“[T]he majestic expanse of the Pacific seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me.” Czesław Miłosz writes in “Facing Too Large an Expanse”, one of the many short essays I’ve been devouring from Visions from San Francisco Bay (translated by Richard Lourie).
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I lost my grandmother back in September 2022. The grief I have experienced has been like no other, an immense loss not just of a person I love deeply, but of my refuge, the existence rooting me even as I have always been finding myself in movement…
On Sunday night, as the two slow weeks between Christmas and the New Year drew to a close, I felt sad and frustrated. It was time to leave my bubble and return to reality, I thought. This bubble had been a space of freedom—an empty calendar where each day unfolded in the moment. It was filled with culture: ….
que notre vie soit vibrations is a wish I have encountered this past summer in one of the art installations spread across a beautiful estate […]of organic winery, architecture and art, where artists from around the world are commissioned to create artworks in conversation with the location where they will settle their vision in.
Artists include Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Yoko Ono, Richard Serra, Bob Dylan, Tracey Emin, Siobhán Hapaska, Michael Stipe, Prune Nourry, Sophie Calle, Tadao Ando and many more. Whether they’re a building, like the galleries imagined by Oscar Niemeyer, Renzo Piano or Richard Rogers, or sculptures and installations, the works are monumental and an invitation to root oneself in the space. The connection with nature transforms an artistic journey into a spiritual one. The wish, may our life be vibrations, accompanies me throughout my own exploration of this extraordinary place.
What a world have we been building, since I sent the last issue of this newsletter last summer. It was issue 30, on Humility and Imagination. I feel none of these two words are part of our mainstream discourses, and it worries me. So here I am. Trying to do my part, attempting to contribute to a narrative of connection and most importantly, trying not to get distracted by voices carrying nothing else but void —from news headlines, algorithms to incompetent politicians.
I promised I would return with new thoughts, reflections, spaces for imagination…
