Oneness

What is your thirst but a useless rustle of winter trees burning to bring back summer's warmth?
One could perish in a spark of that nothingness, for no man could contain the presence of opposites without first being initiated by death.
There is power to be found in the powerless - hope to be found in the forsaken. For who would think that a dirty vase with murky water could contain the elixir of youth?
Hidden in plain sight, Oneness floats from one end of the universe to the other like a wave of the ocean.
Where? In the blowing of dust off one's palm.
Rilke wrote,
"Catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain.
But when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch,
from the great bridgebuilding of God:
why catching then becomes a power -
not yours, a world's."
Oneness is acting upon the understanding that one cannot control anything, that one cannot know anything, that one cannot grasp anything. Following this wisdom, one begins acting in an appropriate manner towards Oneness - realising he is always on Its Path.

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.

Fragment

I can feel my cells tingling in a frenzy of confusion and longing for your presence, because your absence got them scattered across galaxies looking for you. I feel distant from myself without you. I’m not here.

But when I’m confined in your eyes, I feel freer than in any conceivable utopia. I allow your gaze to consume my flame because I know that I have to keep your soul warm. This is just a preparation – an exercise. We are evaporating symbols of the fog that haunts us in our deepest sleep. It’s confined in dreams we don’t remember, because we’re too busy deafening ourselves with music that seduces and sedates us into non-being. We are the result of a long, hard battle fought against ourselves, and for millennia, we’ve been barely winning.

Here, stay here, or I will reel you in with question marks. I eat up my syllables hoping to grow wiser. You’re the only one I’ve Found.

I’m the lava that decided to breathe, knowing it will freeze by doing so. Its only relief is that it passes on its heat into something that solidifies as an eternal statue, transcending its yell of defiance and reaching the bliss it could never have in its state of unstirred passion before its release.

Love Confined This Spider to Freedom

Midnight caught me at my desk listening to Latin American music, looking at your beautiful big purple crystal for inspiration. Rene Ferrer is singing, and Picasso’s Old Guitarist on my wall is playing his guitar in a spontaneous rush of ecstasy.
Love can’t be counted. Lies are counted.
Love is felt. And the world knows nothing of what that feeling means to me.
That is why I write. You – my tangible mirror. Found me and grabbed me into your universe. I felt your touch and it confined my prison.
It made me wake up (not then, but it happened now, as I’m writing this; still a consequence of that touch!) to the fact that right now, I’m only writing drafts. The images I’m conjuring in my passion are but archetypes with a few webs sown between them. The writing – its external form – is the web (still in its youth). Each word that describes an image is an end of the web, a knot.
To he who has never loved: Behold thy sin! Your heart is free of you! It runs away from your illusions and awaits you at the end of the tunnel you keep on building.
If you want to find it, look behind the web.

Fulfillment

Advice for a friend

Q:  How can one know that one is evolving, in any sphere - spirituality, mysticism, being a nice person, achieving something etc. ?

A: You're always evolving. The matter comes down to how you interpret the processes of your evolution. What I mean by that is, everything in your life is an evolution, because life itself is a becoming, and each moment is a "becoming", where the only important factor is YOUR free will, how you choose to perceive that moment, regardless of the positive or negative appearance of the moment. "The problem is not the problem, the problem is how you choose to react to the problem."
So you can track your evolution by seeing if you react wisely to each situation presented to you on a day-to-day basis. Always remember that each moment is a lesson, a "test" if you will. And if you pass the test, you evolve, if you don't, the test is rescheduled and you're given more preparation time.

Where Dreams Grow

Warm tears to water the soil under my eyelids… where dreams grow…

The only thing standing between us is the rainbow built by the sun’s rays. A bridge between our souls, a playground for us to slide on… mixing colours together to leave behind a more diverse universe… Each smile is a half-moon and decades fly past us in seconds… It’s actually us flying past them…

Faster, away from time and space, we fly.

