Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
I hope you all have had a wonderful weekend. I was on the nightshift, so most of the time I was at work or asleep. It's not always fun to have to work in the hospital. For sure not in this time of year with the holidays coming, but ... well my patients need my help and of course that makes me happy.
This month I hope to inspire you through quotes from the novels by Paulo Coelho, and he has written a lot of novels. The main part I have read, but not all. For this episode I have found a wonderful quote from one of the novels I haven't read yet. It's one of his most recently published novels, The Spy. In a way I have to read The Spy, because the main character of this novel is a Dutch spy, Mata Hari (or Margaretha Zelle). She was a dancer and she spied for the British Secret Service. The Spy is on my reading list, so I hope to tell you a little bit more about Mata Hari after I have read it. Until than I will use quotes extracted from The Spy which I found on several websites.
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| Cover of The Spy |
Here is the quote to work with for today's episode:
[...] "Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears." [...] (Source: Paulo Coelho - The Spy)
Love ... the one true emotion we need in our life can also be used in spying as Mata Hari did to retrieve intelligence from the Germans and other enemies. I think love is still used that we by spies, but of course that's not the love we need in our life.
Here at CDHK we have had recently a whole month about Tanka, the Japanese love poem, and we have tried to bring love into haiku ... and that's what I love to ask you for this episode. Try to create a haiku in which you bring love. Of course tanka is also okay, but if possible ... try to create a "love"-haiku.
I have given it a try:
your heart
belongs to me, roses I give,
the full moon
© Chèvrefeuille
This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until December 10th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our next episode later on.
I did a love poem with a nod towards the maltese falcon, a wwii mystery.
ReplyDeleteUK National Archives has a pdf file on Mata Hari, Starting from pg 15 there are pages from a 1917 Dutch magazine article on her
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/filesonfilm/mata-hari-alias-mcleod-margaretha-geertruida-marguerite-gertrude-kv-2-1.pdf
Wiki says the French trial transcripts are supposed to be declassified in 2017 which BBC says went on display Oct 2017 in Leeuwarden's Fries Museum. I am wondering if that means there will be new books/articles about her. Mostly what I read is the French asked her to spy and then executed her when they needed a scapegoat to take public attention off their war losses.