Did I miss anything?

A few years back I visited a zoo where they had set up three big greenhouses-like places, each greenhouse held a biotope complete with plants, birds, some small mammals and insects, non to dangerous and all non toxic or so I think.  It was in the tropical rainforest set-up that I encountered a mum and dad and their two sons all equipped with the latest video camera.  They were walking in neat formation peering through their lenses, loudly conversing to one another. `Do you see anything´ one would screech while he walked right past a lizard clutching a branch. `Can´t see anything` was the reply when they past right under a big clutch of flying dogs hanging upside down off the roof of the  greenhouse. `There is nothing here to see but green stuff` mum said with disappointment, tape still rolling. `Let’s go to the other place, maybe that one is finished` the dad answered grumpily and off they went. Leaving me and the flying dogs stunned, how could they have missed so many sights, sound and smells.

I have witnessed the same thing in shops, theatres, museums and even in places of worship and it left me doubting myself time and time again. Was it me seeing things and listening for things unheard of?

In fear of missing anything we have created numerous devices to keep us posted, like cell phones, video cameras, email, twitter and facebook all to be checked 24/7 just in case we´ve missed anything. That same fear makes us do outrageous things too, we push each other out of the way in order to get a glimpse or just be the first to get in and get whatever it is we don’t want to miss.

Only recently I saw it happen in a place and at a time I did not expect. It was on a calm afternoon when there was a sudden buzz at the stables, a mare was giving birth. Now that is a sight I don´t see every day so off I went  to sneak a peak, when I got there people had swarmed around the paddock pushing each other aside to get a better view, mobiles flashing and some were screaming into the receiver that it was happening right now. There were sounds of disgust  from adults a kids alike when blood was seen and noses were pinched when the smell of birth water hit their nostrils. People went as far as stepping on the mares tail to get closer. The grandfather of the stables who was helping the mare demanded calmness in a harsh tone but that too fell on deaf ears. I could not belief my eyes, they were all right on top of it flashing and filming shouting their accounts into a piece of plastic attached to their ears and they all missed it anyway.

My dad has taught me well how to hear and how to see and many teachers after that added their lessons. But still the doubt remains, it must be me who’s off.

Blank

A blank piece of paper or a blank canvas is often a nightmare for writers and painters. As a sculptor, you have it easy, at least you have a chunk of rock or a shapeless lump of clay you can sink  your teeth in. Even photographers have it easy, there's always something in front of your lens, even if that is still out of focus, there is already something of form, color, movement.

Blank, for most people, is something ominous, the feeling of not knowing what to do and not know how to behave. Form, opinion, judgment and emotion gives something to hold on to, even if this grip is scary or improbable, a grip is a grip.
 

As a child I looked under my bed at least ten times before I dared to go to sleep. The folds in the curtain all by themselves became a robber with a dull ax and how ever scary the robber was in my eyes, he had a form with matching emotion and that made it manageable. Later I learned to transform the robber into a giant rabbit with three ears or a fat woman with huge breasts, but it never became the curtain.

Lately, my hunger for blank increased enormously. Not know and to find no support in form of emotion is a sometimes confusingly liberating.

Poem

Will I cast a deaf eye

Will I turn a blind ear

Will me be you and you me

Or will the line be thicker now, broader even.

When does sound become movement

And movement become thought

Is sound the absence of silent’s

Is silent’s all sounds, like white light is all colour

Is awareness the prism where all passes through

To become palatable, touchable, knowable

Is mind but an innocent bystander,

Catching but a glimpse of what the universe offers

All is energy, nothing is without

The driving force,  the binding agent

The what that makes you me and in reverse

change direction and it makes form, sound, touch

What makes energy change direction,

Intention of..

Random action of..

Collision off the line between you and you

Mind will never know or draw the picture clear

But I will try

I´ll try and fail

But I will get close if I can only let the paint brush go

Let colour pass back through the prism into pure white

Containing all motion all love.

No life line

I think we forget from time to time that live is not a linear thing. It is not a straight line from birth, to school, to career, to death. Life and learning is a circular thing, with all lives events polka dotted around in a random order. Mind tells us it is linear, but you know in your core it is not.

The feeling of failure comes from the expectation that life is linear when it is not. That is where a lot of fear comes from, not knowing what will happen next, what your next step should be. If life was linear, as mind wants us to believe, the next step would be crystal clear, clearly visible, for all to see, no doubt possible and easy.

But as it is not linear and it is not clear what our next step should be, we just take a step, a well thought through step or a random one or stand still. The feeling of falling and failing comes from judging one outcome of a step taken being better or worse than another. Our mind has us running in circles thinking life is one straight line. Weighing and judging thinking back and forth and back again.

Because mind firmly beliefs life is linear it cannot see the circles each step makes, like raindrops on a lake. We reincarnate every second of the day or like someone else once said it: “what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly”

Poem

I feel I fall and rudely I awake.
Pillow snug and duvets safe,
heart pounding and mind not clear.
Where am I and what am I doing here?

This jolt, this shaking of the senses,
comes when I drift off, relax of sorts,
at times when I’m blind-sided by the past,
or stumble into a unclear future

Those bumps tell me I was not here.
The bruise I get is now, I’ll hide it.
I failed I feel, I felt into the then and one day,
words of don’t and not me creep in.

I know not to let them creep to far,
weighing me down as they creep along.
I tell them hi and goodbye in one breath
and welcome a new moment to be me.

I Mind - Mind You

When I looked at mind I saw is was a four year old child trapped in a archivist body, stuck in a stuffy archive. It was constantly asking: “why?” and diligently filing away the questions, not knowing what to do with incoming answers. The archivist sorted them out by category: religion – nonsense – science – junk mail all the while the child kept nagging “why?”

