park, I sometimes can’t help but feel that Porto belongs to me because I belong to it.
References
Truman Capote
This a little Peek at my first experience with karaoke. In China, where I am for the past few days living my own version of “Lost in Translation”
Only in time
Photo: Gianmarco and Jennifer from the Opus Ballet Compagnia rehearsing in Porto, June 2017
References: T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton (1935)
I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.
there’s nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us
Charles Bukowski
Photo Calle Sta. Eulália, Mérida
sends a thrilling pulse through me.
References
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Photo: Piscina das Marés, July 2017
Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.
Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings
Coffee at the greenhouse around the corner
To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ‘tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.
But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!
George Gordon Byron
Photo: Flying to Poznan, June 2016
Stories from A Closet of Errors 
