à la carte spirit by ilona fried
Travel
Strip Malls as Spiritual Teachers?!
The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust Colorado is blessed with dramatic landscapes and sweeping sunny skies that inspire many people, myself included, to relocate here. Some folks even call this place “God’s country”. I wonder if these are the same people who’ve … Continue reading
The Power of ‘Ė Pericoloso Sporgersi’
Not quite seven years ago, shortly after turning 40, I spent a few weeks in Italy. I wrote about my trip on a low-profile blog I created as a substitute for postcards. In the intervening years, I’ve occasionally revisited the posts. One entry, Ė Pericoloso Sporgersi, has garnered thousands of views and several comments from … Continue reading
Trading Old for New, East for West
Sometimes the past visits in unexpected places. On Tuesday, I dropped off yet another donation of stuff. Normally, at this collection center, a brawny and frequently tattooed employee pushes a wheeled bin toward my car or approaches to help unload as I pull up. This time a slender man in his 60s ambled by as … Continue reading
Budapest: Beauty or Beast?
It’s Halloween, a chance to contemplate what is more creepy: a truly beautiful person masquerading as a hideous beast, or an attractive costume that camouflages beastly hate? Two very different news items on Hungary, one on beauty, the other on beastliness, grabbed my attention in the last week. The first, the results of a Conde … Continue reading
When a Memory’s Absence Tells a Story
A former boyfriend, from decades and another continent ago, e-mailed me last week to mention that Barack Obama had visited Germany, where he now lives with his wife and two children. He wrote: “I told my family that, thanks to you, I heard the senior Bush’s speech in Budapest in 1989!” Really? I didn’t remember … Continue reading
à la carte spirit by ilona fried 
Recent comments