I see them sometimes while I walk through the city
they give me an urge to climb
a fear of falling
and the strange feeling
of the moment just before I hit
the ground
I am happy that I am not aloud
near them
I recognize that shape from the past
it looks like stairs going up
but I am fooled before
and wonder if I ever
should even go there
The former Dutch prime minister is now the boss of NATO. He is warning everyone that we have to prepare for the next war. He is doing that because the warmongers in Washington told him to. Russia is doing the same, and China has joined the party too. I am pretty sure that most people don’t want war, especially not the one these so-called world leaders wish for, because the next war will probably cost half a billion people their lives. We, as outsiders, can do very little because a couple of thousand people, at most, decide our destiny. In the USA, there is a democracy, Russia has a strong leader and a very weak democracy, and China is a dictatorship. It does not really matter what kind of government there is; in the end, a handful of people always decide the destiny of the rest. It is frustrating, and it can make you angry. As an Anarchist, I just hope that in the distant future, we all live in small communities, so small that even if one produces a little dictator, he or she could do little harm to the communities around him let alone the world.
Governments are hiding places for people who wanna play Risk with real people; we are and always will be children, only our toys change. I never took any active part in our so-called democracy and hope no one does in the future.
My feet know how to walk the stairs
up and down
when it is light
or in the darkness
only when I think about it
I will stumble
I also know how to live
going up or down
when in the light
or darkness
only when I think about it
I will stumble
I looked up
between all the buildings
in a corner
I saw your windows reflection
colored by what reflected it
I thought about going up
but I lost sight of it
when I moved on
149 The slow arrow of beauty. -The noblest sort of beauty does not sweep us away all at once, does not make stormy and intoxicating assaults (such beauty easily awakens disgust), but is instead the slowly penetrating sort that we carry around with us almost unnoticed and that we encounter again at times in a dream, but that finally, after it has laid discreetly upon our heart for a long time, takes full possession of us and fills our eyes with tears, our hearts with yearning. -What do we yearn for at the sight of beauty? To be beautiful: we imagine that there must be much happiness bound up in this. -But that is an error.
I am not too far away
from where I walk
but I don’t really see
where I go
I am listening to myself again
whining about the same
spending all this time with me
with habits I don’t like
that fit me so well
so strange
I walk on
knowing that my feet will land
without knowing
Every machine has had the same history – a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that, every new invention is a synthesis, the result of innumerable inventions that have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle – all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can anyone, whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?
We often see the outside
of what is the same
we are evolved to be scared
of the unfamiliar
a difference triggers
your upbringing reacts
I build myself
a house with no doors
it is only the sky
what I can see
staring at the dark expanse
at night
is my forwards
my door
Can you imagine that you lived a hundred thousand years ago? On a calm morning, you walk to the lake and look down into the dark water just before you put your hands in it to scoop so you can drink. You see a face, reflected, we might say now, a face like all the others you see around you, but this one is unknown.
These days, you see yourself more often. In the morning, in the mirror, and on pictures you have hanging around or on your phone. I am not sure if we really look at ourselves, but we know it is us that we see, though we probably have a hard time describing ourselves if we have to.
I have to be careful when discussing how important your looks are and how much it contributes to your self-image. I have had the same haircut and beard lengths for half my life. It was never a choice out of style but out of laziness and practicality. I can trim my hair and beard once a month and be done with it. It is a style I am used to, and it bothers me when my hair gets too long, partly because of how it looks, I have to admit, but also because I don’t like to trim it. I know enough people who pay more attention to their appearance; maybe because I have little to work with, I never really developed that urge.
Maybe because I was already partly bold and grey when I was twenty-five, I stopped seeing myself in the mirror as any competition in the particular world I was living in; there are standards, no matter where you live, and I didn’t meet them hair wise and didn’t care. Maybe not entirely because of this, but I started paying more attention to how I looked on the inside. To understand what beauty is inside, I started reading books that talk about this, and though beauty in this realm is also in the eyes of the beholder, we can all agree on what is ugly and what is not, even if it is not fashionable and politically correct.
The mirror in this inner world can be your consciousness. And just like in the real world, we often don’t look deep enough into the eyes we see reflected in the mirror. Maybe this is because of the attention you don’t give it or because you see the look you want to see, the one that is in fashion; the world’s approval is enough for you. Perhaps you are like that person who lived a hundred thousand years ago, and you never had a clear, calm morning when you looked down into a deep lake to see your reflection for the first time.
Disclaimer: these words are a work in progress, and I know from experience that I would write them differently tomorrow, but we live now, and this is how I say it now.
It is so clear to me
that what is clear to you
might not be clear to me
is that clear to you
because that is not clear to me
17 Finding a motive for one ‘s poverty. – There is clearly no trick that enables us to turn a poor virtue into a rich and overflowing one, but we can surely reinterpret its poverty nicely into a necessity, so that its sight no longer offends us and we no longer make reproachful faces at fate on its account. That is what the wise gardener does when he places the poor little stream in his garden in the arms of a nymph and thus finds a motive for its poverty: and who wouldn’t need nymphs as he does?
Is it possible that we are a mere caricature
of our possibilities
To get into you
I have to push buttons
far away from the entrance
I wonder what that is about
Sometimes I come across
a door into you
all out of place
not at all you
an afterthought
placed by who
wanted to help
Today
my thoughts were trapt
inside me
I had to live with them
Nochrisis 