Tonight I put on “Happy Ending” and danced around my room, and it took me back to 2007 – 2008, when I was listening to Mika’s album Life in Cartoon Motion all the time. Mika is such a lovely human. Enjoy the nostalgia. 🙂
I went to an art festival today and a man named Igor asked if I would model for his silhouette demonstration. Here’s the result. He made two copies. I’m getting a kick out of the thought that someone might buy the other copy and then my portrait will be hanging on some stranger’s wall. 😂
Brief Thoughts (No. 6)
Sometimes, you will look at your face in the mirror and think: “Who are you? I’m not sure we’ve ever met.”
But other times, you will look at your reflection with a sense of joyous recognition and exclaim: “Oh, how glad I am to see you! I’ve been waiting for you for years.”
A Dreamy Lens
It’s O.K. to lose yourself in wanderings. It’s O.K. to let yourself dream. There’s a purpose to such drifting, such imaginative traversing of the mind.
You are, in your dreaming, able to envision some things about life with a clarity and luminescence that escapes the ordinary eye. You can, in your dreaming, imagine the potential of things and discover “what may be.”
It’s important to remember this beauty because it can guide your decisions in the real world. You are able, if you try, to mesh together these points of view: your dreamy visions with your apprehension of the physical world as it unfolds before you in real time.
It isn’t easy, but it’s within the bounds of possibility – and to achieve such a fusion (of thoughts, of ideals, of visions) is an admirable and awesome thing.
It is, in effect, a way of infusing the reality of this world with a magical sense of aspiration, of striving for more. You can, if you are diligent in the practice of such skills, achieve a way of living that is at once wholly ordinary and wholly extraordinary – and full of the wonder that leads to GOD.
Tiny Trio
More minuscule journal poems, dashed off in the blink of an eye.
Find a flower
the outshines the rest
with its loveliness –
and then you will know
what it’s like for me
to look at you.
…
If the mountains could move,
they would jump into the sea
in order to take a break
from being so tall.
…
Oh, the troubled heart
finds no relief
except in the wailing
and the gnashing of teeth.
Restlessness
An imaginative glimpse into the mind of someone losing his grip on reality.
The sound of nickels dropping underfoot, lost to the crowds of unrecognizable men – this is what you recall as you sit in the empty room and tap your foot with anxious unease.
How can the sound reverberate so clearly? you ask. How, in the millions of memories collected in your cells, does this particular detail – a sliver of an observation, barely worth remembering – rise to the surface and assert itself so insistently?
You find yourself frantic and bored, bored and frantic, conflicting energies tied up and rallying in your soul. Well, not your soul, you think, but some lesser part – maybe your body, or your mind.
The soul contains an infinitude of peace, you think, and you vaguely attempt to protect the purity of such a notion by stilling your foot and ceasing the tap-tap-tap.
But still, you wonder, what is the point of distilling all these thoughts? You mustn’t go crazy, or everything will go dark.
You must control the impulse to abandon all hope of making sense – and instead remind yourself of things that are tangible, concrete.
The abstractions will spell the end of you, if you’re not careful enough. You know how simple it is to get lost in a question, a mere arrangement of words and ideas.
You must remember, then, to anchor yourself to something the senses can perceive – something your neighbor could drop by and affirm the existence of with a nod of his head and a muttered, “Well, yes, of course, I see it, too.”
But then, remember, also, that your senses deceive. You remember how you were fooled into thinking something was beautiful when it wasn’t? So what are you going to do, ill-equipped as you are to sort out truth from fancy?
You will need to phone a friend – tap into the wisdom of someone whose sensibilities are screwed in a little more tightly than yours.
But whom will you call? The bridge of information exchange is hard to cross. You need to trust that this person will understand your perceptions, even as he holds fast to his own, sturdier way of seeing the world.
Does such a person exist? A dreamer’s soul in a pragmatist’s body? You will need to comb your thoughts for inspiration. The number of acquaintances who suggest themselves to you is frighteningly small.
But the need for verification is intense, is of the utmost importance in this hour when everything seems to have gone strange. Will you break through to the light? Will you climb back to safe terrain where your perceptions are sane and the things you see are full of sturdy, unbending, unobjectionable, inviolable sense…?
Brief Thoughts (No. 5)
If you want to claim your existence (as well you should), you will need to say with authority: “Be gone, fear! I have a mission to accomplish and I won’t have you standing in the way.”
…
Don’t despair if others fail to see what you have been striving for. Don’t get it into your head that other people know your way better than you yourself do. It’s in this sacrifice – of your own ability to communicate with GOD and look into your soul – that you forfeit something very essential to your wellbeing and to your peace of mind. For in the act of delegating the matters of your life to others, you fail to realize the purpose for which you were made – and you let your unique strain of personhood disappear, at least a little, into the background of other people’s wishes and whims.