here I am,
sitting on a bench next to autumn
absorbing the last of the scorching sun
and watching the ants
move like clockwork
in a playground we call our own.
here they are,
mapping the maze
with staccato precision.
I am reading a poem,
like every other year.
later, I’ll get up to go home,
pass the picket fence with the tiny
porcelain cats,
walk into a heap of crunchy leaves,
and stomp out
all regrets.
Just a thought…
So many of us feel depleted, drained, stressed out. Our beings flogged from within, our lives – our biggest gift – turned into empty chases. Pursuing a zillion things that we can grab and touch and display, but which aren’t real. We live in societies that prioritize task efficiency, competition, action, and the accumulation of stuff over family, over time with friends, music, celebration, inner peace, or the contemplation of beauty.
The spiritual, once a central component of daily life – that umbilical cord to the divine – has been all but banished, relegated to the periphery, exiled to the realm of the exotic, the archaic, and the ‘oppressive’. The daily recalibration of prayer has fallen from grace and with it we have fallen – literally – from grace. From the grace of communing with the universe and with each other, the grace of transcending and accessing our higher purpose. From peace and vitality.
We bet everything on the card of desire, sleepwalking through life in a state of sterile and destructive arousal, as if remote-controlled via our most basic reflexes and deprived of the light of transfiguration. Do not be fooled that we no longer worship. We do. We worship the idol of self – the crumbling ‘natural man’ – while cutting ourselves off from our spiritual potential – the human person inhabited by holiness, true love, generosity, and joy.
The unhappiness that brings.
And how freely available the healing can be.
P.S. For more (and better!) on our aimless restlessness, our addiction to illusion and distraction, and our loathing of Eden – take a listen here: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/fatidic-power-literature. An episode I stumbled upon today – no kidding – after writing this blog. There are very few coincidences in life.
Venus – that ancient
goddess of carnal desire –
has a poisonous atmosphere that might,
just might,
hold the life of a microbe.
Immediately,
the microbes here on Earth
began to show signs
of restlessness.
fighting each other for supremacy
and claiming poison
as their territory.
Copyright A. Sepi 2020. All rights reserved
Once in a blue moon,
beauty settles into my soul
like a swallow in its nest:
gracious and quiet and fertile.
Mere seconds later,
hordes and hordes of selfish people
with steel-toothed hounds and motorized wheels
come rushing by,
hurling themselves at the air, at the landscape, at other people’s souls,
a merciless stampede
raising the dust;
an unleashed army of carnal restlessness, a cacophony of hubris and outrage,
charging headlong, chasing the next empty minute, the next self-righteous cause,
cutting open words they don’t understand
and letting them bleed to death.
In their tow, the bee is sucked out of its flower,
the sweetness of honey is said to become unpalatable
and cross-pollination impossible.
I let them pass,
envy not their rapid advancement,
their heedless lack of regrets.
In God’s love, I am nourished.
Copyright 2020. A. Sepi. All rights reserved.
a watch is a little
glass prison
for time –
where the seconds
serve a life sentence
without the possibility
of parole.
people like to wear
captive time
around their wrist.
when all the seconds are numbered and can never escape,
they call the watch good.
measuring
heartbeats,
counting down
to the end.
I’d like to start a petition
to free time
I’d like to see it
fly
and watch
for timelessness instead.
Trying to stay in shape during social distancing.
A river, a grove, a few less trodden paths on a sun-flooded morning. Glimpses of real beauty. And a little piece of heaven.
Copyright A. Sepi 2020. All rights reserved
We’re so fucking great
Masters of our fate
We’ll conquer the stars
We’ll colonize Mars
Make a million bucks
Drive SUV trucks
We’ll upgrade our lives
We’ll get trophy wives
Your pocket’s your Savior
Be snide to thy neighbor
C’mon, be a winner
The pauper’s the sinner
Forget all the ancients
Make profits off patients
We’re so fucking bold
We’re breaking the mold
A virus so small
Is breaking us all.
Remember these days
these brief days
when we walked in groups of one
we gave thanks to the ones who toiled
and our lives touched each other even though our hands didn’t.
Remember these days
these brief days
when daddy was no longer at work (yay!)
because people mattered more
than production:
we discovered we had lungs (so fragile)
and the air became breathable.
Remember these days
these brief days
with the deafening chants of birds, their speeches, their courtships, their pleas
finally audible,
and how we watched them build nests from our dining room window,
the whole family gathered around the table for once,
the playgrounds locked, quiet,
the streets devoid of the screams of neglected children;
the strange intimacy.