I gave mind a pacifier and told it that the answer to “why?” is always “to learn!”. That freed the child and it went out to explore. The archivist now had only one stack of answers and that cleared the mind. The archivist however was not content and needed another category to file things under, for that is what it is there to do. The archivist created a new question: “what?” and took the old stacks religion – nonsense – science – junk mail and was very content it could file things away again.

I pat it on the head and let it be and I go out with the child and explore some more, not bothered with the why or the what.

Who I am? I am you.
 

Frozen full of color

It froze my true being.
Fear did the freezing for me.
It builds layer upon layer in my defense,
cooling down my spirit, slowing down my life.
Fearing the fear and the thaw.

Two things I could choose
Stay within this frozen circle,
or
Look for a hole in the ice.

I looked.
Friction between fear and want.
Friction creates heat.
Heat melts.
Melts the barrier between the me in me and me.
Colorful me, fear free, not fault free.

Poem

How sharp does the line say I’m mountain.
The khaki tells the gray,
here is where I begin and end and here is where I’ll stay

When sunlight breaks through heavy sky
and touches autumn gold,
it tells me, listen friend it is my story too here told.

Then falling leafs disguised as bird
no longer hide the singing thrush.
I gather them where they fell  and play to hear their brush

My life but a circle wide and as deep as I can see,
where heart’s content and cloudless joy
tell the story that is me.

I just don´t see the problem

I must admit this is a recent phenomena, I used to be an expert in seeing problems, detecting them before they arose, analyzing them at length and creating some new ones as I went along. For most problems, real or imaginary, I could sum up an impressive list of solutions and although I tend to lean towards the more simple ones, the ones I could single handedly handle, I could, if in the mood, spin solutions so complex that for them to work the whole world needed to change drastically. But of late I just don’t see the problem.

This does by no means mean that live is smooth sailing and besides I used to see a problem in sailing smoothly anyway. No, life still shows itself in all its facets and a lot of those facets you could, if you wanted to,  label as a problem. For instants, recently I moved house and homeland, now if you want to see problems lining up, move house. Although it was a lot of hard work, I never saw the problem. By the way that was the first time I noticed this strange new phenomena, I contributed this to lake of sleep and the long days of hard work. But just a few days ago I realized it has become a more permanent thing.

I not only moved stuff from one place to another but also NaNa and Flow and my 14 year old mare Ness. After a days ride I put her on what I thought was a fenced of field, I fed her and gave her water and headed home. The next day she was nowhere to be found not even a mark on the ground or a pile of shit to tell me where she went. Now I must admit that I could feel panic present itself and the machine of seeing problems started ticking, but as soon as it started it stopped. While walking around looking for shit I questioned myself: “don’t you love Ness?, there is 80.000 acres of woodland for her to get lost in”. But loving her was not the problem nor the solution, that is just the way it is. As I drove home to get the dogs and start a  searchge party I tried to get myself in problem solving mode, but I couldn’t. I just went back with the dogs and started the party to search with an ease and calmness that did not feel out of sorts to me at all.

After a long day of fruitless searching and with a lot of talking to people who know people I sat on the stairs in my new house and wondered when the problem would hit me, but it didn’t, nor did the panic.

The next morning I went back to look for her and after a few hours of walking and driving around I stopped at my local café for a cup of coffee and told of my missing horse. Before I knew it people who knew people where called and the location of Ness was known. I went to pick her up and there I found myself in the middle of nowhere with a car, two dogs of leash, with Flow loving to chase anything and everything and a frantic horse on a piece of string and I just could not see the problem, all I could see was the action to take; moving forward freely and taking it as it comes.

The farmer, whose field it was, grinned at this peculiar gathering of souls, he parked my car and told me have faith and off we went. It was a four hour walk filled with fantastic moments and incredible sights and with every step I could feel this new phenomena become more me.  I put Ness back in her field and fenced it of properly this time and sat down next to her tired and grateful. A neighbor passed by and I told my story of the missing horse and the long walk. ”You must be tired then” she responded. “Yep” I replied happily “and all I need to do now is to walk all the way back to get to my car”. She let out a big sigh and shook her head in dismay, but as I saw the sun melting slowly with the mountains, I just could not see the problem.

Fishhooks

Fear like fishhooks in my skin

Who put them in and when and why,

it does not matter anymore.

One by one I pull them out, careful not to break the skin.

I thank each hook for its purpose, its lesson, its pain.

Then tell myself “never again” and put the hook aside on an ever growing pile.

Some were easy to take out, some were hard to remove

Some pinned beliefs of self onto my skin,

Some pinned my eyes shut or kept my lips from speaking.

Sunken in so deep new skin grew over it, and you’d hardly notice it was ever there.

But in the silence I could hear them faintly whisper what to fear, where not to go and why.

I hear the voice of the ones who put it there and mine as I repeat the mantra of fear.

I listen carefully and accept their lesson, see their point, thank them for the heads up.

But I do take the hook out and put it on the ever growing pile.

I’ll forge a ring out of those hooks one day to remind me of the circles I broke,

the lessons I learned and the freedom that I gain.

Or not, I might just leave them behind and walk away whistling.

Thoughts on fear

Show me what you are most fearful of and I’ll show you the opportunities you let slide.

Thoughts on fear

There is no such thing as fear without a purpose, but 9 out of 10 fear overgrows purpose.

Find purpose, stop fear.

Thoughts on fear

Fear is like your face early in the morning before you put on your make up.

No matter how much eye shadow and lip gloss you put on that face is still there.

Learning to greet your wrinkled morning face with a smile is the first step towards smiling at fear and have it smile back.

A or E

Apathy - Empathy.
What is the difference?
What is the difference really?

Thoughts on fear

Fear is like Velcro, lots of things get stuck on to it, even if you don’t want to.