Author: miguel

We’re told by ancient Greek stories that Aphrodite, the Goddess of sexual love, emerged from the depths of the sea in all her radiant beauty to help us blind humans see the radiant beauty in all the world, (and not incidentally, in each one of us.) The story goes even deeper, which you can discover for yourself when you swim in the ocean or more simply, by allowing yourself to taste the sea when you eat an oyster in its shell. With the brine in your mouth and your eyes closed, it takes no imagination whatever to realize that the sea is our mother, and the mother of everything else, as well.
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Karl Marx is supposed to have said that history begins as tragedy and eventually returns as farce. Too bad he’s not alive to witness the truth of his remarks as the conflict between the Catalan separatists and the central government in Madrid unfolds here in Spain, day by day, drop by drop, in all its relentless absurdity. Perhaps Marx intuited some universal truth about history, or politics, or human nature—or all three. Perhaps not. At this moment, it’s difficult to ignore the sensation that what we are witnessing here is the farce of two mutually-created firing squads aimed at each other, with the rest of Spain trapped in between.
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Boats are fundamental in the lives and livelihoods of the people who live on Formentera. It’s the smallest inhabited island of the Baleares, which include Minorca, Majorca and Ibiza and is accessible only by boat. It is roughly 30 square miles in size and, at its extremities, only 12 miles of largely infertile terrain connect one end of the island to the other.
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