Quirky, friendly, magical, puzzling, odd, beautiful, colorful, breathtaking, inspiring, legendary, mystical, smiling faces, enchanting grasslands, buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, overpowering cliffs over deep ocean waters, reflective beaches
… Wales, a land that filled me with awe.
Every once in a while I get this great longing to “zoom out”. It is a process I go through when things threaten to get heavy or dull. When I feel that life seems ordinary, loud alarm bells ring inside my mind, because in fact, nothing in this world is ordinary. Life is awesome and full of awe inspiring miracles, from the moment we arrive to this planet with an erased memory and a vague sense of mission, to the nuclear spurts of growth we go through from embryos to adults, to the very simple yet unbelievable fact that we live on a ball that is spinning in a great unknown space and hurling through it at an impossible speed. So nothing is ordinary and it is sinful to treat it as such. How can anyone be bored knowing this??!!
The most baffling thing about ancient history is the search for the real reasons as to why the ancients did what they did…
After being amazed, impressed and dazzled by a 7km avenue in Luxor lined perfectly with sphinxes, I had to ask myself the question: “why would they do that?” It seems far too precise to be a whim of an architect, or the egoistic wish of a king, too well planned to not have a greater purpose. I had a similar feeling walking in between the avenues of megalithic rocks in Carnac, France, where huge megalithic rocks were transported from far away places and placed in rows, tens of kilometers long at equal distances to form avenues across fields and valleys.
I am not really looking for answers as much as I am enjoying the search for them. The process of asking with all the awe and wonderment is what makes history so attractive, to mystery dream, to be lost in the search for truth…
Do you still remember the little spots you played in as a child? A garden, a little forest, a neighborhood alley perhaps? I still do, I remember the trees we climbed, the little houses we built, the small fires we made, the pretend coffees we cooked, and it all felt so huge, like our own little country where only us children could be its citizens and its residents. I love watching Lea with her friends as they live in such worlds of their own, where discovery and adventure lives in the simple things, the things we adults step on and ignore in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. I treasure these times when I can be a spy into their secret worlds, especially now that they are so used to the camera being an extension of my face that I am completely ignored 🙂
photo taken: Lea and Valerie on one of their afternoon expeditions in Shanghai
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
– Albert Einstein
My biggest fear in life is if I were to one day lose the awe of being alive. If that were ever to happen then life would brutally change from the rich multidimensional wonder that it is, to a flat world like that of ‘Flatland’ by Edwin Abbott Abbott.
This photo was taken this morning at the wonderful ‘1933’ building in Shanghai’s Hongkou district. A wonder in art deco architecture and completed in 1933 by a British architect, it still stands in full magnificence of light, shadow, motifs, bridges, and unique design elements. Once an abattoir (slaughterhouse), this gem of a building restored from the communist Era of Shanghai is a must see if you are in Shanghai.