Writing, when true and honest, is a path that leads us deeper and deeper into the forest of silence. In the end we become listening itself, vibration, tune, melody, the inner sound of the world and all its objects; we become, if it is possible, pure openness. We also become extremely solitary, as the distance around us grows and grows. It cannot be said that we lost ourselves, but that we traded one path for another. Of course, this choice cannot be recognized by the majority who are only familiar with noise and oblivious of their own soul.
Tag: wandering thought
Wandering Thought # 122
“All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
I believe that the only way is to play the game while acknowledging it for what it is, that way one can maintain a certain level of freedom and independence, even if only in spirit and not always in external engagements. We do not have to act and think exactly as the world expects of us, but neither will the world turn into what we wish and desire. There is a middle path to be followed, though most, out of spiritual lethargy and need of comfort, will remain oblivious to this, and will take their social conditioning for the ultimate reality.
Wandering Thought # 120
When was the last time you felt your body as Eros incarnate, as though the fires of creation itself were leaping out of it and could not be contained? When did you last feel your existence entire as a divine fragment, filled with longing for something infinite, overflowing with an incomprehensible madness and an exquisite harmony? When was it you last felt all the stars in the universe pulsing in your single beat of heart, pulsing and pulsing with an irremediable fire that wants to create over and over the entire universe in the image of your love? A thousand lightning churning together through your body, yet deeply imbued with the stillness of dawn?—Ah listen, just wait and listen, the whole of life is within you, it was for you that the universe was created, it was to embrace you that love was born. It is time to open you heart and feel, and let go of the constraints of your mind. Feel, even if it tears you apart; feel this boundless joy that has been your fate since the beginning of time.
Wandering Thought # 118
What does modernity say? You are nothing if you are not seen; you are a commodity, wholly made for sight; your value lies outside yourself, in being seen; the image is your god.
Wandering Thought # 117
Man will not rest until he has transformed the last bit of nature into an economic resource for consumption, and thereby killed himself as well as the rest of nature. Perhaps technological capitalism is nothing more than a long process of suicide, deprived of any self-control or spiritual mastery.
Wandering Thought # 116
Loving each other meant transforming into the best versions of ourselves we could ever be; it meant finding, through each other, the secret source of joy in our own hearts; it meant opening up and flowing, but also being contained and cradled; it meant traveling away and going, but always connected by a hidden thread, and always under a watchful and caring eye. Love is being in becoming, always from the central place in our own hearts.
Wandering Thought # 115
This compulsion to buy ever new things, not out of any need, not because the newly acquired item is better, but because this allows us to project a better image of ourselves, and gives us a psychological satisfaction (that we fit, that we ‘are‘) — is at the heart of what consumer driven capitalism is all about.
It is not having or possessing in itself that satisfies us, but the image that, through this having, we are able to project to others, is what we ultimately seek. Advertisers did not so much create this need as exploit it, and therefore amplify it. We are, each of us, an “influencer.” But the questions is: at what point does the image we project of ourselves meet with actual life, with the reality of our emotions and intellectual capacities, with the sum of our life and its potential?
To be is not so much to have, but to be able to project the image that fits, the image that insures our identity and social standing and recognition. But it is a mirage we are only attaching ourselves to, an illusion. We are nothing more than a whiff of smoke that the softest breeze will dissipate.
Wandering Thought # 114
The thing which affects artists more acutely than regular people is how greatly they feel the weight of loneliness. This weight is so tyrannical that they seek out many ways to shed it, mainly through their creative impulse. But it is a process which never succeeds, for, apart from the momentary orgiastic feeling in the moment that art is expressed and in which the artist jumps out of himself, the loneliness returns. Art and artistic expression deepen the feeling of loneliness through time, but it is not a loneliness which severs and isolates the artist from his or her surrounding, on the contrary, it enables a greater and more intense and attentive form of relationship with nature and life. Loneliness is a weight that constructs painfully through many many years, but it strips to the bones and makes the artist shine in the light of their truth. Blessed are the lonely who turn their loneliness into art.
Wandering Thought # 113
I write because the words open my heart to something greater than I am. I write because, being open, I am transformed through the grace of the other. I write as a form of communion, with the world, with the sacred, with love. I write as a poet; I write as a lover.
