Let's close our eyes for a moment and imagine, just imagine ...

Long hours of flying. More than 4600 hours in the air, in different small planes, alone, among the silences of the blue sky or looking for the little blue cuts between the storm clouds that the pilot has to fight his way through. He has circled the world three times in an ultralight aircraft. Many times he has found himself in impossible situations and flown through them.

Let us open our eyes and take a look.

VIDEO: Matež Lenarčič, Point of no return

Recently, Matevž Lenarčič's remarkable book, Point of No Return, took off from Sanje among the silences of the reader's blue eyes. Around the world in an ultralight plane. Although his feats have brought him worldwide recognition (including the title of the World's Greatest Pilot), Matevž himself maintains humility and humbleness in the face of the mighty force of nature. He trusts his aircraft, his experience, his feelings and his fellow human beings. As he says himself, he has met many of them along the way and many, even casual acquaintances, have come to his aid when he was in trouble.

His conservation work and efforts should be seen as a warning and a reminder that we, as a civilisation, are dangerously adrift with the unbridled growth of production.

Have we reached the point of no return? He speaks about all this without embellishment in the present book, in which, among other things, he takes us through the beauty of the earth and the sky.

Matevž Lenarčič, a pilot, photographer, mountaineer, biologist and environmentalist, has summarised his experiences of the blue expanses of flight and his message to his fellow human beings in the feature-length documentary film "Dark Cover of the World", which has recently been screened at the 25th Festival of Documentary Film

In collaboration with Matevž Lenarčič and our musical collaborator Nimetu, we have prepared a video to mark the book's release, which you can watch on sanje.tv.

With his unusual, sometimes extreme view of the world, Matevž tells us in the book and the film that our world will soon be devastated if we don't change our civilisational values.

Among the silences of blue,

Your Sanje

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

"Coming onto the aviation scene in my thirties, I had no aspirations, no plans for a professional transport career, for flying large passenger or small business aircraft. I have always hated uniforms, and the pilot's uniform is no exception. It puts a person in a narrow compartment, takes away their identity, their creativity and turns them into a number, a subordinate member of the organisation that the suit embodies. Military, police, air force, fire brigade, they all take away freedom and demand belonging. It would be difficult to do a job in uniform, or a job of rules that you have to obey as soon as you put on the uniform. Transport aviation has precise schedules in which the pilot's life is caught up. Since my main currency is time, not money or reputation, it is clear that I do not belong in the cockpit of a passenger aircraft."

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

"Is the lonely view from above part of the problem or part of the solution? Matthew's flight around the world looks lonely, but it is not - he meets people on the way who are ready to help him in seriously dangerous situations and in complications that are straight out of a dystopian novel about the dominance of bureaucracy. Matthew's travelogue, a literary form that is often self-confessional, does not belong to this genre. It addresses everyone's problems - global and regional climate change and air pollution, and it illustrates why we need to radically confront the neoliberal paradigm."
- Dr. Grisha Mocnik

"Read this book! Not only because it will paint a picture of unusual places you have never heard of but have always wanted to visit. And not only because you will find it hard to put it down before you reach the end of the road, in suspenseful anticipation of what plagues will attack the pilot Matevž in the next chapter, but above all because Matevž's reflections will, at least for a while, give you hope that there is a world in which we will not burn our poor planet down, but rather start to restrain ourselves, instead of betting it all on technological miracles that will never happen."
- Bogdan Biščak