After all these years, I still yearn for you. And if we die, and are reincarnated, I believe we’ll find each other again.
(Amsterdam, Nederlands, November 2010)
How to Be a Romantic
To Love is to be God.
Never will a Lover’s chest feel any sorrow.
Never will a Lover’s robe be touched by mortals.
Never will a Lover’s body be found buried in the earth.
To Love is to be God.
— Rumi (via fuckyeahrumi)
“Sometimes it felt like there was a part of me inside him that I ached to get to.”
—Lily King, Father of the Rain
They say hell is knowing heaven, and then losing it.
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
As much as I want to erase the memories sometimes, I can’t.
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
…But I couldn’t do this, even if it were possible.
(How can this be? when it’s all an illusion.)
“ There will come a time when you won’t be able to ignore what you’re running away from. Why put it off? Wouldn’t it be better to live the rest of your life without having to be on the run?
Art Ticknor, Solid Ground of Being
Dreams of my love ironically keep us separate.
“ If you want to work on your art, work on your life.
Anton Chekhov
As long as I exist, we can never be one.
As long as there is a “you” and a “me”, there will always be two. The sages say the self causes us to not see what truly is. That “I” am simply an imaginary mental construct. This construct will always be separate. The way to become one — transcend the boundaries between myself and what I love most — is to see that I don’t really exist.
In the same way that right now I can imagine next Friday, but right now, next Friday and everything I imagine in it doesn’t exist (it’s only a mental construct), I also imagine myself. That I exist over time and have a story as to how I got here. This is actually not our first-hand direct experience. In a way, you must be more scientific than scientists.
The sages say that if you can see this and accept its implications, you’ll see that everything is One.
As much as I complain about the cold, I love Autumn. Its palette of colours reminds me of change and progress. An approaching deathly winter wonderland, and the rebirth that always occurs soon after. That’s probably why I wouldn’t be able to live somewhere that’s hot and sunny and idyll all year round, it’s a false sense of security and happiness. As one of my favourite authors Madeleine L’Engle says:
“In Egypt, I learned why the women drew black lines of kohl around their eyes: to produce shadow, to protect their eyes from the fierceness of the sun. We see because of the sun, but if there were no shadows that light would quickly blind us. We need the shadows of buildings to protect us at least a little from heat.”
