Is this finally Zen?

A whole day ahead 

Nothing in my calendar 

Going with the flow.

Adieu to a dear friend

Dearest Maria,
 
As I light candles for my morning meditation, I’m thinking of you and all the light you brought into my life. In these last years, my daily prayer was more of a plea for mercy: “God, have mercy and allow Maria to stay one day longer.” For life without you seemed unimaginable. Yet, as is so often the case, the universe has grander plans for you than any of us individuals. So now you have been released from your burdens and suffering. I’m so glad you believe in heaven, though I may not, for surely you will be joyfully happy there.
 
And you have left your family and friends with a difficult task: we are to be happy that you have found peace and tranquility. We must celebrate your light, the courage you have shown, and most particularly, those endless acts of human kindness you gifted each and every one of us. Your ability to love and be loved, no matter what our flaws are, has been a constant inspiration to me.
 
What I learnt from you is how life, in all its fullness, is both of everything: sadness and happiness, doubt and certainty, responsibility and freedom, and lastly, sickness and health. Your ability to embrace the positive while acknowledging the struggles was a lifelong practice of patience.
 
I remember the countless times when visiting, how you managed somehow to sail through all the chaos to get the girls off to school, Helmut to work, and you as well. You were the pivot point of turning every potential meltdown into something that could be fixed right then and there.
 
No matter what was going on, there was harmony in the chaos of daily goings-on. It was so endearing to see how Helmut, muffled in pragmatism, managed to weather the storms of female unpredictability. How you would calmly be packing lunch boxes and running downstairs with a load of laundry and then going out to quickly water the garden. All the while the family would running up or down the stairs, shouting or singing the anthem which is uniquely that of the Wittmann–Speber household.
 
Your girls have always been the treasure and pride of your life. They have grown into women with unmistakably unique skills and big hearts. You and Helmut gave them constancy in love. They move with confidence as adults that has grown from the knowledge they are deeply loved.
 
Even though we only saw each other once or twice a year, your family has always been part of the Hadley/Cavallaro family. Our children more like cousins than the children of a friend of their mother. How precious this was for them. May Anna, Fee, and Lisi and Helmut know they can always count on us if they are in need of solace.
 
So, the moment has come to pass forward the light of your loving being. May we all take dear, dear care to share it with our loved ones, as well as with strangers.
 
Winter is here, and I know I am going to miss you so intensely, be sad, and even feel diminished in my spiritual core. That is what happens when best friends part ways. Yet spring will come, won’t it, Maria? Surely there will come a time when I can think of you without tears. I can talk to you without having to lift up the phone. We met as young women and became kindred souls, sharing all the sorrows and joys that made our lives so grand. Thank you. I love you.
 
Love and affection,

Your Lia

Beautiful sounds: halyards

The clanging of halyards echoes through the rigging as we ride out a storm in a sheltered harbour. 

Sadness unshared

A young woman travelling through Europe meets a young artist in Amsterdam. He plays a sad song on a scruffy guitar. She listens, rejoicing with her whole being in the song’s words; so profoundly touched by how the songwriter manages to build and crash the hope of love eternal. Not a tale of romance gone wrong, but rather the universal tragedy of love unleashed. 

The man turns to her and says he was surprised to see such depth of sadness in her eyes as he played. He says it in a way that is half fascination, half abhorrence—wondering how she could be so very much other than all the other women he had played the song to.

She looks back at him, puzzled. Until then, she had believed everyone felt deep sadness every day. But now, that guarded look in his eyes—previously so sexually charged—makes her feel embarrassed. Shamed, even, for having shown her vulnerability.

#booksIlove: DS Cross Thrillers

Title: All of the DS Cross series, by Tim Sullivan

First time I read the book: 2025, on recommendation from Sonja Heinlien

Generally, I love a detective series. The main characters have time to develop and play off each other. It is not only about the crime, but also about letting the characters occupy space in my mind for a longer period of time. 

I slurped this series: The Denist, The Cyclist, The Patient, The Politician, The Monk, and The Teacher. I still have The Bookseller to go.

