Momento Mori

After a while you learn the subtle difference

Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,

And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning

And company doesn’t mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts

And presents aren’t promises,

And you begin to accept your defeats

With your head up and your eyes open

With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,

And you learn to build all your roads on today

Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans

And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn…That even sunshine burns if you get too much.

So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,

Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure…

That you really are strong

And you really do have worth…

And you learn and learn…

With every good-bye you learn.

~ J. L. Borges

I’d like to have time to kneel and smell the flowers, get pollen all over my face and have bees chase me around for being nosy.

I’d like to remember the smell of an early morning; get up with the sun and be the first Eve who ever walked on Earth, naked. Does anybody know what dew is?

I’d like to be a cat when I stretch, feel my cells multiply as I reach the other side of a yawn; decaffeinate my heartbeats, green up my tea.

I’d like to reach a higher scale in my shower symphony, compose an opera piece on the spot and splash the bathroom walls with notes. Wash all my sins away with organic soap.

I’d like to sit still until all fear starves itself and silence is ok; breathe deeply in some universal chest like a healthy organ. And then be born and curious about the world again, pointing at things with chubby fingers, because they are so fresh and new, they haven’t been named yet.

I’d like to answer all my phone calls and mean the how-are-yous and not save my honesty until all the good-byes have been sentenced over my wireless head.

I’d like to be a friend of insects and men. Not be afraid of mirrors. Not even scream at spiders.

I’d like to yogalize my poses, buddhalize my prayers, jesusize my love and hindulize my smile.

I’d like to whisper to only a few people under a blanket instead of shouting at hundreds over the internet rooftops.

I’d like to put a heart in every word even if it ends up so beaten that I run out of all my seven lives before my grave is finished.

I’d like to love you out loud, not only in the dark cave of my mind, with bats hanging out of my eyes, in the opposite direction.

I’d like to speak in complete sentences, instead of SMSing E-people with LOL-lives always in !!!!! demand for + Facebook #Likes. I’d like to kiss with my lips instead of XO with my keyboard.

I’d like to love my neighbor even when his f***ing TV drives me so f***ing crazy I could reach across the f***ing wall and pull out the morning-show f**ks through the TV screen and get them another f***ing job that doesn’t degrade humanity.

I’d like to be 100% recyclable, untraceable, not remembered, only perceived, non-violent, transparent, like water; donate all my organs, leave only footsteps on a beach, not carbon footprints on my future children’s faces.

I’d like to take naps, lots of naps, preferably in a swing or by a fireplace, preferably in the sun, with a dog drooling over my feet; and never have to hear the sound of another alarm clock again.

I’d like to write letters – at least once a month, with real ink on thick, recycled paper, and seal them with my ring on candle wax; send them away with a carrier pigeon and then wait patiently for the answer, looking down from a castle window. Not type up anxious atoms on a screen, click, double-click to open, close and open, close again, why-won’t-you-charge, brainless, annoying piece of s**t?

I’d like to have some faith, just any faith that I can walk on water and not drown; and even if I didn’t have that faith, jump off the boat with no lifesaver, anyway; especially during Shark Week.

I’d like to hear some real birds chirp over my shoulder, not blue, dead birds tweet hashtags with my fingers.

I’d like to finish all the books I start. Review the universal story through every pair of glasses. And after all is said and done, be even more certain that I know nothing yet.

I’d like to love and lose and love again, and lose and love and lose again, because what else is there to do.

I’d like to get up once a week with no other agenda than laziness in bed, just touching feet and feet, and eating breakfast for dinner, off a blanket. And stay alive like that in bed. 24 hours.

I’d like to sit with old people and understand why they’re not in a hurry, rest for a few minutes at the shade of their deep and heavy, bulldog wrinkles; and listen to the stories they tell from when the world didn’t use to end.

I’d like to flush my Blackberry down the toilet and make it seem like an accident.

I’d like to believe that we’re not just numbers plus minutes plus blood, but human issues glued together and dangerously alive; and like all great short stories, we sound familiar, but haven’t really happened any place or time before.

I’d like to have kids so they can remind me of all the things I used to know when I arrived into the world. And when my kids forget, I’d like grandchildren.

I’d like to be more than a word, a sentence or a paragraph. I’d like to be an entire chapter, or better yet, a novel. Be written in detail. Survive the darkness. Rephrase the light.

I’d like to think with no thoughts that the heart is its own country, in which I am allowed without a passport, or any kind of name.

And write with no fingers on that flickering life that passes as we write, incessantly, about how life is passing through our fingers.

Loved one, I see through your cloak of torment

and its manipulative waft

sluring others to partake in its suffering.

I see YOU, your soulful flare

laced with billowing love.

But as long as that cloak walks in the room before you, I will choose another experience.

I will not chase you around the wheel dizzily spinning out of breath.

No, now I step off and wait for you to tire, hunched over by your heavy load.

I will courageously stand over here, holding the knowledge that your truth suffocates beneath that versatile illusion.

I will stoke my truth with love filled fire balls

knowing I cannot force my awareness onto you.

I will BE how I feel

when I see past your shadow costume

into the light of your soul.

No matter where I am, I can BE that…

I wonder…Will you feel me across this ocean?

Will you shed your blinding burden and embody the luminescent underside of your disguise?

No matter the answers, my truth is clear.

Until you choose to bare your soul, I will be the silent wave loving on your distant shore.

By~Alexandra Folz

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Albert Einstein