About

Hello, I’m Marc

… and I’m the author of LũM, a blog of stories, legends and myths from around the world. I’m curious to know how you found your way here and what caught your attention. Perhaps we share a desire to discover what lies behind a place, a tradition or a story that someone still tells.

To explain how this project began, I need to start with a small contradiction: as a child, I loved adventures, but I didn’t enjoy travelling at all.

Between that child and this blog lie books, a journey that changed the way I saw the world, and a curiosity that is still with me. If you’d like, I’ll tell you the story.

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A little personal story…

As a child, travelling felt like an ordeal. Why?

Because it meant getting up early, being taken from place to place with little to interest me, and ending up sleeping in a room that wasn’t mine. We almost always travelled by car, and the journeys seemed endless.

A few years later, things hadn’t improved much. Going away meant spending days apart from my neighbourhood friends and the video games in which I could create worlds of my own. With everything I enjoyed at home, why would I want to leave?

It was on those trips, away from my routine, that books became my refuge. Tales of adventure, horror and mystery kept me entertained and, for a few hours, stopped me missing everything I’d left at home. Those books nurtured a passion that is still with me today.

While I waited for the trip to end, I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next in the adventure I was reading.

The turning point

For a few years, trips to the beach or the mountains were enough for me. A day out was fine, but I didn’t feel the need to go much further.

Then, in the summer of 2006, we decided to take our first trip together as friends. We finally had enough money to pay our own way and ended up choosing the Riviera Maya in Mexico. Beaches, coconuts, buffets and daiquiris beneath the palm trees. I admit that, with all that to look forward to and good company, it wasn’t hard to find the enthusiasm to go.

Once there, though, I discovered something that drew me in more than the comforts of the hotel. The Maya ruins raised questions: who had lived there? How had they built it all? What stories did those stones hold?

Walking among those buildings and listening to their stories, I rediscovered a familiar feeling: the desire to know more, to imagine other lives, to find out what lay beyond. It was the same curiosity that had kept me turning pages on those childhood trips.

Between discovering new flavours, exploring the jungle and swimming in cenotes, I began to understand what a journey could offer me. This time, the adventure was happening outside the books too. And I was there.

Travelling without travelling

Since that summer of 2006, the way we travel has changed considerably. Globalisation has brought places that once felt distant closer to us, but along the way we seem to have lost a little of that sense of discovery. What once took us by surprise is now often something we’ve already seen, compared and added to a list before leaving home.

Reels, package holidays and budget flights are part of everyday life. Images reach us from everywhere, along with suggestions for getaways and itineraries telling us what we mustn’t miss. Sometimes I wonder how much room there is left to discover a place if we already know what we expect from it before we arrive.

And it isn’t just about screens. Living in Barcelona, you can take a Japanese pottery workshop in the morning, have ramen for lunch, attend a tea ceremony in the afternoon and eat sushi in the evening. All of this, thousands of miles from Japan. Flavours and experiences you might once have discovered through travel are now close to home.

My younger self would have been delighted! These days, though, I find it hard not to think back to that first discovery in Mexico and wonder whether, with everything so readily available, we still leave enough room for the world to surprise us.

Travel with purpose

So what does travelling mean today? For me, it should be about more than visiting an iconic place, taking a selfie and sharing it on social media. Whether that’s the Statue of Liberty, the island of Santorini or the Great Wall of China.

We all want to visit the most beautiful places in the world. But if we do nothing more than follow the same itineraries and collect the same photographs, we end up contributing to overcrowding that wears away what makes them unique. Behind every place are the people who live there, enduring customs and stories we’re unlikely to discover if we only stop by to say we’ve been.

Spending a weekend in Amsterdam doesn’t mean knowing the Netherlands, either. Direct flights can bring us to a city in a few hours, but understanding a country takes more time and curiosity. As I move further away from what feels familiar, questions emerge that I’d never even thought to ask.

That’s why I’m increasingly drawn to losing myself in an unfamiliar place and taking the time to understand it. Listening to someone talk about where they grew up, asking about a tradition or discovering the legend that gave a mountain its name. It’s in these moments that I feel a journey takes on meaning: when I come away with stories that bring me closer to the place and the people who live there.

What is LũM?

LũM is light. The name takes its inspiration from the Latin lumen and the idea that a story can illuminate something that had previously escaped our notice.

This blog grew out of a desire to share stories, legends and myths from around the world. Tales that tell us about the places they come from and the people who have passed them down, their beliefs, their fears and their ways of understanding life.

I hope you’ll find the pleasure of being carried away by a good story here, but also the curiosity to explore a little further. Perhaps a tale will make you see a place through different eyes, wonder about a tradition or want to understand a way of life different from your own. I believe that learning to look with curiosity and respect is one way to begin caring for the world we share and will leave to those who come after us.

Thank you for being here. If any of these stories stays with you after you’ve finished reading, sharing it will already have been worthwhile.

And if you’d like to keep discovering more, you can subscribe to the newsletter. Knowing there’s someone on the other side gives me the energy to keep writing.