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The tomato miracle

 

Life moves faster than time

 

We are only strangers and pilgrims

 

Although I embroider a new question every day and I try to stay with that question, most of them keep being on my mind on other days and some questions more than others. It also makes a difference where I put them, apparently. I didn’t do it on purpose, but on the upper part of my right trouser leg I embroidered “What if there is no tomorrow?” Every time I sit down somewhere and cross my legs comfortably, I read it. It is an interesting question you can look at in two ways. Like a memonto mori, none of us is going to live forever —although some people are putting a lot of effort into changing that and who knows, maybe we will some day be able to upload our brains. 

Would you have any regrets if you would know today would be your last day? Are there things you haven’t done that are important to you? Did anything remain unsaid that should have been communicated? Did you live enough, love enough, enjoyed enough, care enough?

But also: what if there really wouldn’t be a future? In a way it looks like that already, if there won’t be any major changes, that is where we are heading - as the human race at least, the planet will survive, probably benefit from us not being there anymore.

In the coming years we will see if that awareness is strong enough, if we are willing to make some profound changes.

 

This morning I was out early for a walk. I saw the sun rise out of the sea. I watched hundreds of starlings gather in a tree before they flew off as if they were one. I found a little terrace and ordered coffee and a croissant. A dog seated himself next to me, the croissant just came out of the oven and spread a scent trail he couldn’t resist. On the left site, across the street in front of the cemetery, two stone ladies were watching over me, reminding me that we are only strangers and pilgrims on earth, “peregrini et hospites sunt super terram”.

 

 

Encounters

 

 

Silence, identity, art, enigma

 

When does size matter?

 

How are you?

 

Who is we?

 

Which way?

 

What does it mean to be anonymous?

 

Some say something is about to change

 

How to love?

 

Why is the measure of love loss?

by Jeanette Winterson

I have spent most of my life thinking about love. I understood early that love could be exciting, extravagant, risky, reckless, heart-racing, heart-breaking, complete, catastrophic, desired and desperate. And I knew that love was like a scent trail and I would follow it. That love could not be a thought-experiment. That love should never count the cost. That the cost is the exchange of the self as a single currency.

I set out to fathom love because I lost it too soon– at six weeks old when I was adopted. Losing love early shapes the idea of love into its opposite: Loss.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Our binary oppositions are too crude. The opposite of love is not hate – in fact love and hate are as close as a pair of hostile brothers, as anyone who has fallen out of love – with a person or a cause, will know.

If love means to gain everything then to lose love is to lose everything.

But I don’t mean the hit or miss of another person, Love is oddly impersonal – it is a quality as well as an emotion. Nobody teaches us this quality and so we are left with the emotion –inevitably directed at another person.

What I have found is that once cultivated, like courage or self-control, love the quality is more durable than love the emotion.

When I learn how to love – and it needs both hands like playing the piano – I find that I am not waiting to find love. Match.com is irrelevant. My purpose is to love. I love.

In all circumstances? Of course not in all circumstances, anymore than courage or self-control is present in all circumstances. But I am aware that this quality of love now belongs to me. No longer on the outside waiting to be discovered (You too can find love) or worse, fallen into, like a hole in the ground. (Falling in love again)

I have had so many reckless encounters. I have never been a love-rat but I have been a love-pirRATe, jumping ship, avoiding duty, flying under my own flag. When I believed love was loss - and I believed it with poetic fatalism, there could be no genuine attachment. Attachment to another meant a rendezvous with loss. I preferred to fuck with death.

Sex is a very good way to avoid attachment. Men are better at this than women but at least they get some pleasure out of the (self) deception. For women, fucking is the new frigid. So much sex. So little intimacy. Is that freedom, do you think?

Was I free? No. I have always enjoyed sex and taken pleasure and treasure from those wooded islands I visited and those other ships passing in the night. But I was not free because I was in thrall to my private narrative of loss.

I did not know that love could be reliable like the sun; the daily rising of love.

As I get older I find that I know less and less about more and more. Also, I know more about less. I know something about love having boxed its shadow for so long. I found that the insubstantial thing I hit and hit and hit was not love; it was me.

How to love? Love is both risk and rescue mission; the princess in the tower is you. Forget the gender; the princess in the tower is you.

I had to give up the pirate ship – which was a shame in some ways when I had spent so long embroidering the flag. I had to risk the climb to the top of the tower and get the princess out and let her go. Yes, let her go, to love in her own way, freed from all the towering assumptions about love.

What now? The point is to love well, with or without an ‘object’. The sun shines, with or without an ‘object.’

And when I love you, it is for yourself, as you are, not as a trophy for my ship or as a hostage to my flag. Love increases in the company of the other, and finds itself again as an emotion - the signal emotion - when you are there. But if you are not there, then love as a quality does not desert me. And never did, though I did not know it, and many times I deserted love.

You need both hands – like playing the piano. To touch love. To hold love. To shape love on whatever wheel. To scoop up love where it falls. To climb the rope hand over hand. To find her face in the dark. To be empty-handed sometimes. To give; once for yourself once for the other.  To catch the sun and throw it back again across the shadow of the ship you used to sail.

Can we escape the metaphor?

Weet u de weg? Do you know the way?

Do we need wings to fly?

What is the real world?

What is happiness?

Power

 

Do you think I need wings?

 

Today’s question, “do you think I need wings?” comes from the elephant in the stories of Toon Tellegen. The elephant is tired of the forest. “Nothing but walking, standing, and walking again, he thought, no, that isn’t really my thing. I am going to fly.” So he did, on a beautiful day, the other animals in the forest were watching him. He aimed for a cloud and was planning to disappear behind it. He took off, flew all the way up, over the trees, passing a swallow, disappearing from sight. Then he fell down.

In later stories the elephant climbs trees obsessively. He always falls down in the end, he always tries again. “To be happy for a moment, now and then, just before I fall, I cannot do more. But maybe that is the only way to be happy, to be truely happy, and is falling a part of that."

What can I do?

 

For how long?

 Nastia Smirnova wrote: Доколе? A very old and very dramatic Russian adverb that is simultaneously a rhetorical question. It means “for how long or until when this (usually unfair thing) will continue?”

Live the questions

I walk across the moor, into the woods, past burial mounds, through The Forest of the Dancing Trees (long ago, farmers were allowed to cut down trees for their own use and they would take the straight ones and leave the bended ones) and I think: “All the answers are here.” I am not sure what that means and if it is more than just an abstract thought. They are not written out, they are not present in my mind, they are not tangible, I can’t see them, I don’t know them.

 

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that you have to live the questions:

 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

 

and this:

 

“If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.”