Love is a form of communion, that would not be possible without this stepping outside of our social roles, this intimate knowing and being known, this raw offering to the other, bare to the bones, this being seen in one’s soul, which fills us with harmony and light, giving us a deep sense of belonging, and giving us back to the world — as what? — as a divine fragment, as something transformed.
Wandering Thought # 112
Scientism takes off after communism and traditional religions in that it would like to construct a perfect and ideal world, comprehensible down to its last detail, which light would shine with the new, atheistic religion, albeit still clad in age old morality.
Wandering Thought # 111
The person who is spiritually inclined will find himself drifting away from every day practical matters and the concerns and aspirations of normal society. Thus, in time, the language he uses will no long be sufficient to form a common understanding. He will drift on, as though in a cloud of solitude, but he will be connected to something else, something more inward and less tangible, and also something that cannot be shown to others who would demand a justification for his way of existence. This basic rift has since eternal times marked the existence of the artist, poet, philosopher, shaman and saint separating them from the practical and society oriented folks. This is still at work today in such kind of people, but not without a feeling of guilt more acute than before. When in previous ages this spiritual bent and way of life may have been justified, or even seen as a privilege, today, and under the guise of psychology and capitalism, it is looked upon with a wary eye, and the person labeled as psychologically and economically unsound.
Wandering Thought # 110
The moments and experiences that turn into memories and persist within us are always the ones that carry an emotional weight. The rest of the things we go through we do not remember or recall. So our memory and recollection of the world is always subjective, reflecting ourselves and set of emotions and being in that particular moment, the person we were at the time. But, also, the memory which persists within us is not a finished memory or a static image; it changes within us as we change, for the memory itself is always grasped and viewed through the prism of emotions and thought, our growth and maturity, which are ever shifting.
It is not always the experience we go through which creates the memory within us, the opposite can also be true. Some emotions can be so intense that they generate a set of images and feelings that acquire the hue and shape of reality and thus persist within us, becoming more real than reality itself. That is how artists, in particular, grasp the world. But what is true for the artist is also true for the “normal” person. Memory and image making are no passive activity but a creative process that goes down to the very roots of our being and idea of the world. The person is both generator and creator, grasping reality not as a fait-accompli, but always creating it out if the prime material the world and our situation within it provides. In the truest sense, “we are the poets of our lives.”
Wandering Thought # 100
The years move on, and the things which seemed so important become trivial; time and loss have a way of distilling life to its essence. The years move on, what remains now are the simple things that were there all along, waiting in the quiet. The years move on, and we start making friends with our own disappearance; how well can we dance the dance before saying goodbye?
Wandering Thought #98
All poets are fools; they love the world more than it deserves to be loved, and when it hurts them they bless it. All poets are fools; they inscribe their holy verse in a woman’s body, and turn her into mist and light. All poets are fools; they are meant to suffer, and enter a place of light. All poets are fools, they bless what hurts them, and love with a passion that rivals the sun. All poets are fools; blessed are the poets.
Wandering Thought# 91
What is a poet?—a poem that plays hide and seek with itself; a poem that needs long walks in the sun and rain for it to find itself; a poem that takes a great deal of time to decipher the light in its darkness; a poem that is wasteful with much of its life for it to experience a few precious moments; a poem akin to an open wound, aching and pouring. A poet is a man without a face, standing in the crowd, in his heart feeling and recording everything. A poet is a sky buried in a man, filled with endless distances. A poet is a failed attempt. A poet is an unreachable man. A poet is not ink but life made invisible. A poet is no one. A poet is.
Wandering Thought # 50
The invention of aviation was not a utilitarian invention. Reading through its history one realizes that its root and outgrowth came the human imagination, from an irrational fixation on the reveries where man saw himself flying, felt himself in flight, and so ached to achieve flying that from the profundity of a love that persisted through millennia he was finally able to materialize his dream.
In the end, much of our modern inventions with which we pride ourselves owe themselves to this — poetry and witchcraft, the ability to imagine new things, impossible things. For all his rationality, man, more than he knows, will always be close to the poet’s heart — his passions, which are inescapable, will make sure of this.
Rooted in Love 