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Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

@solivagantwisdom.bsky.social

220 followers 260 following 110 posts

Workshops, Retreats & Hypnocoaching: https://linktr.ee/solivagantwisdom https://solivagant-wisdom.com/ Founder, Jan Peters: @janpsolivagant.bsky.social‬ Get In Touch: https://solivagant-wisdom.com/contact/ #SlowLiving #Introverts #Quiet #DepthPsychology

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Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls @solivagantwisdom.bsky.social · Jul 8

Solivagant's #workshops, #retreats & #hypnocoaching are designed to nurture the innate #giftedness and #wisdom of #introversion, #solitude, #highsensitivity & #neurodivergence.

Solivagant Wisdom adheres to the principles of #slowliving and #slowculture #quiet

solivagant-wisdom.com/ourphilosophy/

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2021

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 1d

🙏 @victoriaspires.bsky.social as host of #promptcombo #DreamLogic

#newpoem #adaptation / #photography:
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025/2024

#poetrycommunity #Symbolism #RussianPoetry #PoetryInTranslation #AlexanderBlok #crypt #tomb #AllHallows #Halloween #spooktober

Mother and Son
Converse in an Ancient Crypt
After Alexander Blok

I meet you in
Dreams as a
Matter of course.

This night,
We lie side by side in an
Ancient crypt.

Above us,
Life rumble-clatters on in
Ever shriller
Boom-claps of
Hubbub and Bedlam –
Until the
Last Day is upon us.

Vague glimmer of
Paschal Sunday;
Far-flung
Clamour of
Bugle-swoon.

Our
Catacomb is
Copper-cast, but
Pulsates within a
Ruddy-gauzy
Film of light.

Wrapped in
Vapours of
Sunday-school
Monotony and
Incredulity, His

Features surface,
Clustered about with
Swords and angels.

Entombed with us, a
Placid spouse shuns
Rebirth, spurns
Emancipation -
Slumbers on in
Oblivion.

You whisper:
In life, you were sturdy-burly.
Press harder on the
Vault, and the
Stone will
Roll away.

I answer:
No, Mother - the
Strength I once had has gone. I’ve
Suffocated in the tomb.
Pray, both of you, for an angel to
Come along and
Roll away the
Stone.

Free adaptation from the Russian:
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

After Сон (“Dream”, 1910),
Alexander Blok (1880-1921), Russian Symbolist

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2024

Black-and-white image of the inside of a mausoleum taken from the entrance. The shadow of the photographer is projected into the interior.

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 1d

🙏 @victoriaspires.bsky.social as host of #promptcombo #DreamLogic

#poetry / #photography:
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025/2021

#poetrycommunity #nature #AncientTree #Kraftort #AllHallows #Halloween #spooktober #Grace #LifeAndDeath #SeenAndUnseen

Kraftort* Redux

Providence, Sacrifice,
Abundance
Wrapped in her
Spiny burrs:

Nutrient-rich, dense
Victual shagpile
Cushioning a rural folk’s
Collision with the
Frozen ground of winter want.

Pigs fattened on her kernels
Butchered at autumn’s end -
Chestnut Harvest falling between
All Hallows and the
Feast of Saint Martin;
Slant-lit season eroding the
Membrane between
Life and Death,
Seen and Unseen.

Late one year, a
Young patient dies under
Ether. As
Penance, the
Surgeon walks, cycles
Seven miles each day, in all weathers, to Attend Mass at the
Pilgrimage chapel beneath the
Chestnut;

Hand-builds a grotto,
Stone by stone, under the
Canopy of the
Venerable tree.

Years pass.
One October night, the
Penitent holds solitary
Vigil at the grotto.

Brisk wind stirs, shakes the laden Branches.

In his reverie, he hears the
Sharp, rapping
Abacus-and-rosary click of
Reproach and condemnation
Charged in
Ever-quickening,
Voluble reports to the
Ledger of sins and good works.

