BEFORE SUNRISE

““It’s like our time together is just ours. It’s our own creation. It must be like I’m in your dream and you’re in mine or something.””

— CELINE ~ BEFORE SUNRISE

---

EXCERPT FROM ZOE'S NEWSLETTER

To Family and Friends

dated: March 25th, 2017

Oliver and I continuously joke that we are experiencing 'a trip of a lifetime' within our whole trip of a lifetime. That is, there are so many countries, so many cities, so many sites we have visited that have played a part in our dreams - our 'one-day'-s and our 'I wish'-es. One such trip within our trip was our visit to Vienna...

Vienna will forever sit in my mind as the setting of one of my all time favourite movies: Before Sunrise, by my all time favourite director: Richard Linklater. (If you are looking for more suggestions of his movies, do try Boyhood and Dazed and Confused.)

In the movie Before Sunrise, the two main characters meet on a train, then taking a chance, they disembark to spend one evening and night together, walking through Vienna. They fall in love, of course, but the director takes this tale beyond the cliches of the usual love stories, using this story to show how we will always fall in love with new beginnings, with mysteries, and how traveling through new places can facilitate this by allowing us to be a wholly new person. 

Vienna was our Before Sunrise moment. We rediscovered the joys of learning a new city - it's roads, it's quirks, it's main attractions and hidden gems. We fell in love with each other again too. I often feel I am falling back in love with Oliver - not that we have ever fallen out of love, mind you. More so that we find ourselves cycling between days of cooperative partnership and contentment, to days where we look at one another with new eyes - stopping to actually look, not just glance, at the other; appreciating some part of them that was, perhaps, taken for granted only a moment before. Thus it was, hand in hand, that we walked all over that city from East to West. 

---

Every day we would get up and walk an hour into the city; each evening we would return after sunset, to sleep in our little car in the parking lot outside of town. The spaces in between, they were magic...

CINDERELLA

MUSINGS ON THE MAGIC OF FAIRYTALES

& a poem for the coming of Spring...

s n o w  s h o w e r s
 

there comes a steady

'plip - plip'

heard from the undergrowth.

and the trees are
quivering
loosing
snow showers:

shimmering shards,
sun catchers...

spring is on her way.

There is a reason children are drawn to fairytales;
and, here, I may pose that the reason is thus:

That the mind of a child is less decided upon the nature of reality. Thus, children able to entertain the ideas of mysteries yet to be solved, alternate histories, and magic unseen.

Then again, more and more adults are awakening to find that, they too, possess child-like qualities. As adults, we can still recollect those days of curiosity, can still see the world from a place of new beginnings, and we may still look around us with a sense of awe and wonder.

For, aren't we all children, on this ancient Earth? A young species, still learning about our world.

---

“The world is full
of magic things,
patiently waiting
for our senses to
grow sharper.”

— W. B. YEATS

OLIVE TREE

---

An idea taken from:

WALDEN

~ by Henry David Thoreau

“Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees...
the black birch;
the hornbeam;
the false elm...
These were the shrines I visited both summer and winter.”

---

Here is a grand idea, an ancient idea, and one that I have fallen in love with:

To visit the trees.
 

I made a date with this particularly ancient olive tree. We met in the mountains of Montenegro, where the old olive tree had put down roots, over two-thousand years ago.

When you visit a tree, you must listen - deeply and openly, to hear what wisdom the tree offers. Slow your mind and body, thinking of the rhythm and cycle of the tree - it's lifespan is long, often longer than our own. Our days may feel like minutes to a tree, just as our weeks could feel like years to a butterfly. In that slow space, we might come to understand more of the wise whispers of trees...

---

🌿 🌿 🌿

 THE MUSINGS OF TREEBEARD

“‘I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.’
A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.’”

— THE TWO TOWERS, J. R. R. TOLKIEN

WHISPERS

~ by Ayla Nereo

“To receive your whispers
tender breath-keepers
givers of life to these lungs
may I open my ears and
surrender
what can you tell me
how can I tend you
how can I tend to the ones
who pour life through these lungs…”