Story
Story 110
When I was heading home after the sunset, I heard frenzied neighing behind me suddenly.
It was a mother horse with her foal left behind her herd calling a help.
When the neighing was heard across the grassland, one big horse rapidly reacted.
It was apparently the leader of the herd.
He ran towards the mother and her foal literally like a wind.
The moment was absolutely breathtaking.
The rest of the horses remained still and watched where the leader went.
The leader soon joined the mother and her baby, and they started walking toward the herd together.
I felt the relieved feeling of the mother horse.
The sense of responsibility of the leader based on his physical and mental strength impressed me deeply.
It was a beautiful story that the grassland could tell.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Issyk Kul)
Story 109
Sometimes we realize that we cannot be friends with everybody, but we can still live together in the same world with the right distance.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Kas)
Story 108
Ney (a reed flute) is a traditional Turkish music instrument and the most important instrument for Sufi rituals for their meditation.
I met Tugay Başar who is a ney expert when I was staying at my friend's house in Turkey.
He played ney whenever he felt the right moment had come, and the way he played was like he was breathing sacred words into his ney.
I understood why it had been said that the sound of ney transcends space and time, because ney's sound directly comes to our soul.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Eskisehir)
Story 107
I remember one person whom I met in Latvia many years ago from time to time.
On the streets of Riga, the capital of Latvia, she was strumming her accordion and singing loudly in a hoarse voice.
She did not care if anyone listened to her.
She stopped singing in the middle of a song when she did not feel like it.
I saw her in the sunshine in the early summer, and in the freezing air of winter.
It was as if she were part of a painting of the beautiful old town.
One day she asked me where I was from when I was her only listener.
“From nowhere,” I replied.
“You don’t remember where you are from? Funny,” she said.
“I quit caring where my origin is. Here I am living in this moment, that’s the most important thing to me,” I said.
“Hmm, strange.”
She looked at some crows gathering at a park next to us.
“My name is Veronique. I’m from France,” she said.
I was not sure if it was true.
If it was true, what brought her here in Latvia from France, and how come she became a street musician?
“Can you sing some of your favorite songs for me? I will sing songs for you in return,” she asked me.
It was a very cold day.
I sat next to her and sang a couple of songs.
In both songs soon after I began to sing she started playing her accordion and sang herself.
I thought that she just wanted to play music anyway.
She played Armstrong, Presley, and Piaf one after another.
The cold became unbearable, I told her that I had to go.
“Before you go, I want to ask you something,” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
“You don’t care where you are from, right? So you don’t care what you have done before? I mean, you don’t care your past at all?”
She looked into my eyes.
A pair of crows flew away from a naked tree beside us.
“Well, I try to live in this moment, here and now. Past and future do not mean anything to me,” I answered.
“When you focus on this moment to live, then each moment of your life becomes eternal, and you are free from the concept of time,” I proudly continued.
"Take care, thanks for your music," I put some coins in Veronique’s cup and stood up.
“You are not free, gentleman,” she said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I said you are not free. When you forget your past and future, and consider to live only in this moment, you are like a slave of here and now,” she said in a husky voice.
“We have memories in the past to cherish, we have hope in the future to bless. I go back to the past when my life is too hard to deal with, I dream the brighter future when I am very sad about what I have got. I travel in the past and future freely like a bird, I don’t want to be stuck in a cage of here and now forever.”
I did not know how to respond.
The woman playing music in a carefree manner taught the man who blindly believed that his view of life was highly sophisticated how actually blind he was.
“Come to see me again, I like to have a company like you,” she winked at me.
“Thanks. See you,” I shook her hand in a worn-out glove with my numb hand from the cold.
Shortly I heard her started singing over my back.
"Non, je ne regrette rien"
Edith Piaf's masterpiece that I often saw Veronique singing.
"No, I don't regret anything."
I felt that it was her own song cheering her life, and I also felt like she was singing it for everyone on the street.
Hearing Veronique stopped singing the song in the middle as usual, I walked in a cold wintry wind with warm feelings.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Riga)
Story 106
A duck was sitting on a frozen canal under a bridge.
It seemed like a lonely constellation of duck was floating in a galaxy.
Somebody might say that I could be a lonely comet passing the galaxy.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Riga)
Story 105
When Riga became a European Capital of Culture, the new National Library was going to open as a part of the memorial event.
City of Riga organized a plan to move a collection of books from the Old National Library to the new one by a collaboration work with citizens.
People would make queues all the way to the new library from the old one, and would pass the books.
That day so many people from young to elder, women and men joined the event.
We handed thousands of books in -10 °C.
It was not easy to stand still there in the cold, so some people played BGM and we danced to keep ourselves warm while we were passing the books.
Sometimes people curiously looked at the book they received before giving it to the next person because there were so many kinds of interesting books stored in the old National Library.
The New National Library opened gorgeously, and it will be a place where the great collection of the books passes on human wisdom and knowledge through generations to generations for a long time just like the people passed the books one by one.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Riga)
Story 104
Latvia is the country where the first decorated Christmas tree was put up in the world.
After Christmas, chopped Christmas trees are seen everywhere.
Remnants of Christmas decorate the town streets, and people start missing Christmas already.
(photo and story by Tengyo Kura, Riga)
Story 103
I spent one Christmas at my friend's house in a beautiful place in Latvia.
My friend's father showed me their traditional sauna.
Latvia boasts rich sauna culture.
The Latvian sauna provides not only physical health but spiritual purification as well,
According to my friend's father, a sauna is a microcosmos of the universe where your body and soul are in harmony and peace.
When I tried to take a picture of his sauna, he said that I could take a picture the sauna only from outside.
"Do you know four elements that create the world?" he asked me.
"Well... Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack before bed?" I replied.
"That's another four elements of life," he laughed.
"Look, we make fire here, and we heat stones from the soil with the fire, then we put water on the heated stones, and hot wet air rises from the stones and fills inside the sauna," he explained to me.
"So the perfect balance of the four elements is kept here now. If you bring your camera which is made of metals and plastics, the balance will break and the sauna won't function as much as it's supposed to."
I was given a guest cottage, there were many birch branches on the wall.
They are used for massaging one's body in a sauna, they must be soaked before used by the way.
The birch-branch massage gives us physical-mental relaxation and spiritual uplift.
"For us, using a sauna is like a ritual. We go back to nature spiritually and we become one with nature."
Saying so the father gazed at the fire.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Sigulda)
Story 102
"You can make fun of it; my horse singing in the middle of the night. There is no melody, no lyrics. There is no song and no horse in the first place. Nevertheless, it is better that way to live: To let the horse singing in the middle of the night be."
This piece of poem was written by a Latvian poet Ojārs Vācietis(1933–1983) when Latvia was under the rule of the Soviet Union.
The piece of poem gave a sense of hope for freedom to the Latvians who were oppressed by the then government's authority.
The horse singing in the middle of the night could be seen by nobody, but I believe that it exists within ourselves living today.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Riga)
Story 101
"Look, the moon says good night!" a little girl next to me said to her mother.
"When the moon says good night, the night must be very good," the mother said to the little girl.
"So we say good night to the moon, too. Then the night for the moon is going to be very good!" the little girl responded.
"Okay, shall we say good night to the moon now?" the mother asked the little girl.
"Yes! Good night, the moon!" the little girl waved at the moon getting away from the window.
"Soon we are going to see the sun," the mother said to the little girl.
"Is the sun going to say good morning to us?" the little girl asked her mother.
"It is for sure," the mother said to the little girl.
"Then our morning must be very good!" the little girl joyfully said.
(photo & story by Tengyo Kura, Over Siberia)