Remember these days,
these brief days
when we looked at each other with fear and awe
and doubt and hope and kindness
– but we looked! –
and were on the verge of rediscovering
humanity;
A book and a stroll meant the world to us,
we sang on balconies
while deer with unnatural eyes and glistening antlers
wandered into Nara and took the empty metro nowhere.
Remember these days
these brief days
when the trees stood erect and reached into the sky while the stock markets fell
(not the other way around)
when the river exhaled a soft haze at dawn before the buzz began,
the buzz of a thousand and one insects.
Remember the days
when the engines of destruction stood still for a minute
while food continued to grow out of the dark soil
and we were afloat in the poetry of necessity.
Remember these days
for they will not last forever
and maybe, one day, who knows,
they shall be missed.
the heavy, menacing tread of the lone jogger,
the scented solitude of the wild cherry blossom
down by the water.
a silence overpowering, thunderous.
undaunted gulls shrieking about trivial things,
ripping through it –
ear-piercing, alive.
two-dimensional human shapes in the distance
revealing the magnitude of the landscape:
floodplains and clouds huddling over and thickets and brown grasses and beavers
hidden from sight
the musical chirping of warblers,
the regular knocking of woodpeckers.
a sprig, a bursting bud, a thin green leaf timidly exploding
as spring self-isolates amid
this prodigious heaving and gasping,
this fear of inhaling
punctuated by the scampering dogs.
industrious zeal grinding to a halt.
how slow the river flows.
how pale the grey sands.
it feels like Good Friday without the church bells.
Have you noticed how the following themes keep popping up, almost obsessively, in contemporary discourse – in the media, in the public sphere and increasingly in ourselves?
This obsession with sex – and complete devaluation of love and tenderness and commitment.
This obsession with doing – and complete devaluation of being.
This obsession with the intensity of fragmented experience – and complete devaluation of profoundness and resilience and eternity.
This obsession with work and maximization – and complete devaluation of contemplation and spirituality. Of the time it takes to realize that you have a soul, that you are a human being capable of transcendence, not a machine plugged in to churn out as many objects as possible per unit of time.
We treat ourselves and each other as equipment, as products. We apply to beings the logic of machines. We have transferred the maximum efficiency mantra of the technological sector to human life. We have internalized the algebraic depersonalisation, the callous disregard, the flattening subjugation of being to efficiency and utility present in our discourses. We find it OK to behave and to be treated increasingly like predictable robots or like working animals. Like mammals, all dapper and happy to be allowed to act out their basest instincts.
This obsession with Darwinism, with us as little more than physical organisms in biological evolution, this bench-marking against apes, not against angels or saints. This devaluation of angels and saints as melodrama and cheap esoteric – or, even, as oppression. This talk of our “natural instincts”. Nature, our nature, as a new goddess. But should we always make way for our natural instincts? Will that improve us? What will build more character and more goodness and a deeper path to the absolute we secretly yearn for?
(Is something good or legitimate simply because we were born with it? Because we acquired it? Because it is fun? Because it brings pleasure or monetary value? Are we not supposed to transcend ourselves?)
This frenzy of devaluation… No religion, but brand religion. The branding iron.
What is slavery for theoretically free individuals? According to Simone Weil, the disconnect between one’s efforts and their life’s work. (We work, but we no longer have a life’s work, an opus, an oeuvre. We expect our work to be the foundation of our identity, but in fact, so many of us no longer feel like creators. We no longer develop our being in the process of our work. Work all too often feels like odd life-draining tasks under excruciating time pressure, away from the ones we love. It no longer feels like purpose. Just endless busyness. Our work has control over us, but we no longer have much control over it.)
What else is slavery? In Gravity and Grace, S. Weil goes on to say it is the coercion to accept that “reading” of yourself, that interpretation of yourself, which others stamp on you. Having no choice or having only wrong choices. Allowing yourself to be devoured by exhausting activities, and making all this daily effort simply to stay in your current condition – no horizon, no finality, mere survival. Day to day to day. The arbitrariness of how you are treated. The dependency. The addiction.
Any illusion begins to feel real when enough people accept it and internalize it as “the thing to do”. Repeated, it reproduces, it propagates.
This destruction of the human soul…
We no longer recognize the sacredness of our own and each other’s being.
Will the human spirit ever rise against this flattening iron?…
Life's journeys
Felicia
GERMAN - ENGLISH - ROMANIAN
inspiration, création
