New book "The Way"

A bit of surrealism. A bit of mysticism. A richness of imagery. And a lot of reflection: on beauty, on fear, and death. And also a multitude of questions: addressed to the Universe and addressed to my readers.

That's what my new book called "The Way" will be. A book in which I have collected my writings over a considerable period of time. More than ten years, that's for sure. In fact, "The Way" is two books. And they will be published simultaneously. In one I've compiled my poems. In the other, short and sketch stories.

This post is about these books being finalised and put together, about finally finding the title (literally a week ago). This is an announcement that, here, the books are in, the books are to be. What's not there yet is an exact publication date. So I suggest keeping an eye on the news. At the moment I am busy correcting the text in Russian and preparing it for publication. Most likely, the Russian version will be published on Ridero and Amazon in late summer or early autumn. After that, I will work on the English version. There is more work there - I expect publication during the autumn of this year.

If you visit the pages of the books, you can see they look like this:

This is a preliminary version of the cover. But it roughly conveys the atmosphere that will be on the final version as well.

The book "The Way. Short Stories" will include stories from my "Year of Stories" series, among others. You can read some of them here: https://www.petergoncar.com/blog/categories/short-stories

And in an upcoming post, I'll also share a couple of the latest poems that will be included in the book "The Way. Poetry".

Flowing Moments of Life

Moments. Life is filled with them. It consists of them. And so, they flow, like water, one into the other. Like water in a mountain stream. Or they may be compared with the movements of an ecstatic dance. But there it is, the movement. And there is statics too, of course. The point at which they come together is especially fascinating - when you yourself are resting, almost motionless and looking just straight ahead, but observing the action. It can be compared to a static video shot showing movement, showing life.

And here's the day. An ordinary day. A special day. It's good when every ordinary day is special. And they are like that - you just have to retain the skill to notice it. And what's so great about this day?

Here it is. In a nutshell. A walk through the city. Beautiful green streets. Enjoying the summer, which is just as it should be: warm, comfortable, not scorching, with a breeze. Food market. Back home. Coffee and American pancakes with maple syrup. Talking to a friend: about all sorts of things, important and not-so-important. She shares with us where she saw fireflies the other day. Right in the wild. We're thinking in the evening: "We should go there one of the next days." And a little later: "Why wait? Let's go now!" And we go. It's already dark. It's almost nighttime. Walk. Walk. Walk. Here we are. We did not see a lot of them, but a couple of them appeared - they teased us a little with their "switch-on" and quick "switch-off". But in addition to fireflies we saw foxes. A couple of them, too. They weren't too scared. But they didn't want to interact much either. They stood aside, watched us, waited until we left. Beautiful evening. Beautiful night.

Beautiful spontaneity. It's like jumping into flowing water. It's like spinning in a dance. It's about letting the moments of life flow through you.

A Forest of Spirit

Last winter, at the turn of the old and new year, we went to the forest. It was the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The end and the beginning. On such important natural days, we always try to interact with it, with nature. And it is very important for us not to lose touch with the forest. So we chose a forest not far from Krakow and went there on a snowy December day.

And we got what we were looking for. And more than that. We communicated with the trees. We rolled in the snow. We felt one with nature. After all, nature doesn't leave us - it's people who move away from it, even though they are always a part of it. We walked around and felt that our spirit and the spirits of nature, and its Spirit are one.

And apart from the sense of the intangible, we simply enjoyed the views. Among other things, we found ponds that looked literally like something out of a fairy tale or some kind of fantasy. And then we decided that we would come back to this place again in spring.

So we did. At the end of May, we visited the forest again. We spent even more time there. We settled our winter debt to leshy. Once again we enjoyed the view of the ponds - now in a springtime entourage. And once again we felt that spiritual, immaterial, with which the forest is permeated. And (importantly), those places gave us inspiration for new parts of the book "Cloch and Bua".

Indeed, photos don't really give you the feeling of space. Neither the sense of the spiritual. But here they are. And perhaps you, too, can feel inspired through them?