Rousing him,
Restoring him to himself, the
Clicks soften into thuds -
Burrs raining down on the
Grotto:

Gracious host breaking
Generously upon him.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

*Kraftort (Ger.), lit. “place of power”

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2021

Trunk of an ancient chestnut on a gloomy November day, next to a pilgrimage church and graveyard.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2021

Interior and shrine of a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 3d

#ImageAndVerse #Stunday #October #Autumn #vssdaily #pass

#newpoem / #photography:
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025/2024

#poetrycommunity #bskypoetry #nature #EastCoastKin #spooktober #transience #Kenosis #AllHallows

Autumn Singularity

Pristine, primordial -
Autumn.

Blaze of
All-too-brief crystalline days
Splintering into scintillae that
Flare, fade then
Fold into
Gloaming.

Miraculous as those
First seconds struck ex nihilo:
Infinitely short,
Neither One, neither Nought,
Voiced, not glossed -
Lucid, unelucidated.

Peened scythe
Preens its whetted edge of
Grain remains that
Spark, scatter,
Settle over
Dark-mattered earth.

In desolate, clod-clustered
Spasms, earth strains towards the
Hunter’s Moon,
Pines for the plough – a
Harrowed hankering.

Season in humility
Trims its luminosity.
Glare pared away,
All Saints empties out into
Nothingness bordering
All.

Winter’s Gift:
Clarity.
Trees seen clearly, singly: the
Ground that sustains them - now
Naked to the eye -
Sustains all.

In October,
Birdsong has long since
Receded down the
Sun’s Path, but Saint Lucy’s
Storms are still far off.

In October,
Skies pass their
Azure breath into
Evening’s
Prone core – as
Day exhales,
Expires.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

Inspired by Есть в осени первоначальной
(“There is in Earliest Autumn”, 1857),
Fyodor Tiutchev (1803-1873)

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2024

Trees along a country lane, captured at golden hour in early November.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2024

Lone, mature tree in autumn on a hill. Leaves already golden, with half of the foliage already stripped.

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 9d

🙏 @thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social #promptcombo #sotellmewhoyourfriendsareandI’lltellyouwhoyouare
Sorry, it's long, but it's the only one that fits. 😆

#poem: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

#ComingOfAge #memory #80s #90s #GenX #Yugoslavia #poetrycommunity #Zagreb #PeterUstinov

Leslie Caron in Zagreb, 1989

We bond
Over letters:
Shared passion for
Language, literature -
The Life of the Mind;
Shared cache of quotes from
Python, Blackadder, ‘Allo ‘Allo.

The girl from Zagreb -
Polyglot, worldly beyond her
Eighteen years, working-class -
Eclipsing with ease the churchy,
Would-be Oxbridge crop of a
Suffolk sixth form.

Her neat, feminine hand,
My barely legible scrawl:
Aghast at Tiananmen Square,
Elated at the Fall of the
Berlin Wall.

Maiden Voyage, December 1989:
Sleeper via Milan to stay with her
In Hrvatska, Yugoslavia.

Melee of Laibach, Gastarbeiter,
Hyperinflation,
Hand-milled coffee, MTV.

Goli Otok, Adriatic Alcatraz,
Abandoned that very year.
Bratstvo, jedinstvo i suživot -
Dried husks crumbling into tinder.

My friend’s university ID:
Latin and Croatian arrayed in
Solemn columns -
Zagreb folding back into
Bulwark of Christendom.

One morning, black-clad,
Sombre, she absents herself.
High-school comrade,
Bosnian Muslim girl, has
Taken her own life. Later,
My friend, dejected, recalls
The mother’s blank-eyed, flint-faced
Parting words:
Ali Bog će joj oprostiti!
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

That evening, we visit my friend’s
Bosom Buddy:

We are greeted by a bubbling beck of
Kindness, soft-cheeked smiles, giggles, Modishly bobbed, black curls – and
No English or German.

We converse. My friend interprets.
In the background: snatches of Lili on TV -
Enchantingly mawkish fifties Hollywood
Chick flick. Leslie Caron as suicidal Ingénue. Homeless, heartbroken, Unwittingly confessing to the carnival Puppeteer – a wounded, embittered
Veteran – through his four puppets:
Brash, Sly, Prima Donna, and Craven Giant.

