Playing Guitar in San Bernardino, Paraguay

San Bernardino (AKA Sanber) is the small lake town on the shores of Lake Ypacaraí, only 20 miles from Asunción and even less than that from Luque's Church where Agustin Barrios Mangoré gave one of his last public performances in Paraguay. In one of those Luque recitals, the Paraguayan Master performed with the guitar that I restored and that I keep in my collection (see my Barrios Guitar here). Our San Bernardino home overlooks Ypacarai lake.  For the past 10 years we spent all our weekends and vacations here and since May 2014 we live here permanently. San Bernardino is also the place where I recorded the 90+ tracks that I have uploaded on mangore.com recently. I will extract the very best of these to produce my next CD, "The Movies". You can hear the 90+ tracks here

The moment is intense and life seems to blossom with each one of these Heavenly gifts. All around us we can hear and see nature's frantic effort to seize the last moments of a day that is swiftly coming to an end. The birds sing to the top of their lungs as the day ebbs away as if resisting the inevitable. To them, the end of the day represents the end of their life. Little do they know that most of them will awaken a few hours later to a brand new day. But it is actually me who learns from them and not the other way around. These minute creatures teach me that all that is true is this very moment and that is all we really have. In fact, one of these sunsets will one day be the last sunset in our lives. I realize that we often linger on to tomorrow, we project our lives there and we make plans and in the process we miss the most precious thing we really have: the present moment. The present moment can easily pass unnoticed and un seized right in front of our eyes. Tomorrow is just an illusion in our minds, today is real, today is what we have been given.

Yes, the Sun seems to take forever to get across the sky. Suddenly, when the sunset approaches, it seems to go through it in a heartbeat. I always get the feeling that if I do not grab my camera fast enough, I will probably miss it altogether. Every second during t sunset is priceless and missing one instant is missing everything.

Below I share a few stunning Paraguayan sunsets I took along 2014. Each one of them deserved a poet to search for the best words to describe it. Each one of them represented a true gift from Heaven to humanity and they left a mark in the form of  passion and admiration and immense thankfulness in my heart and soul.

I have been a passionate photographer most of my life and I soon discovered that sunsets make for the perfect subject to be photographed. I mean, all you really need to do is to be there at just the right moment... nature will pretty much take care of the rest. With every passing day I come to realize how important it is for a human being to be deeply aware and in close contact with both mother nature because God uses nature to ignite our Interior life. To be aware of this truth is to take our lives beyond the simple task of existence.