The first thing Viñales gives you is colour: a soil so red it stains your shoes, your hands, even the air itself. It is not the soft loam of Europe, gentle and forgiving, nor the volcanic black of Japan, sharp and fertile. It is a harsher red, iron-rich, insistent: a
🌊 Matter and Mind in the Morning The sea greets me first in Shizuoka. From Shimizu harbour, gulls circle low as fishing boats return, the air woven of salt, diesel, and faint tea drifting from inland hills. Armstrong cuts against the romance: the mind is the brain, nothing more. Awe and
“A house is not just a place to live, but a place to keep the memories of life.”—Haruki Murakami Gasshō-zukuri (合掌造り) means “constructed like hands in prayer.” The phrase itself feels reverent, almost devotional. These thatched farmhouses, with their steep, triangular roofs and broad shoulders, are not aesthetic gestures
πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει, σημεῖον δ᾽ ἡ τῶν αἰσθήσεων ἀγάπησις, καὶ μάλιστα τῆς ὄψεως. All humans by nature desire to know, and a sign of this is our love of the senses, especially sight. — Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a21–24 Ens et verum convertuntur. Being and truth are convertible. — Thomas
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau 🌆 Trinidad: Beauty, Piety, and the Invention of the Secular Trinidad dazzles at first sight. Its cobbled streets glint in the Caribbean sun, pastel façades lean into each other like old friends, and the towers of Santa Ana and the
“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so… What was once a light cloak has become an iron cage.” — Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 🌲 Heddal: The Whisper of Enchantment The stave church at Heddal rises like a ship turned
🐚 The Pearl of Exile Cienfuegos calls itself the Pearl of the South. At first the name feels ornamental, another Caribbean flourish. Yet walking its boulevards, I felt the presence of someone beside me. Helen, Camus’s Helen: symbol of proportion and beauty seemed to wander these streets, her shadow falling
“The city… does not tell its past, it contains it like the lines of a hand.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 🌆 Two Visions of the City The first thing you notice in Havana is the weight of the sun. It presses on the stone, bleaching pastel walls into chalk, making colours
“Morality is just a sign language of the affects.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil There are moments when travel ceases to be movement and becomes instruction. You do not merely see a country; you begin to feel how it has formed its people, its stone, even its silences. China
“The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” — Tōno Monogatari, Preface 📖 Two Books of the Forest In 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Their aim was not simply to entertain, but to preserve. Germany at the time was not
“Consciousness sleeps in minerals, dreams in plants, wakes up in animals, and becomes self-aware in humans.” — Rumi 🌌 The Sky Was Too Blue The sky over Hiroshima was a cloudy blue. Not the gentle, reverent blue of mourning, but a flat, hazy indifference: a sky being scrubbed of memory. It hung
In Japan, the year isn’t measured only by months or temperature shifts. It moves with the flowers; not just cherry blossoms, but dozens more, each whispering a quiet change. The Japanese calendar, once divided into 24 solar terms and then into 72 micro-seasons (七十二候), is a reminder that life