About

Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog!

On this page I want to take a little time to introduce myself to you and explain why I have created this site.

Who am I?

My name is Pierre-Laurent Sisley. I currently live in Bagnolet, a city in the Eastern inner suburbs of Paris. I was born in Brittany, the French Celtic region, in 1964. I lived my whole childhood and youth there. I have always kept a strong link with my native region as any Breton has done generally. I can even say that my personality is a perfect reflection of the land where I grew up. I was brought up in a region where the Atlantic Ocean, the peculiar ever-changing bluish grey skies and legends partly made my way of being. They shaped my personality that always expresses a complete ambivalence at any time. I walk on my life path whether it is raining or the sun is shining inside never feeling deeply sad nor happy and will still do so. I am a man having a kind of melancholy tinged with optimism, what has led me to be naturally used to having a quite poetical relationship full of subtleties like shades of colour with life. Hence, I am a very creative man. My imagination has no limit.

Professionally, I worked as a residential care officer with disabled people for 13 years. It was a great opportunity to improve my skills and to grow humanely for me. However, I decided to leave my job to study at university again and become an art-therapist in a few years. I am now experiencing this quite new challenge! Besides, I have also been studying the Australian aboriginal medecine for some years attending some specific training courses and through my own research in that subject.

Beside my professional path, I am interested in various things but spirituality is certainly one of those that matter the most in my life because it has influenced my whole existence for long changing my belief deeply. I have mainly been a Buddhist believer since 1988. I only practised Buddhism until 2008. My spiritual growth was then slow and hard because polluted by narrow-mindedness due to some ways of seeing things that I was so attached to. It logically led me to experience a huge 4 year crisis that ended in June 2008 after a sudden inner awakening. This event changed my life for a much better personal behaviour in life. I have gradually learnt to deal with things more suitably for me since then. Life has taught me to sustain my wisdom with some other beliefs as well. I now walk on the very demanding path of deep inner awakening rejecting dogmas and their “ready-to-believe” message. I do prefer curiosity and actual personal experience. In my opinion true faith is mostly a matter of openness and individuality. With time I have understood that spirituality was much wider than religion which has often missed it for centuries. I now go through life much freer as ever. I can say that I have become a longlife learner henceforth. Though I am naturally analytical-minded and tend to be as much accurate as possible in my explanations, I have gradually been giving up most of my certainties on a lot of things since summer 2008.

Seeing my life honestly, I can tell it has always been very uncommon and it has made me be a very unconventional man. I don't fit at all the image of the dude who is in his fifties having a comfortable well-ordered, indeed shade conformist, way of life. I am often told I am quirky... but I am only freer than so many others! I am what I am naturally... and don't need to apologize for this.

Small Kernevest lighthouse in Saint-Philibert (South-Brittany, France)
the town where I lived my childhood and my teenage years

What is this blog for?

I created this webspace because I like to write and exchange with others. I really enjoy expressing my ideas playing with words, trying to tell what I think as accurately and beautifully as possible, and receiving other people's reflections too. As I enjoy communicating with others being often on Internet is not such a virtual thing for me: it is a part of my real life on the contrary. In my opinion, being in touch with people this way is not completely virtual: it is only another aspect of reality that is mainly indirect. What we live in our daily life, at work, in our families or in our hobbies, it is only more visible and tangible but it has not more or less effect on our living actually. To sum up, what is usually called virtuality is only different from what we see each day around us but not unreal at all.

Another reason why I put this blog on line is my strong interest in using English language. I can indeed remember my very first feeling when I started learning English at school: it was wonderful, like if I had heard "speaking music". This inner opening to Shakespeare's language has stayed and has constantly grown since that time. I have always tried to keep my skills in English alive through the touch with English-speaking natives when travelling or socializing on Internet. I have also read books or articles on sites as much as possible and I have often written in that language commenting people's posts on their own sites or elsewhere and keeping some personal blogs as well. However, blogging is certainly the way which has always made me improve my skills the most because it has compelled me to look for more vocabulary and check my grammatical use systematically. Thus, I have been able to express my opinion on a lot of subjects more accurately and above all more personally as I have been getting more fluent in the use of English with time. I remember an Australian friend who told me one day that he found my way of writing in English naturally poetical and my level of vocabulary in his mother tongue even sometimes better than a lot of his compatriots' one that tended to stay basic and colloquial. He explained to me that he liked the choice of words I made very much: my use was more formal than what he could hear or read around him usually. A British friend told me the same a bit earlier in my life. I was surprised to hear this each time: I did not imagine that the results of all my efforts could be so obvious and acknowledged by some native English speakers actually. It is of course pleasant to know this but it is reassuring above all: I know what I am really worth in that field.

On this blog several fields are broached: psychology, self-development, philosophy, spirituality, society, politics, culture, communication, art, etc. In fact I am not focused on a specific subject. The uniqueness of my site comes more from my very personal point of view on things founded on my own experience influenced by my constant inner growth. But you have to know that I really hate dogmatism in any opinion, whether it is political, scientific, philosophical or spiritual. I am clearly a freethinker. I naturally tend to follow the path of politically incorrect ways of thinking, something than can be very disturbing for a lot of people around me who prefer to walk on the main road of political correctness.

Beside my very analytic vision of life, I also enjoy setting my creativity free. This is why some personal poems or short stories may be published too. However, my creative writing is not only in English. I indeed also write in French, my mother tongue. As I let words come to me randomly, I let them play their own sound like some notes that make up a beautiful tune... and sometimes, they appear in both English and French. Thus, I hope you like French a little bit at least. But don't worry: most of my creative writings posted here are in Shakespeare's language.

The publication rate mostly depends on time... and my personal choice. I indeed usually give more importance to quality than quantity. Thus only a few posts are posted within a long period. Doing so did not prevent me from having a regular readership in the past and it even had a positive result on my most faithful readers: some told me they could find an old entry more easily and then reread it as much as they liked.

words + ideas + creativity + exchange = blogging

Here is the end of this introduction that tells you of what matters about me and my site. Now you only have to read some articles to know me and my way of thinking better. My very first blog entry entitled The Isopogon Spirit can then complete all information given on this page. Please, never hesitate to express your opinion about any topic or issue I may have brought up on my site directly. Readers' comments are certainly what keeps a blog alive. If your ideas are explained politely and convey serious arguments, your comment will always be published even in case of strong disagreement between us. It is only a matter of honesty and basic respect to anyone. True dialogue can't exist differently at all.

I send you my best thoughts and wish you a reading enjoyment here.

Pierre-Laurent Sisley

PHOTO CREDITS: LP Le Chanjour & X