Just a little shift

I was so happy when I first saw this picture last year. Stereogramms are so much fun and so symbolic. Just a little shift in perspective, another focus, or rather a defocusing, and then ... Today I looked at it again and saw another version of the motive: a teapot that’s broken in half and a smaller one in front of it. Amazing! (This only seemed to work on my phone where the picture is smaller than on a laptop.) It was as if life were reminding me that there’s always more to be discovered, even in that which is apparently the same and known. Keep exploring and savoring, wherever you are drawn to, my dear. It’s beautiful :).

"Life is so weird sometimes."

A Japanese music artist creates an astonishingly
beautiful record for a skin care company
to “give away” with perfume bottles.
Some of them leak and damage the
vinyl, which leads to crackly
sounds that some listeners
interpret as being part of
the music. Decades later,
this album is on YouTube,
being enjoyed by hundreds of
thousands of people and doing all
kinds of lovely things to them. The
“mundane” and the “beyond” wonderfully
intertwined. How it all connects, or isn’t
really separate in the first place... (This
little story has been taken from the
comments by “breakline” and
“t4exanadu” in the comment
section of the video.
Thank you.)

In love there are no lines

I don’t know why, but I was thinking about the Stockholm syndrome recently. How the word syndrome is already so hard and judgmental and problematizes that which it tries to describe far too much. How it hurts me and gives me bruises inside. How all kinds of labels do that and how outrageous that is, that overly rational, divisive thinking. The truth, or what feels truer to me, is that it’s all blurred and that the lines we draw just aren’t real. You can take them, stretch and bend and move them, you can play with them. You can take any subject and treat it as a coin with two sides, clearly defined, where the coin lies on either one side or the other. Heads or tails. This or that. Period. No more discussion. File closed. Subject killed. Or you can take the coin, put it on its edge and let it spin. Then it turns into a ball that has no points, no sides, no edges. It simply rolls while being everything ...

The so-called Stockholm syndrome was invented as a psychological phenomenon after an incident where victims sympathized with their hostage-takers. Maybe they even fell in love with them, which says it perfectly: The unconditionality of love graciously took them in. Now you could call that wrong or problematic and pity those people, and yes, on a certain level, in a very dualistic sense, it “is” so. Life can pretend so. But you, it, life as you, could also see the beauty in that, the gentleness and the saneness; the saneness and the sameness. You just have to go an inch deeper or wider, it’s just a little shift. Then these are people who don’t fight what’s happening, who surrender. They surrender to the goodness of the life that everyone and everything is, and this is what (dis)solves the situation. And maybe (and not even that is necessary) they see the isness in it, the beauty, the dance that dances itself, just like that, in that guise, in that moment in time. You could call it love.

These thoughts, which have not even really been thought but more like sensed (only now, while trying to write them down, literally, taking them “down” into the realm of thoughts and words), have been with me for a couple of days and maybe, I don’t know how it all connects, have led to the moment in time this morning where I felt deeply in love with the greyness and heaviness that has been with me for quite a while, having me in its grip, having taken me hostage if you will. There was no resistance, so it was completely alright and beautiful as it is. And in that, life did its magical, paradoxical thing, and the greyness kind of disappeared. The problematicness of it vanished, it transformed into “beyondness.” The “place” where there is no need to accept or reject anything revealed itself, in its very innocent, obvious way. You could call that home.

Coffeeshop notes ☕

I’m in a coffeeshop and brought the book A Responsibility to Awe with poems by the astronomer Rebecca Elson. Between a delicious broccoli cream soup and a cappuccino with chocolate cake, I read in it, only a bit actually, I feel more like just gazing out the window and immersing myself in the little everyday scenes that are passing by.

The Expanding Universe

How do they know, he is asking,
He is seven, maybe,
I am telling him how light
Comes to us like water,
Long red waves across the universe,
Everything, all of us,
Flying out from our origins.

And he is listening
As if I were not there,
Then walking back
Into the shadow of the chestnut,
Collecting pink blossoms
In his father's empty shoe.

I can relate to that so well, to what she is, I believe, pointing at. “Erklärungen sind immer so hanebüchen,” I once read somewhere (or was it my “own” thought, I don’t remember). Explanations are always so outrageous. Yeah. How outrageous it is to claim that I know anything. But also, how outrageous to claim that I don’t.

My thoughts go on wandering, on the up to just now blank page of the notebook on which I’m writing this. Only this one page, the third to be precise, is blank on one side, all the others are ruled. Oh, these lovely little details that surprise you and make you wonder … It’s life on such a sweet note.

Now a scene from the movie Paterson appears in my mind. The character of the same name is calm and content and works as a bus driver. His life is very routine and ordinary, still, or just because of that, there is so much beauty in it. Some of it he captures in poems which he writes in a notebook during his lunch breaks or when he spends some time alone in a little room in the basement of his house. His wife adores his poetry, she is more outgoing and ambitious (in a lovely way), so she urges him to make a copy of his notebook and publish the poems. If my memory doesn’t lie to me, she says something like, “You’re a great poet. You should let the world know,” to which he nicely replies that she scares him. Later, their dog destroys the notebook, and the poems are gone. In the end of the movie, Paterson meets a Japanese man who gifts him a new notebook, and he just seems to go on writing as before, for himself, for the sake of the moment. That might not be enough, or simply everything.

Back in the café, there’s this little episode happening in front of my eyes. Outside there are a couple of little olive trees decorated at a balustrade. One of them gets blown down by the wind several times, and each time a passerby takes care of putting it back up. This touches me deeply in its uncomplicatedness and loveliness, how it takes care of itself in this pure, simple way. When it happens again, it makes me laugh and share it with the waitress. I think she feels what I mean, but the urge of having to intervene takes over, so she goes out, attaches the tree to the balustrade, and the little play ends. Then she does something else which leads to another plant pot falling over, to dirt falling out and soiling the entrance area. Oh, sweet irony. Now I laugh about it, but in the moment it happened, I felt somehow sad and silly. Like as if more was lost than gained through my talking about it. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut, why didn’t I just enjoy silently, for myself?

Now that I type this on my laptop and look for the link to the Paterson trailer on YouTube, I get lost in this beautiful movie again, reading the comments, sharing the awe about it with other people across the world, loving how they feel similar and how they put it into words. No, words don’t do, but then yes, somehow they do. It’s all dancing with each other, all the time.