I’m puzzled as to why I should recall this.
Perhaps the answer lies with the
Six Feet Under episodes I watch
Years later:
TV as sounding board for the
Subconscious,

Echoing inner conflicts, grief, anxiety – Now a foreshadowing, now an
Ironic counterpoint.

Our conversation shifts to Bosnia.
My friend talks of relatives, cousins
Stockpiling weapons, with or without
Official connivance, since the end of
World War Two.

I respond with a Peter Ustinov anecdote.
My friend interprets:
Tito hosts a state banquet, with
His old comrade-in-arms, Džemal Bijedić, In tow. Now Prime Minister, the burly Bosnian Muslim, seated beside the US Ambassador, regales her with tales of their Partisan exploits in the Dinaric Alps.
Rips apart the main course with his bare Hands, speaks with his mouth full.

Tito, seated opposite, glares, hisses:
Bijedić!

Bijedić, wiping greasy fingers on his lapels,
Continues to slurp, slobber, smack his lips.

Bijedić! Nož!

Bijedić grabs the cheese knife:

Tko?

Girl with the bobbed, black curls
Roars with laughter, then coolly:

Usput, ja sam Bošnjakinja.

Oh God, have I put my foot in it?

She chuckles warmly, shakes her curls.
Our gaze shifts to a key scene in the
Denouement of Lili, in which
Leslie Caron takes her leave of the Puppets. They tremble, on the verge of Tears. Angry, bitter puppeteer can’t tell Her how he feels.

Teenagers on the cusp of womanhood,
They sigh and coo.

We take our leave of Bosom Buddy - the
Girl with the bobbed, black curls.

She enfolds me in a warm hug, squeezes
My arm.

Penfriend and I drift apart. I move through Berlin, Turkey, Poland, the Middle East, End up at university in
North London.

1992. Conflict within a conflict.
Croat-Muslim War erupts in Bosnia.
Slurs traded between Balije and Ustaše.
Croats blow up Stari Most.
In Donji Ahmići, civilians fleeing across Fields are picked off by sharpshooters.
Agony of flames for those left at home.

I often wonder what became of those girls:
The Worldly One, the Bosom Buddy,
Friendship – theirs, ours.

One of them is alive,
Thriving.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

NOTES

Hrvatska, Croatia

Bratstvo, jedinstvo i suživot, (Croat./Bos.) Brotherhood, Unity, and Coexistence

Ali Bog će joj oprostiti! (Croat./Bos.) “But God/Allah will forgive her!“

Nož! Tko? (Croat./Bos.) “Knife! Who?”

Usput, ja sam Bošnjakinja. (Croat./Bos.) “By the way, I’m Bosnian.”

Balije, derogatory term for Bosnians

Ustaše, Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization, formed a puppet regime in Croatia under the Axis powers during WWII. Here used as a derogatory term for Croats.

Stari Most, literally “Old Bridge” - the iconic, 16th-cent. Ottoman bridge spanning the Neretva in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 12d

#PoemsAbout #BreakTheMould @thebrokenspine.co.uk @alanparrywriter.co.uk

#EmilyDickinson #PaulCelan certainly broke the mould

#poetry: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

#prescience #Modernism #VictorianPoetry #Niemandsrose #FahmidaRiaz

To E.D. - Called Back
“This rare narcotic she bears”

Solitude yields a rare liquor,
Trickling – Morse-toned – Yet the
Cadence is Protestant hymnal.

Carrington Event sparking a
Minor blaze at Amherst
Telegraph Station – Her verse tells
Of Black Swans that will -
In time – haunt the dreams of Flappers
And Radium Girls.

Not
Like one who hosts learned soirées
At Walden Pond – But true
Anchoress – withdrawing – with each
Death - into Soul’s select
Society. Godly reason

Displacing Ego from
The Hub of Creation - Her age
Witnesses Calvinist
Melancholy morph into
Neurotic paralysis
Of the Fair Sex – Brain now aglow
With a light - eerier
Than all the Soul’s dark effulgence.

Hers
An age of Lovelace’s algorithm -
Darwin’s worms - Mendel’s peas -
An age where Arnold’s Sea of Faith
Retreats with the tide.
An age where Freud – Infant – bodies
Forth drives – primal, turbid.

