Remembering jagged cobblestones, white and golden streets,

Old Europe,

Warm sun,

Lisbon with her streets lined with trees of the darkest green, their limbs gently grasping you to dance along swirling patterned pavements

Tricking the eyes into thinking all is lined in gold

While really all is lined in crumbling history

Age of discovery unfurls itself into a discovery of the present

Biting into such life, and such memory, has left the taste that dissolves with bitter slowness

To witness such human life, to be apart of a world that I claim merely a molecule of,

Yet all together again, a single myriad of everything at once,

There,

What yet was

The Rain begins.

springtime ode to uncertainty

The weather is all of a sudden beautiful and therefore I feel an intense obligation to never catch myself inside.

So I sit outside in my dirty backyard full of dog shit and drink bitter, unconvincing French wine and listen to the people scuttle around my neighborhood bouncing basketballs and laughing, obviously enjoying the spring breeze as much as I am. This is how my life has transformed here.

I spent months in turmoil wondering if I was ever destined to have anything resembling a future. Looking over my shoulder and into a past of such an indescribable nature, one so full of awkward silences and beautiful oceans, coveted smiles and the passing of milestones. Enduring was what I would have said of my life ten months ago and yet I knew the minute I left the western most coast of Europe I would be dying to come back. I only wanted some sort of freedom, an elusive idea with blurred edges. Fate I would hope.

To be an individual, to be one among many, but to feel as if I had the keys to my own life for once. I have always been a solitary person by nature, one of those who loves to be around other people almost as much as to be alone only has no idea how to behave around other people.

I cannot say what my exact purpose or even motive in this life is or will be but I am sure I am destined for something even I could not have imagined to be real. Sometimes I wish I could be someone who was sure of their own self, of their own decisions. But I am not blessed with the grounding of a root, but rather the motion of wind.

Time

I woke up in my bed thinking of time. I think of the limited number of breaths each one of us has. Like a grandfather clock ticking, like a bomb waiting slowly to explode, ready to explode in silence. And yet what is it that we are doing while this clock ticks? We waste this time, these precious minutes that turn into hours which turn into days and on into months. We then find ourselves after these years to have blinked an eye in which everything flew away into dust, into a hazy pool of memory. Of course, time can be a different story. It can be all the world of possibility and if we were to take it seriously, it could be everything. Yet sometimes I feel time itself does not really exist. I'm not about to go into my rant of the existence of nothing, only interpretation, but I will say that time is in truth a human created invention. Whether this changes anything or not I will never know. Life would seemingly cease to be hours and day, weeks and months. The calendar would be abandoned and everything would become more like just a series of successive events. That, to me, would be a little weird, but not an altogether foreign feeling.

There are nights when time causes me to stay awake. It has the power to make me question how I am using my own sense of time and how to make the most of it. So thank you, dear time, for letting me ponder you, dissect you and express your undeniably false identity.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

(Pg. 131)

East of Eden