Návraty Domov/Coming Home [antikvár]

Karol KaJlay is an artist aware of the old saying that you cannot catch a bird in a net wi h only one eye. But I got instantly entangled in his net of frozen moments of Slovak space and time that he called CommgHome As I silently gazé at the Slovak landscape in his pictures I suddenly hear a hymn How Beautiful Thou Art, MyNative Land, composed by M. Schneider-Trnavsky, and I feel that I seem to be moving, transporting myself somewhere back in time while writing a letter... And lo, from my sunny shore of memones I am setting out through the landscape of my childhood and youth to the land of my forefathers, their descendants, my relatives, further on to the places where I worked, from the South to the North, from the East to the West, through Hont, Spis, Orava, Saris, Pohronie, down to the Danube plain, Zahorie, and 1 realize profoundly that I am a native of the Slovak South, through my father from Orava and through my mother from Spis. I was deeply affected by the regions that I came to know through them and I came to realize that I belong to the generation of storytellers inspired above all by our homeland. To the land of my forefathers, native places of my mother and father, I travel in my childhood most often in summer. On the eve of my departure I always stop by my beloved Southern river where the horses are given water and where the shadows of the trees lie as if on a motionless surface of the river. The silence rules, there is no wind and the red sun sinks into the lowlands and warms your back. The night and darkness stay warm for a long time. I know that in those moments when I stand by the river in the sun, up in the Slovak mountains people already sit by their lamps and talk about the events of the day and think about the next morning and while the river is quiet over here, up there you can hear a mountain brook even when you are deep in the forest. When the poppies bloom in the Southern fields, the heat rules, while in the North it is still fresh, valleys are still green and the grain fields are only small points of the sun that bathes every morning amidst the summer in the pure dew, together with the blue sky. So I enter this world that I see either as pure white, or pure green, from the landscape just fiiled with yellows, reds and with roads white as flour. And when I later leave the native land, I return to it mostly when it blooms with colours and is fiiled with sunshine. I have been wandering through Slovakia since my childhood, between its North and South, East and West, the lowlands and the mountains, towns and villages... What is it that stayed in my mind uppermost? Well, this recommendation from my parents inherited from my forefathers: "Ifyou hold your dear ones close toyour heart, ifyou like your people and rememberyour native home and land and ifyou do not stop thinking about them with love, then the sun will never stop shining 011 you even ifyou were tofreeze toyour bones and get wet through and through... "And they were right. When I remember people who were close to me and my native land, it never rains, it is never cloudy, there are only beautiful days, words, voices, and melodies.J look at everything with love because of the love which I have received from everyone: including puppies, kittens, little lambs, goats, cows, ponies...Through a summer Spis meadow I walk towards a little lamb that I am taking to pasture for my grandmother, I am playing on a mouth organ and from the birch trees comes a girl with her own little lamb and she is singing a song that I am playing on my organ... What one sees, experiences, and goes through when one wears shorts is unforgettable, since the loves of those years stay with you longest-even forever. When a man in the South sets out through the autumnal plain, he turns into a poet and storyteller for everyone and in the spring, when the acacias are blooming, the same happens, especially because of one's love and loves. Winter in the South is depressing; springtime is expressing itself in song when even birds know when to sing so that they may make each other attractive. It is awesome to walk through an alley of flowering acacia trees-they make you dream. Acacia forests, alleys, poplar alleys...Acacias in bloom are spring, poplar alleys are summer, autumn, and all these trees put together are a dream and distance... Somé mystery seems to be hidden behind those trees, something that will come,