Like these, but seeing further, Her
Verse - Quarks and Charm – chimes in With
Modernist, Futurist -
Discerning the Numinous at
Precisely those points where
Things Fall Apart.

E.D. calls back:
“Are you - Nobody - too?”
Death-fugued in his Parisian exile,
Poet – cryptic neologist
In his Muttersprache, Mördersprache -
Answers from the hollow
Heart of his No-One’s Rose.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

Note: Muttersprache, Mördersprache (“Mother Tongue”, “Murderers’ Tongue”)

Epigraph: from A Woman is Laughing, Fahmida Riaz (trans. A. Saxena)
See bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahmida_Riaz

Iconic daguerreotype from 1846-47 of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Iconic black-and-white photo of German-language poet, Paul Celan (1920-1970)

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 14d

#OTD #80s 15-16 Oct. 1987 #GreatStorm #ClimateChange
#RetroArtPrompt #nefarious @artbyseranya.bsky.social

#poem / #photography: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025/2024

#poetrycommunity #bskypoetry #Shakespeare #Macbeth #Tempest #scream #monochrome #Nature #BirnamWood

The Tempest - PAGE ONE

Halfway between
Chernobyl and my first
Exercise of suffrage:
Sizewell B, just fourteen miles away,
Prompts loud, lapidary Green to
Spore in the deep, dark midnight of
Tory Blue.
October evening,
Sixth-form outing:
Contemporary Shakespeare,
Theatre Royal.

Tempest:
Inner turmoil, ambition, treachery -
Otherworldly disruption of the
Natural order.

We return home at midnight
To soft rain. The air is still,
Sultry for an autumn night,
As if the season
Has sapped its own strength;
As if the season
Has hollowed itself out from the inside.

4am
Pitch and yaw of a
House far out at sea.
Walls vibrate.
Unearthly howls:
Souls in agony
Circumambulating,
Seeking succour,
Scratching at double-glazed sills.

Whipcrack-flash of
Power lines striking the ground.

Daylight whisks in,
Softening the storm to a
Mere gale.
I peer out the window:

Copper-topped and bristled
Head of the Troubled One,
To whom I give wide berth,
Slices prow-like through the
Choppy headwind.

We venture out.
Cars, phone boxes,
Post boxes, greenhouses,
Annexes crushed under
Toppled cedar,
Sycamore,
Oak.

Spire adorning the town’s
Private school -
Cracked,
Crooked,
Doomed to collapse.

A neighbour’s wall
Lurches, dissolves, nearly
Smothers my sister.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

The Tempest - PAGE TWO

Countryside:
Birnam Wood battalions,
Squadrons, platoons
Decapitated, decimated -

Macheted – or
Mangled.
Shredded by
Volley upon volley of
Round shot.

Tunstall Forest -
Annihilated.

Power returns
Intermittently, but the
Windscreen-wiper motors on the
Family car conk out.

Driving home in rain,
Patches of Ipswich, Woodbridge,
A12
With lights still out.

Pair of Mum’s old tights
Attached to the wipers,
Now hand-operated by
Driver and front-seat passenger.
Wisecracks ripple through the car.

Years later,
I watch and rewatch
Polanski’s Macbeth.

What troubles me most:
Scant mention
Made of the
Storm, the
Tempest.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2024

Monochrome image of toppled fir tree with roots exposed next to a boardwalk. Upper Harz, Germany

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2024

Vague impression of how Tunstall Forest looked after the night of 15-16 Oct. 1987. The image here is of a forest of spruce reduced to matchsticks by bark-beetle infestation. Upper Harz, Germany

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 16d

🙏 @dragonslayerma.bsky.social as #PromptCombo host.
#SimplePleasures of #Solitude #daydreaming #solitaire #gitanes (I no longer smoke 😁)

#poetry / #photography: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025/2008

#LeGrandMeaulnes #Sologne #EscapeRoom #Philemon #Baucis #Chateau #InnerLife

Lost Estate

La Sologne,
Sand-and-clay implacability, where
Maquisards,
Oblivious to time’s march, melt into a
Marsh-and-meadow melee.
Where hedgerow-cached
Portals open onto pingo-pond,
Sylvian dominions
Pooling the nameless, numberless Consolations of
Solitude.

