All posts tagged: featured

On Dreams and Husbands

THE LAND OF DREAMS | There was a huge, open-air camp. Singing plants and illuminated chilis sprouted from magicians’ hats and everyone offered dreams for barter. Some wished to trade dreams of travel with dreams of love; others offered dreams of laughter in exchange for sad dreams to release a long-needed cry. A man walked about looking for the bits and pieces of his dream, which was shattered by someone who smashed into it: He collected the shreds of his dream and pasted them together to make with them a banner of colors. The water bearer of dreams carried the water in a vessel on his back and dispensed it in tall cups to whoever got thirsty while sleeping. A woman wearing a white tunic stood on a tower and combed her tresses that reached her toes. The comb shed dreams with all their characters: the dreams were born from the hair and glided out into the air. Excerpt from _El Libro de Los Abrazos_ by Eduardo Galeano. Trans. Nathalie Alyon “But how is Nathalie going to find a husband …

Traveling Alone in Distant Lands. Afraid?

I can think up many a reasons for packing up my apartment and traveling to the other side of the world by myself. I want to learn new languages, understand other nations, see the rainforest, and climb strange mountains… But the real motivation for leaving home is to learn one thing: to be alone. I’ve always had this romantic notion that to be a true artist—whatever that truly means—one must have a personality that thrives on solitude. I imagine a painter locked up in a basement for days, weeks, months, working on her masterpiece. Or picture Virginia Wolf shooing away servers in her country retreat in Sussex, in self-imposed imprisonment, to think, to write, to be alone. After John Steinbeck finished college he was broke and needed to find a way to support himself that afforded him the time to write. The 24-year old aspiring writer accepted a job at a large estate in Lake Tahoe as its sole caretaker. “It required that I be snowed in for eight months every year. My nearest neighbor was four …