The main character George Cross is on the spectrum and has earned reluctant acknowledgement for his excellence the hard way. He's bull-headed and brilliant. He has also suffered much bullying on the force over the years and his way of handling it is both frustrating and amusing to those that like working with him.

Not wanting to move on

Leaves turning yellow
My feet warm in soft slippers
Summer is over.

Café Catlove, Gijón, Spain

 #1
 
A young mother and father come into the café with their cute little baby. The woman starts breastfeeding. The man's friend enters the café after about fifteen minutes, and he and the father exchange a brief conversation. The two men get up and leave with the baby carriage. The woman then gets up and continues to breastfeed while following them out of the café.
Walking while breastfeeding is a skill I never had.
 
 
 #2
 
So far, I have failed to find a good cup of tea. After searching for two hours, I found one that at least offered tea. The menu was heavy with green and matcha. There were only two black tea choices: with milk (con leche) and Americano. Since I couldn't imagine what Americano would be, I opted for tea and milk.
 
This turns out to be warm milk with some tea dust floating around. No tea leaves or tea bag in sight. No use of boiling water in the process. Definitely an acquired taste.
 
 
#3
 
No one here seems to speak English. They smile shyly and speak Spanish slowly. Occasionally, they give one-word sentences a try: "card", "here" (when seating in a restaurant), or "sorry" and a shake of their head (when asked if they speak English). It doesn't matter if the person is young or old. All are universally living in a world where Spanish is a given.
 
Last night, while trying to order wine, the waiter did not know whether the wine was "dry." He did not suggest asking his colleague. Instead, "don't understand" in Spanish was his response.

Whether driving taxis, working in shops, or cafés, there are only people speaking Spanish. And truthfully, I have only heard a smattering of people speaking other languages. So, I dug out my Google translator and smatterings of words from my early years in Caracas, and did the best I could . What fun!

Beautiful sounds: Bay of Biscay

 The deep brumming through the walls of my cabin on the way to Gijón in Spain the last night of my journey.

Explore: my phone

I was listening to the interview above about slow productivity. The speaker, Dr. Cal Newport, talked a lot about deep work sessions and time boxing to do uninterrupted work. The Newport and Huberman talked about working or walking without having a telephone or email inbox nearby. 

Newport talks extensively about the futility of trying to do deep work and all the while checking your phone every few minutes. He believes, probably justifiably, that this is a type of wasteful behaviour most of us do engage in. He calls it, pseudo-productivity. No one can produce anything of note when they are constantly moving their attention away from what they are doing.

Over the last years, I've noticed that I am increasingly plugged into my phone. Since the 2016 US elections, I've stopped using Facebook and (now) X. So, it is not any social media sites that are distracting me, but WhatsApp and email.

Since leaving the company, the number of emails has decreased from over 100/day to a few notices from LinkedIn. WhatsApp is the same way. So, even though the volume has been drastically reduced, my unhealthy behavior toward my phone persists.

This is what I want to explore:

1. Start writing emails to friends again
2. Not checking my phone for the first hour of the day
3. At night, have the phone in another room
4. Occasionally, leave the house without the phone
5. During deep work sessions, put the phone somewhere else

I've noticed that many people I know do not answer their DMs immediately anymore. There may be a collective consensus that we are no longer available all the time for everyone, both at work and in private. So, whether this is true or not, I am on board!

When silence sounds like agreement

(This letter is written out of a recent experience. Though the names and details have been changed, the story reflects what many women in technical professions endure.)
 
To a much-needed advocate, Jason,
 
The other day I walked into the common room for a break. You and Max were deep in conversation. It took me a while to realise he was on a rant about how useless women are as technicians.
 
I have spent over forty years of my professional life quietly swallowing such vitriol. There are only so many discussions one person can rise to. No matter how often I have pushed back against men like Max, I always walk away with a bitter aftertaste. Nothing dents the armour of that kind of hatred.
 
Max’s rant went further. He named women who had worked under him, one by one, and gleefully listed what he called their inadequacies. He took pride in having blocked their careers. At first you were silent. Then you laughed. Perhaps it was out of discomfort, but even so, silence and laughter sound like agreement.
 
