A Ringing

In the clasp
Of such a powerful chant
One cannot help
But swing forth and back;

At the sting
Of such a menacing trap
One can no longer indulge
In what now is the past.

Halt! Despair shan’t be pitied
The lament of ghosts is not heard
O pain! Don’t you see it is vivid?
Revealed, what was whilom obscured.

The mind! O the mind! Its soliloquies!
Devious spirits perennially menacing
Dragging it into their passionate nothingness
Voices of conquerors blinding and deafening

Endless samsaras coming and going
Thousands of worlds minds constantly joining
Missing each time the essence, the unity
Tying together beyond any scrutiny.

Reaper! Come reap all these sorrows
They hold all of the treasures you seek
I know you to be the keeper of keys
To all of these doors that beckon to follow.

O! Torturous mystery, dismounting to greet me
Your white horse may eat from the fruit of my garden
Allow me unburden your sorrows so deeply
Affecting each wrinkle your cheek cannot guard from.

When altered, I see that the paths that unwind
(From places known only to few who’ve unraveled
The puzzles that twist only minds that are worthy)
Are symbols equating to bridges and temples.

Narrating the beauty on trembling mirrors
Thousands of facets all sown by expressions
To build countless bridges, reflections of figures
Exalting the mind beyond all its intentions.

Unlocking the coffin of reason, discovering
Joy and absurdity coming together
That which cannot be named nor repeated
Revealing itself like the peacock its feathers

It is I, foolish ego! who’s meant to but suffer
Your task is to watch me do so with joy
You know not the force that moves me to plunder
Nor one that retrieves me when passions deploy.

You know not of love, poor thing, but of glory?
Your pitiful reverie in secret self-mocking
The bridges you cross and plots of your story
All lead you to chaos, yet stop you from stopping!

Tis’ nothing but madness, I plead you to witness
Transfigure your image by breaking this mirror!
The pieces will grow into beautiful paintings
Of mythical landscapes to serve as a river

Glowing more brightly now that the clouds
Have opened the gates for the light to shine forth
The serpent uncoiled, one hears its chime loud
The doors are now opened, keys dropped to the floor.

March Mantra

You're depressed cause you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing.

Hope Inspires the Good to Reveal Itself

"Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it… Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

[…]

A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity."

Anne Lamott in Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

Then and Now, Now and Then

The virtue of this city happens to be found in its vice. Rain. Brussels rain, accompanied by an inescapable cold for the soul. A bearable monotony. Bearable by virtue of pacifying you into accepting it.

The Sun is nowhere to be seen, and it feels like the length of the buildings in front of the window elongate the breeze of monotony. The water slowly dripping from a metal bar right in front of the window resembles a cat sitting still, gazing at its prey, then suddenly jumping out at it. These drops are the only things that startle the passive eye which allows this gloomy, silent picture to engulf it in its demonic stillness.

A constant, bearable wait. Waiting for a call to action. Looking for a heroic way to break out of the monotony, to break the ice that separates the frozen from the moving. The distance between static and dynamic is probably the longest. A decisive move that would set everything in motion… A cold engine that would suddenly start, leaving the driver who forgot how to drive utterly consternated.

 A question arises: what then? If we wait and let the wait weigh us down into a complete, ungodly immobility, how will we be prepared to face the call to action? We remember vaguely, in an intangible past, a voice telling us move, budge, push your gears. But when we came to the realization that the voice was outdated, that there is new machinery, that we are the new machinery, we ceased to listen to the voice urging us towards efficiency. We realized we are a better, upgraded version of our parents and we decided to take that knowledge to the grave. And with a pride. But missing the motivation to spin our gears out of lack of external movement, we decide that our inactivity is excusable, and we retire in a world of temporary comfort and self-delusion.

But the rain knows. The raindrop that suddenly drops, startling our peripheral vision, is the call to action. The same rain that once pacified us will soon shift poles and jump at the prey that stopped noticing it.

In the collective conscience, only one question arises: what then? The ones who ignore this question and treat it as an annoying pop-up will realize the graveness only when it will be too late.

The end is not near. The end is now. The one who truly realizes this, his conscience doesn’t ask “what then?”; it asks “what now?” 

February Mantra

Everything you do reveals what you seek.

Clarity

"Obscurity and vagueness of expression are at all times and everywhere a very bad sign. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they arise from vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those writers who construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself into thought; they also often wish to conceal from themselves and other people that in reality they have nothing to say."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

Cloud

As the night sky's moon-lit clouds

Do soar above the valleys

They chime blue thunder strikes

Revealing burdens they carry.

Under these moon-lit giants

(Keepers of Heavens and Hells)

Dwells Fallen Man in his kingdom

Overwhelmed by the luminous bells.

He walks alone in the darkness

Reaching forth with his power of thought

Behind him come black avalanches

Caused by the pains he has brought.

And buried, he shall be forever

By his own hand, his own accord

Lest he use his last effort

To grab on to the light like a cord.

It strikes, and does painfully so

But through pain alone can man vanquish

No other escape than to hope

That the forms that he follows won't perish.

The cloud of Eternity silently marches

Through winds of despair or of glory

For outside is but the form

That always follows what's holy.

On his freedom-burdened path, man

Walks like a stranger befuddled;

Though knowing deep down he is one with the Whole

He stumbles into amnesic eternity.

Sad as it seems, it's never too late

For man to look up and see that the Clouds

That so graciously slid a rope of bright light

Await for the moment he's had his last doubt.