puzzling

Has it ever happened to you to lay your hands on a book that was so intriguingly capturing that you can no longer leave it behind...? Yesterday i must confess something i no longer thought possible happened. Quite often lately nothing has been able to draw me into it as it used to before... but then Eugene Van Itterbeek's "Journal Roumain" did the miracle. As one might as well guess from the title the book is about the impressions and feelings that Romania has aroused in the heart and mind of a foreigner. The pages are quite a lesson some of us have needed for a long time now, it's about the miraculous beauty in simplicity that Romania has. It is quite shocking to see the richness and complexity of Romanians, their simplicity and still depth of spirituality.
There's no room for superficial here, God and nature are all omnipresent in people's minds leaving deep traces in everything they do in their daily lives, carving their character, building their personality.

Besides, the Romanian villages seem like some oasis of the past- full of deep significance, purity and God; their beauty is so mystic and lost in the Western civilisation, and so regretted by Mr. Itterbeek... and so searched and longed for by many who come here to find themselves....

reading his lines made me wonder- why do we sometimes so obstinately think what we don't have is so much better? Why so many of us dream of promised lands, of superficial, material things, when the obvious is we have something valuable, a unique treasure that riscks to be lost or praised by others only, while so derided by us who own it?