I considered asking the two of you to stop. What held me back was the knowledge, gained through experience, that Max is not only a misogynist but also a bully. He would have turned his scorn on me and kept at it for days. So, I stayed quiet. Again. That silence is its own kind of cowardice, and it plagues me.
 
Which brings me to the point of this letter. Jason, I have known you to treat your female colleagues with respect. If that is so, could you go one step further? Could you become an advocate? When you find yourself in conversations like this, could you simply say that you do not share the opinion? Could you point out that speaking this way damages reputations and demeans the profession?
 
It cannot be the burden of the few women in the room to fight for equality. The fact that Max could talk for half an hour about “useless” women by name shows just how few women he has worked with, and how many he has made miserable.
 
It is not enough for women alone to carry the burden of calling out misogyny. We are too few, and too often punished for speaking. It is men like you who can change the tone of the room.
 
Please help create a workplace where this kind of talk does not pass unchallenged.

Why I started blogging (and why I haven’t stopped yet)

I wrote my first entry for YumYumCafe at a time when blogging was still in its early bloom. I had contributed to a few other blogs, but eventually I decided to create one of my own. My idea was simple: a place where family and friends, scattered across the globe, could peek into my life.
 
Of course, there were other motivations too. First of all, it was an exciting time in the blogging world. Web 2.0 had arrived, and suddenly people who weren’t professional journalists could publish their own stories. I remember reading first-hand accounts from war zones, or artists peeling back the curtain on their creative process. It felt as though we were being invited to stand like a fly on the wall, watching people make sense of the world in real time.
 
For the first time in my life, I felt part of a wide community. And I didn’t just want to be a consumer or a commenter. I wanted to create.
 
This shift was thrilling. Up until then, the internet had been something you consumed, but blogging opened the door to being a maker. I also had a strong sense that my young children would grow up in a world shaped by this technology, in ways I couldn’t yet imagine. So, it seemed important, even in my small way, to join in.
 
The irony is that my family and friends weren’t the least bit interested in my blog. Not then, not later. But other blogger and strangers were. Over the first decade, I developed deep friendships with some bloggers. Charlotte, for example, became a dear friend, and Ronnie was a kind of mentor for several years. These connections felt more personal and honest than many of the relationships I had with neighbours or colleagues. Back then, people wrote straight from the heart. They weren’t branding themselves or curating their image. Ronnie, for example, wrote about growing old in America, and it struck me as a voice that needed to be heard.
 
Blogging was never without competition. First came MySpace, and then Facebook and the others, which blew the wind out of the sails of the blogging community. For me, the real death knell came when Google shut down its Reader. I had spent years building a library of newspapers, journalists, and bloggers to follow. And suddenly it was gone. I never found a satisfying replacement. Slowly, I stopped following other blogs, though I did keep writing my own for a while.
 
About five or six years ago, when work became overwhelming, my blog began sputtering. I told my family I was thinking of closing it down. To my surprise, both my daughter and my son urged me not to. They said it was part of my artistic legacy, even if they weren’t reading it themselves. (In the meantime, both Julien and Sara do read the blog.) That gave me a second wind. Since then, I’ve been writing more regularly again, and I’ve come to see the blog as part of who I am. Not necessarily what I produce, but the process itself: a daily act of expression. And that is precious.
 
I know Blogger is clunky and outdated, and I’ve often thought about exporting everything somewhere else. But I cling to it, partly out of loyalty, partly out of laziness. Thousands of entries later, it feels like an archive of enthusiasms, obsessions, and half-baked ideas. Sometimes I think I should tidy it up, delete obsolete posts or broken links. But Julien told me to leave them. It doesn’t need to be polished. It is what it is: an ongoing, growing archive of a life lived out loud, in public, with whoever cared to read along.
 
And, against all odds, I think I’ll continue.

How can this be true

 

If I were to paint a sunset, how could I possibly do this justice? Even this photo has not quite caught its magnificence. 

May I never forget this moment.

Beautiful sounds: sunrise

The cacophony of birdsong suddenly diminishing to occasional twirpping the moment the sun rises above the horizon.

Beautiful sounds: water

The gurgle and slap of waves along the bow as I lie on the heeling side of the hull, tacking through the sea while reading.

