A Place for Real Conversations
I am what you would call ‘emotionally-challenged’, tear ducts-wise. Then, I read this the other night and water started streaming out of my eyes.
It’s a speech delivered by Chief Sealth, or Seattle, to his native Duwamish indian tribal assembly in 1854 in the Pacific Northwest.
I just had this thought.
What I’m doing with Tiny House of the Heart (Thoth), the ‘bookstore’, is potentially a new-new thing.
I like to read, just as you might like to cross-stitch, take pictures with a DSLR camera, or build water pumps to water the hydroponics vegetables. It the ’something’ that we are passionate about.
After a while of doing, you begin to yearn for company. So you start telling your friends about your pieces, and even go so far as to recommend them to sink $1,200 so as to go take pictures with you on Friday afternoons.
In my case, with books, I started looking at how people buy books and discovered that major retailers missed out one big thing - recommendation. When you go to Borders or Kinokuniya, you get tens of thousands of titles grouped into broad categories and people who can help you find the book, as if you ‘already know’ what is it that you want.
Every one of us knows exactly what we’re thinking about, what is it that we’re on to. What we do not know is that there is a book about that thing out there already. I believe this to be the main reason why many don’t read.
There is a huge niche and potential here, I thought. There are many people who want to cook, as many would want to understand their children, and just as many would be contemplating about life.
The twist is that you cannot stretch and cover all of these niches, because you basically become another major retailer.
The trick is to be small, even tiny.
Thoth is a tiny bookstore for people who want to find out who they are, their spirits and passions, their hearts and soul, their creative potentials, and their search for meaning.
In time, my living-room-of-a-bookstore will be an address that strangers would walk in and spend a day reading a good book. And since we all have the same vibrations, a group will take form, then a community. I think that will a good thing.
And in the meantime, I will make a little profit from the books sales to pay off the rent and replenish the coffee counter 
After all, what I really want is to meet and talk to more people, not the astronomical (relatively) profits of a big book retailer.
I’m ever the procrastinator. The move has been set for next Friday and I’ve spent most of the week reading, handling a server sales and only in the depths of the night do I start drawing the plans for Thoth.
This took till 6am on Wednesday. The problem is with Ikea. They have like 10 ranges of shelves, ok, my budget only allows the 3 lowest priced ones. It’s the layout - how can I balance 3D-whitespace with enough storage for a sizable little store? Anyway, that’s what kept me up all night.
Here are some of my personal favorites of the now-finalized floor plan:
Right now, I’m only expecting friends to visit the joint so there’s absolutely no worries about the place being too jammed. It was good to start doing this without thinking about money. And as far as Thoth’s operations goes, the bulk of whatever I can scrimp and save goes to buying new titles!
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.The dark will be your womb
tonight.The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learnanything or anyone
that does not bring you aliveis too small for you.
David Whyte
House of Belonging
Tags: David Whyte, Jalan Hitam Manis, poetry
Thoth is Tiny House of the Heart - it’s the Singaporean compulsive abbreviator at work here. Thoth started out as my wanting to own a place for real conversations.
I didn’t like the noise in the city, preferring the crickets’ emsemble sprinkled with the distant dog’s barks of approval. I simply cannot stand the artificial pounding and driving anymore, not even the Doppler’s swish of cars. I know I have to get out of the ‘city’. But, alas, I live in a country that is also a city. However, I’ve got my supporters - guardian angels who love me and are going to LOVE what I’m going to do next. So, they brought 113 Jalan Hitam Manis to me.
Jalan Hitam Manis - literally will be my ’sweet dark street’. It’s where I will continue the quest to find my soul - a quest Thomas Moore says will take me into the dark nights. It’s a trip that one makes on their own. Well, you’re not really alone because your guides will show up. Jalan Hitam Manis, the street where the nights will be sweet.
There will be 3 rooms on the upper floor. Two will adjoin a quaint balcony. I’ll settle in one. My own room. And in the other, the guest room, which I’ll use for the hypnotherapy sessions. In the third room, facing back, I’d move Spiragram there if the landlord approves my Home Office scheme application. There is one bathroom on the mezzanine level. No more lower body privacy for me then, but I guess I can live with that, just need to get a big comfortable bath robe to spare the rest.
On the ground level, there’s a fairly big living room where the conversations will take place. I’ll have to come up with a layout plan that ferments them. A place where a stranger walks in and immediately feels at home. A Singaporean stranger, but not your typical HDB layout of course. There are things that transcends cultural and ethnic barriers that oozes ‘home’. I have to nail that down. And it’s not that hard, I tell you. If I were to use my head to think and plan this, it will be impossible. But now, I’ve learn to use the faculties of my Heart - the better brain - to achieve this. There’s this quiet confidence in me that tells me I can do this by walking around, visiting 2nd hand shops.
The kitchen is bare, and white, featuring a nice-size store room. I think I’ll set it up professionally, with 2nd hand equipment of course. But it’ll be my kitchen and I’ll bake, cook and brew sweet java with it.
Ah, the gardens are next. That’s what made me sign up for the place. The previous tenants did a good job with them and I intend to keep all of it. It’s a good thing the timing of the viewing was before they level them to make way for cement. I want to add a couple of fruit tress in the back. How good if there’s a breed of apple trees that can grow in our climate. If not, mango trees will be it. And from there, mango crumble! No one has done it that way before and it’ll be great. I’m also thinking of carpet grass. I love carpet grass, they feel so much cleaner to lie on to enjoy the sun and read. Rusty will like it too.
