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Light and shadows
Sometimes there are details which appear repeatedly in a short time span of my life bringing together new meaning to me. It’s like when you take a lemon, sugar and water and prepare lemon juice from them. By taste, you can still distinguish the ingredients but you cannot separate them anymore and even their taste is not entirely the same. It is how it started with light and shadows this time. I like Robert Ludlum and his spy stories and yesterday I finished reading the 3rd instalment of his Bourne series. I came across a sentence there: “Hugging the shadows of the successive storefronts, Jason crept slowly forward.” My breathing…
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Trip from Modrava
I’d like to get back to those few days we spent in Šumava this summer. We were staying in a camp, going on trips and for one day we planned a trip from Modrava to our camp. We had to go by bus just a few kilometres and then follow a marked track. When we were getting off the bus, it was already drizzling and we needed to take on our raincoats. Well, I don’t mind walking in rain, but our cameras had to stay in our bags and I regretted that so much. On the one hand I felt really annoyed and on the other I tried to persuade…
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First snow
It was snowing all day and night yesterday and as the temperature was stuck under the zero, we woke up into beautiful whiteness this morning. Just on Friday I finished covering some of the plants in our garden with branches to protect them against harsh winter and I’m so glad I managed to do it in time. We have a saying stating that “Martin comes riding a white horse”, which relates to 11th November being the Martin’s name day. It is quite usual that in the middle of November we experience the first snow, hence the white horse. This year the snow has come a bit sooner and I find…
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Have you ever heard a smell?
A few weeks ago I coincidentally came around two interesting articles dealing with a phenomenon I’ve never heard about and which I find really interesting. Synesthesia. Does it ring a bell with you? We all have 5 senses and they operate independently of one another. But there are people whose senses are combined in such a way that they can e.g. taste sound, see coloured numbers or letters of the alphabet, hear smells, see colours when hearing musical tones or sounds generally, etc. Any senses and any number of them can be combined but commonly just two of them are involved. Even in this case, perception is rather complex. Karen…
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Winter atmosphere
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape.The loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”― Andrew Wyeth I like all the disguises nature wears. One place can be either dull or prominent under different conditions such as light, time of the day, weather, season. Once I read an article about how to find the soul of a garden. The author of that article expressed an idea saying that the soul becomes obvious just in winter when there are no leaves disturbing its expression. Well, the truth is that places do look different in summer and…
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Sumacs and a piece of good advice
We went shopping on Sunday afternoon because our supplies of food were almost exhausted and moreover, our children needed new shoes for approaching winter. So instead of walking in some beautifully coloured country we were walking among shelves full of goods. I definitely prefer the first option but well, I have to respect the needs too. So, we went shopping. Shopping among Christmas decorations and Christmas trees, what a bizarre look it was. The untimely decoration contrasted strongly with the memory of our trip two weeks ago: I like sumacs a lot, the structure of their leaves, their shape and their colours, so beautiful. But we had one in the yard…
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What a coincidence…
Have you read the novel “The Swarm” written by Frank Schätzing? Its dust jacket contains this description: “Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island’s water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean’s revenge as the seas and their inhabitants begin a violent revolution against mankind… “ I’ve read this book and I like it very much though I have to admit that many described scenes and possible events depicted in the story were not pleasant to imagine. Their synonyms would be disaster and catastrophe. But the story definitely helped me to…