Funny idea

The Chief Officer took a photo of me, but without feet. When I asked him to take another with feet, he said without feet makes me look taller.

Beautiful sounds: pond

The soft shooshing of water as it enters the pond on one side and slips out on the other.

Curtains Against the Coastline

When the Turkish officer recounted the story years later, it was still with a sense of disbelief. His ship had anchored off the west coast of British Columbia, near a stretch of shoreline lined with beautiful, posh summer houses. The evening was quiet, the sky dimming into that deep blue hour between sunset and darkness. Inside the cabins, crew members went about their routines. Some lights glowed through the glass of the portholes.

Then came the order from the Port Authorities: any porthole facing the shore must be covered. The only exceptions were the navigation lights required by international law at the bow and stern. The reason? Residents ashore did not want to be “disturbed” by the sight of light coming from the ship.

The officer asked his captain, “What sort of people are like that?” The captain’s answer was swift: “Rich people.” It was a demonstration of privilege born from wealth most likely, from being white. Not in the form of open hostility, but in the quiet rearranging of other people’s lives to preserve one’s own comfort.

From the shoreline, the request might have seemed trivial: what is the harm in asking for a few lights to be dimmed? But from the deck of that ship, it was a reminder that wealth has a reach. It can cross the water, override practical norms, and erase your presence entirely, without a second thought.

Photo by Roland Schumann on Unsplash

She wasn't born yesterday

She struggles down the stairs at Platform 14 of Hamburg's central station. Labouring somewhat under a backpack and two carry-on suitcases, she stops halfway down the steps to catch her breath.
 
A man, maybe in his thirties, shabbily dressed, picks up one of her bags and asks whether he can carry it the rest of the way. She’s grateful yet suppresses the instinct to say, "Don't bother; I can do it." Instead, she closes her mouth into a soft smile and gives a nod of thanks for his civility.
 
At the bottom of the stairs, she hasn't even finished saying her thank-yous when he launches into an elaborate story: he and six friends were travelling south, he missed his train, and something, something, and still more—she can't quite keep the facts in order.
 
After quite a ramble, she understands that he "just needs" 12 Euros (or was it 15 or 20?) to meet up with his friends. He'll travel with her to Hannover, carry her luggage, and then be able to pay her back when they reunite there.
 
He keeps talking while she thinks: Phaah. He's standing too close. His breath smells of alcohol. He has no teeth. He's obviously high. He can't really think this will work, can he? He must live in another world where an old woman still believes these kinds of lies.
 
When he finishes his pitch, she gazes into his eyes with a measure of kindness and says, "No, thank you." They both nod, and he disappears into the crowd.
 
She lingers for a moment, then glances at a man who has been observing the encounter the whole time. She blinks, gives him a half-smile, and wanders off in the opposite direction.

Beautiful sounds: lone bird

The sharp, trilling birdsong of a solitary singer, breaking the hush of a sun-drenched noon as all others sleep.

TR update: fermentation of ideas

Obviously, I’ve been really busy writing and making podcasts for the upcoming voyage. I’ve spent hours every day working on the project. It has been very satisfying.
 
Nevertheless, Christina approached me to work together with her on some creative project. So, Talkshow Rivals it is. I would like to publish it as an online novel series. Since the storyline is fleshed out, it shouldn’t take too much work to rewrite it as a serial. Or get Christina to do it together with ChatGPT or Claude.
 
My idea would be to create a persona for each of the main characters. We could use these personas to shape the tone and speech patterns of the dialogue. ChatGPT could then help Christina and me make sure the dialogue flows. One of the things I find difficult to imagine is how each character speaks in their own unique voice.
 
So, hopefully, Christina can read through the script in the next months while I am on the ship. When I return from the trip, we can start creating the personas.
 
Briz has also offered to help in any capacity.
 
Julien has suggested I make an interactive graphic novel of it. Graphically, it can be stick-figures. It would be an opportunity to learn some basic coding. Anna, Julien's colleague, and Amol have offered their help.
 
So, even though I haven’t “done” much, except rework the script by removing the gaming elements, the ideas are fermenting, bubbling to the surface.