Rusty, my yet-to-be adopted Labrador Retriever. I’m calling it Rusty for now. No good reason, just that I figured that’s what its coat color will turn out to be. And ‘Rusty’ sounds amiable, calm and friendly. I hope to meet Rusty as soon as the time is right. And yes, Rusty gets his own privacy in his own doghouse, which I’ll built. Speaking of which, I got to remember to look this up online.
I don’t know about you. But if I know someone who has a place like this, opens it for people to visit, plays classic jazz and serves donate-only beverages and pies, I’d definitely hang there. It’ll hold only 4-5 groups of 2-3 friends. But Singapore is a small and pragmatic country, I think this should be enough.
Tags: Jalan Hitam Manis, place
What’s in a name? Everything, or at least, whatever you can come up with in the beginning. Whether it’s naming your child, my son had the honor to tell the story of an ambition that stretches three generations; or a new startup, I can easily tell a 15 minute story about my startup names; it is important to name the new with the hopes and dreams that you see in them.
When I was tinkering with “Tiny House Of The Heart”, I was a little concerned with how ‘cute’ it sounded. I am not cute (at first glance). But the reasons to call my new bookstore “Tiny House Of The Heart” are so much more than important than this.
In the past couple of years, I had the good luck of chancing on a number of books that really touched my heart. I was exploring a new kind of lifestyle and along the way, I had to cross the ‘aloneness’ bridge. With so much time on my hands, I started reading profusely. Out of possibly more than 100 titles, I discovered this collection that is simply magical. I call them the Soul Books.
Books for the soul calm you down. They take you away from the material concerns of the world - your no-longer-fulfilling job, your strenuous relationships, your dwindling bank account and perhaps even your waning sense of security. Soul titles take you to another world, not here, yet uncannily familiar, like it’s a long lost past from a fragment of your fondest memories. They make you realize, that after all, you are so much more than your job, title, social role and wealth. That you are not a number.
As I read these books, I found myself more open to matters of the heart. My colleagues tell me I changed. Friends tell me I’m less dominating. And I begin to smile more. All this not because I’ve moved up the next social level. And I’ll explain to anybody who’d ask that it is all due to the fact that I am more grounded.
This reading blitz also coincided with a soul searching and spiritual development phase. I still wonder if the reading caused it. But that’s not important. The important thing is that as I turned inward to know my self better, so as to answer, for myself, perennial questions like “who am I” and “what am I doing here”. You see, once you start asking these questions, the answers will started showing themselves in dreams, synchronicities and teachings.
In short, I know that I have to start this bookstore. And obviously, I am calling it where I have found it - in a small corner, a tiny space of my heart.
Cheers!
Shooperman
Thoth's garden
After a couple of weeks of looking around (thanks, Claire), I’ve finally found the place that Thoth has to be. There were options but I’m sold on the garden the previous tenant left behind.
I spent New Year’s Eve with three friends at Robertson Quay. Incidentally, the new year also ushered in a fresh list of places banning smoking. As such, I had to walk toward the river to find a nice spot for my much needed ciggy after a hefty dinner.
Two puffs in and I noticed a group of three trees right in front of me. As my mind quiets down and filters out the din from the vicinity, I gradually start to feel the trees’ presence. Apparently, they were having a nice evening chat.
I asked them what they were talking about - I’ve always want to learn more about trees, not from the books, but from them, directly.
“We’re discussing about treeness,” one of them replied.
“Ah, but what is treeness?” I asked, I vaguely know it’s about the being of a tree, but I needed specifics.
“Treeness just is. It’s what we are. Our being. And, my dear friend, there’s a lot to talk about treeness when one is a tree.” answered the older, wiser one amongst the three.
As I was pondering his response, he added “We have noticed this about man. There is not much discussion about human-ness. We’ve been trying to understand you better, but it’s all chatter about things outside a human-ness. Why is that?”
“That’s a keen observation,” I replied, “I have found that out about our people too. I have wondered about that sometimes.”
By then, I puffed my last and decided to rejoin my friends. I thanked the trees for their friendship and wisdom. Tonight, on the last day of 2008, they’ve given me something to think about.
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.David Whyte
When you want to build a place for great conversations, the implicit rule is that you create it over great conversations too. So, here’s introducing dreamer, an online friend whom I talk to about Thoth. Oh, we started talking about dreams and dreamer’s got a lot of them. Somehow I became the interpreter for them. And lately, dreamer’s been calling on them to inspire me with more ideas for the shop.
The dream for this post is one about a room infested with translucent yellowish eggs that hatched into aliens. Dreamer was confident I cannot decipher this.
So here goes.
First, the color. Since it’s translucent yellow, I mapped it to aura color meanings and it just so happens that I found this on the first google result of “yellow aura color”:
Pale or Light Yellow: Emerging psychic and spiritual awareness; optimism and hopefulness; positive excitement about new ideas.
Next, the aliens hatching. And I’m just going to say this: I believe we’re not the only living intelligent lifeform in the universe, simply because it will be such an awful waste of space.
So, dear Andromedans, Pleiadians and others, I’m going to bet on dreamer’s intuition and add your titles to Thoth.
Happy 2009!
Shooperman
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