Readers chanced upon a clearing here in
Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes
A century ago - its enigmatic
Lost Estate the tale’s symbolic pivot.

Mystery and transience of youth,
Doomed quest for a vanished world,
Now sequestered in a nondescript Chateau:
Museum-retreat fashioning a
Charmed, homespun niche amidst the
Upheavals of interwar France.

I see them with my mind’s eye, ninety Years on: ageless, reclusive
Philemon and Baucis, in whom Bukowski’s Gods still delight.

Game of solitaire arranged on the disused Billiard table in a shower of sun-gilded Motes, overseen by a tarnished
Suit of armour out of the foxed, Mildewed pages of some chapbook.

Unfinished letter, article, story or Manifesto lodged in the
Underwood typewriter, unsent to Minotaure, Pages Folles or Le Figaro -
Ashtray studded with Gitane stubs in Unfailing attendance.

Hunting trophies consigned to the boot Room, mounted askew or littering the Workbenches like decapitated
Dollies in some child’s dark, Mad Hatter Fantasy.

I hear the Lost Estate has begun hosting
An Escape Room that harbours
Twin torments for hermit souls:
Teamwork and claustrophobia.

Millennial-Zoomer masochism – gravity Of a dystopian coworking hub warping The space-time fabric of their inner life.

Imagination now a peer-driven,
Groundhog-Day litany of
“Check In,
Action This,
Get Aligned,
Circle Back.”

I recall a more spacious age, not long ago,
When I visited this nondescript chateau in An obscure corner of
France de l’intérieur.

© Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2008

Staircase, hallway, open door, window admitting sunlight in a nondescript chateau in Central France.

©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2008
Beekeeping paraphernalia (?): white beekeeper's hat resting on one of two conical structures on the sill of a window admitting daylight.

Reposted by Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls

Jan Peters - Solivagant Wisdom @janpsolivagant.bsky.social · 19d

#PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk

#adaptation: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

#Expressionism #Trakl #PoetryInTranslation #DepthPsychology #TheShadow #CainAndAbel #Blake #Nightmare

Dread

After Das Grauen (1909) by
Austrian Expressionist poet, Georg Trakl (1887-1914)

I drift through deserted rooms.
Frenzied stars dance upon a blue backdrop.
Dogs bay in beck-rimmed yards.
Manic chinook roots through the treetops.

Then all stir ceases.
Aglow with choleric ardour,
Venomous blooms sprout from my mouth.
Blood-drip sap from marred branches
Shimmers pale as dew.

From the mirror’s specious void,
From the mirror’s pearly shade,
Contours merge vaguely into the
Visage of Cain.

Curtains rustle softly.
The moon stares vacantly
Through the window.
I’m alone with my killer.

Free adaptation from the German:
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

"The Body of Abel Found by Adam & Eve", William Blake, circa 1826

Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls @solivagantwisdom.bsky.social · Sep 27

#poem: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

#tadpoles #frogs #QiBaishi #DutchGoldenAge #EarlyModern #ScienceAndPoetry #Evolution #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #BlueSkyPoets #naturepoetry #archetypes

Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls @solivagantwisdom.bsky.social · Sep 27

Hybrid of #FireSalamander #Myths #Legends & #Dragonlore #Serpentlore

#newpoem: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

#poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #BlueSkyPoets #SlavicFolklore #Widow #RussianPoetry #humoral #DepthPsychology #archetypes

Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls @solivagantwisdom.bsky.social · Sep 1

#poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

#poetry: ©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025

#Rooks #corvids #plaguedoctors #flagellants #RussianArt #dreams #sleep #DepthPsychology #EastAnglia #birdsong #naturepoetry

Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls @solivagantwisdom.bsky.social · Sep 1

Welcome!

Solivagant Wisdom: Slow Living for Quiet Souls @solivagantwisdom.bsky.social · Sep 1

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