The winds of Keltia

Dear faithful readers and followers of my blog posts, looks like we could altogether meanwhile solve the initial technical problems and You can easily follow and subscribe my blog posts now by just typing klausfhepp.blogspot.com into the browser of Your smart device (fone, pad and/or computer) and entering Your email address in the menu window which You can open on the left upper side of my posts. Good news first for You! Our community is growing continuously and globally. We are many already and - and this is really overwhelming me - we are already present on all continents of this planet. Please permit me this romantic comment, but this is really "killing" me. I knew already, that I have friends, business partners and all other types of good contacts at many places, but I was deeply impressed, when Google Analytics showed me on the map of the globe, wherever You live. Wonderful. Today I selected a story and subject, which is fully personal and has nothing - directly - to do with my job career and professional experiences, but which for sure has had an important contribution to preparing me for my later-on professional development and international activities. 

Now I`ll invite You to a jump suit dive from the cloud right into the center of Paris. But at first let`s set our clocks back to saturday, march 17, 2018 and have a look at the picture I selected for this post. My 30 years old german son Florian and I had just arrived at the entrace to the famous music hall "Olympia" for attending the fabulous live show of the breton harp player Alan Stivell, an - outside the fierce community of his faithful fans - little known real dinosaur musician. Actually Alan Stivell modernized and revived the traditional celtic music and can be considered as the precursor of the later-on so called "Celtic Rock". He further developped the harp instruments, played with bronze strings and invented the electric harp. His first live LP (this was an eternity before at first music cassettes and much later-on cds became popular, not talking about MP3 or even today`s music streaming) was launched in 1972 by Fontana Recordings and titled "Á lÒlympia". 

This was exactly the year during which I had participated in a students summer camp in the very beautiful Cevennes mountains in the incredibly beautiful south of France. Besides many other very nice memories of these student camp vacations, I kept forever two important, exciting and extremely impressive remembrances. One of the many friends I made during this time, was a german girl, a little bit older than me and at the same time extremely beautiful, sweet, intelligent, culturally interested and in general very active. And she was one of the few admirers of Alan Stivell`s mordernized celtic harp music, which at that time hardly any people knew, much less in Germany. So we heard together endlessly Alan Stivell`s until then only published two albums "Á lÒlympia" and "Reflets". They got burned deeply into my soul and made me listen to Alan Stivel`s music throughout all the years that have passed since then. To be true, not really that often, but sometimes. And it makes me feel happy and inspired still today, after such a real eternity. One of my favorite Alan Stivell music pieces is "The Winds of Keltia", one of his few songs in english language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqDmTEu7s0Y

Please let me know, how this song affects You. Having explained all this, the only explanation owing You still is, how it came to my son`s and my trip to Paris. One lazy sunday afternoon in january 2018, lying - like usually - in the hammock on the terrace of our house, surfing in the internet, I found a note, mentioning, that Alan Stivell (I seriously didn`t even know, that he was still alive then) was giving a live concert in the "Olympia" music hall in Paris, exactly where unbelievable 46 years earlier his first live album had been recorded. This fell like a bomb on my head. No doubt - I must be there and see and here this musician, which has been so important for my youth and even later-on, finally. Quick thought, quick decision and quick realization have always been amongst my talents. I called my son Florian, of whom I knew that he also has a strong affection for music and cultural themes in general and invited him, to accompany me on a spontaneous weekend trip to Paris - in my case by plane from Sao Paulo and in Florian`s case by train from Münster/Germany - with  Alan Stivell`s concert as the foreseen weekend highlight. 

I can confirm to You, that we enjoyed terribly this weekend in always exciting Paris and that I was overwhelmed by Alan Stivell`s live show and music. He played his harp and sang his songs with the same dedication, passion and perfect style as more than four decades ago. Such people - the same as Mick Jagger - always fascinated me. No loss of power and authenticity until the final count down. That`s what I always dreamed of and always admired since I was a child. Never loose Your personality and fundamental abilities to express Yourself and participate actively in what`s happening. This closed another loop of experiences for me in my life. I hope, that I did not bore You with this extremely personal and emotional story and that You have somehow enjoyed this sharing of pure and deeply personal  experiences, values  and feelings and that this makes You curious for following my future posts on all kinds of personal, cultural and professional experiences and insights, which might enrich You with positive inspirations. Tomorrow I`ll come back to You with the reporting of a really important, business related subject. 

Ken arc`hoazh- See You tomorrow (in breton language)