A hermit and a poet

Everyone has a story to tell, at least one. Can you believe there is a man in Poland who chose the hermit's life when he was 24? He left university and ordinary life behind, and went to live in the wilderness of The Bieszczady Mountains in the most south-eastern part of Poland. He wanted to live a homeless person's life in extreme poverty, away from civilisation in order to find a living God and a mystical connection with Christ. Jano (Pustelnik z Bieszczad) is almost sixty years old and he doesn't regret his life choices. His parents were both teachers. His father spoke many languages fluently and read books in the original languages, not translations. This talent makes me think of another linguist I happened to cross paths with. I am talking about a poet who writes both in English and Spanish and whose interest in Dylan Thomas resulted in publishing 'To Dylan', a book of poems inspired by the Welsh bard. Robert is working on the next book related to Dylan Thomas' poetry, I gathered. Why don't you visit Robert Gurney's website here and discover the poet for yourself?
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I've just received an email from Robert and am sharing it with you here:

Hi Joanna

Struggled for ages to get this on your blog without success:

Dylan's Gower by Robert Edward Gurney,  Cambria Books, 1 November 2014

Talking to Dylan Thomas's lovely granddaughter, Hannah Ellis, and to the inspiring Olivier Award-winning actor Guy Masterson last night at the RSA in John Street, London on the occasion of their brilliant British Council seminar "Dylan Thomas: A Life in Words", I was particularly struck by Hannah's reference to Dylan's notebooks which he wrote between the ages of fifteen and twenty. She mentioned how these had been lying mouldering  in a box in Boulder, America, but are now available to the public in Swansea. Hannah argued that everything was there, in embryo, in those notebooks,  that that period of poetic creativity, those five years of “cosseted” (Hannah’s word)  creative activity, a veritable  explosion that occurred within the young genius relieved to drop out early, at sixteen, from a school in which he was bored,  were the foundations of his work to come.  Dylan lived in Swansea, on the edge of Gower, during those years.  Hannah referred to a text in which  he wrote that he "often" went down to Gower. The gist of this book, Dylan's Gower, is that it is clearly time to re-evaluate the influence of the spectacular and quirky Gower Peninsula on his work. Hannah maintained that Newquay and Laugharne were key periods in the gestation of Under Milk Wood. I agreed but argued that to them must be added the beautiful bays and villages of his early ‘backyard’, the place to which he would escape during his formative years and to which he was tempted to ‘retire’  in the final year of his life. This book points, perhaps, to the need to re-evaluate the role Gower played in the formation of the creatures of the mysterious entity of Dylan’s literary imagination.

Bob, Thank you for sharing that. It will be interesting to read what you discovered about the place so important in Dylan Thomas' life and literary pursuit.

As to adding comments on the blog, I have mentioned before that I am not an IT geek and cannot explain why so often people cannot add them below my post. Maybe they expect to see them straightaway which doesn't happen.
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This evening I would like to add a poem I came across when reading about the Voluntary Simplicity (VS) movement:

The Secret of Life

By Joe Dominguez

The secret of life is simply you…

your magnificence, your divinity.

Love is the medium through which

the divinity manifests.

The medium is the message.

Love is the message.

When you love, you are carrying the message…

You are manifesting your magnificence,

your divinity.

When you feel love, you feel good.

When you feel good, you feel love.

When you feel good, you feel god.

When you feel god, you feel good.

Love is your creation.

Your natural state is

the ecstatic experience of Love.

It is simply the conscious experience

of our aliveness, made manifest…shared.

Love does not “happen” to us.

We happen it.

We happen it by removing that which blocks it.

Living a life is simply the process of removing

those barriers to experiencing Love.