On a mountain, a temple between clouds. To find a monk alone in the middle of silence, making shapes with ink — that is a marvel. His smile, inviting me in, made me lose all sense of distance. Suddenly, I was home.

He spoke to me in a language I couldn't understand. I spoke to him in a language he didn't know. The smile and the gestures, the shape and the ink on paper — enough.

A life of crossings, of borders, of new houses taught me how to leave. That encounter in the clouds taught me how to arrive.

For years I worked among flowers in a city of towers. Always between the earth and the air. I learned that the most precise beauty lives in that interval. And it is an instant. Because silence, too, has a scent.

That is how Frassaï was born. From the instants that recognize you without asking permission. And I keep welcoming each perfume and each person who arrives with what I learned that day in the clouds: no language in common. Everything said.