Matter is nothing but a cluster of complex layers of shadows – a cloth blurring our sight… A cloth that clings like ivy and wraps itself tight over our eyes like skin…

But once we shed it by shedding our light on it, we discover ourselves to be the only reality there ever was.

Always us…

Once the tidal waves fill the symbols on the shore with water, bleeding their brilliance over the moon’s reflection, spilling the world’s secrets to its guardian angel, we will conquer our mind’s confusion and find comfort in each other’s eyes alone…

Need will be erased from our vocabulary and all pain will become bliss in our Heart.

I found you, as simple as that.

Forever, I found you.

Each time, over and over.

No decay, just becoming.

Rebirth until death extinguishes itself.

Tonight, I cried with the moon’s reflection in my eyes… And the moon cried back and bled its silence to mourn my death’s death.

And the world was transfigured before my eyes. I saw what the oceans were hiding and cried another ocean… The universe has its ways of concealing its inmost built-in secrets.

All songs end in silence… The most beautiful silence. The same silence that has our gazes entangled.

Where will I find you after the Flood?

I wish I could keep these tears embedded with your reflection forever…

I’ve waited all my life at the gates of Mystery alone…

Now, I finally have someone to wait with…

Their opening is certain… It is the symbol of certainty itself. But it is up to us not to enter alone.

Will you hold my hand when our gaze slips within itself?

Will you meet me when we take our first breath into eternity?

This story has no ending. It doesn’t matter if I keep writing or not, it will write and fulfill itself…

Life has no conclusion to offer us, but our hearts do.

Near

Far.
I swing my heap of gold.
Into unknown territory.
It was eating me alive.
But I conquered it.
It was as if a cobra was dancing on my belly while I was chained to the ground.
Funnily enough, I got rid of that feeling simply by closing my eyes.
Not by imagining I’m in some other place.
Just by closing my eyes and doing nothing.
Accepting the impending death. Come on, get on with it.
But then I opened them. And what I saw was definitely not what I expected.
I didn’t expect anything actually. I have no idea what happened. To this day.
But it happened.
And so, I must say. I am grateful for it.
For almost getting killed.
Maybe I did get killed and now I’m in a higher state of consciousness, but apparently in the same body. I don’t know.
But what I saw was that I had no heap of gold to begin with. It was all a shiny illusion.
And it was so easy to let go of it.
It was required of me to do so. Otherwise, maybe I would’ve actually gotten killed.
It was a test to see if I’m true to myself.
Well. Now I’m just sitting lazily and enjoying the snake’s dance, wondering what happens next.

Always Somewhere... Somewhere, Always

Colouring each breath, slipping on sighs, the world is a big fountain and we flow on it.

Where are you when I close my eyes? In my dreams? Physical?

I find you somewhere else each time.

Your beauty is not out there.

It’s inside.

I found it in me.

I wiped a tear on your hair and made it glow. Now my vision is blurred but I can still see the shape of eternity because it has no outlines.

Reality has no rules, love… you’re a spoon, I’m a cup and I’m filled with my love for you, and you stir it slowly, massaging all of my deepest fears to ecstasy. Finding you was the worst nightmare for my ego. It dies painful deaths each moment it’s lit by the sparks in your eyes as my soul falls down their abyss. Your rabbit hole is my favourite roller coaster. Up, down, left, right, center, the plot is like the flight of a bird with a missing wing. What a monstrosity we committed by flying. We’re not meant to fly, said the voice in the shadow. But when I turned on the light, I saw a mirror… but I could not see myself in it, because it could not contain me anymore. The mirror didn’t realise I turned on the light. But you did. And your eyes are the only place I can see my Self. When you close your eyes, I disappear. So stay awake! Don’t worry, this is a dream, and we’re both in it. And we’re leaving together.

Will you hold my hand when our breaths’ colours start fading away? Will you slide with me on a last sigh and fall with me when we get to the cascade?

I find you somewhere else each time.

I find you somewhere else each time.

I find Time somewhere else with you.

Souls

A Dreamer

loss of words