Shanghai | An Unexpected Haven for Nourishing Body and Soul

“Solitude is the harvest time of the soul.” — Walden When designing a villa for a friend, I used a lot of crystal stones in their bathroom. At the time, I thought it was innovative, but I didn’t realize that this space would be filled with these minerals everywhere. Those rough crystals look like glacier slices, and now the raw stones in the corridors, lobby, and bathrooms resemble ancient light, swallowing up people’s fatigue. My time staying at the Anandi Hotel in Shanghai was always spent with yoga, floating, strolling, meditation, tea blends, and light meals! While floating, the waves in the pool felt like slow-moving second hands, my skin rippling with the water, and my mind gently gathering energy from the air. The mornings here remind me of rice paper soaked in morning mist, with light and shadow draped like white curtains over the yoga mat. As I breathe, my skin quietly stretches, like opening a thread-bound poetry book. My mind keeps replaying the moment I woke up and pulled back the curtains. The lawn below looked like solidified paint, a green tranquility surrounding my view, with people sitting in meditation on the distant grass. I once read in Walden about this silent tremor: in the morning mist, “the sound of pine needles falling is clearer than the bell,” and the roar of ice cracking on winter nights “is like stars whispering at the edge of the galaxy.” Thoreau wrote that tranquility is essentially “an inward expedition.” When people stop filling rooms with furniture, stuffing time with schedules, and invading nature with desires, the soul can truly harvest “a lasting peace as clear as Walden’s ice.” This peace is not an escape but a more awakened way to “live poetically”—transcending time through focus and reaching abundance through simplicity.