Tag Archives: life

The Silenced Mind

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12

So fast, something
Safe can become
A prison.
Walls being too familiar,
Keeping out the world
While tenderly preserving
A monastic sanctity.
When did it all
Become such a threat?
Peace being lost
In the claiming of
Freedom…
So wounded
We wait
We tremble
While wars are being
Fought
Inside the caves
Of the silenced Mind.

A Gathering of Hope

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39

We all get sold this idea that life is some kind of beautiful fantasy, then when we learn that that is not true, we hurt, we hurt badly. But we push through that pain. Every day.

When our dreams are shattered and we learn that they will never come true, we make new dreams. When we fully understand the concept of our mortality, we learn to make each day count, to not waste time on things that don’t matter.

When we lose someone we love for the first time, we learn to love the ones that are still there harder, to appreciate them and celebrate our relationship with them.

When family is denied us, or taken away from us, we create our own family. We learn to share out our love to those who need it, with an elderly living alone, with children without parents, with abandoned or threatened animals.

We find happiness despite the pain, and that is what makes human beings so darn strong. And amazing. And awe inspiring. We all live with pain every day. All of us. But we do just that, we live with it. Fully and happily. That is what makes a human being so great.

Nordic Summer

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49

It is June and the sun has come out. Finally. After eight months of cold, wet, snow and grey drooping skies. The roads have dried up, tanned into a paleness of taupe and stone marble.

Town gardens have sprung to life. Green climbers are cylindering up white picket fences and garden bluebells and peach blush roses lean towards borders of saturated unclipped grass. Lazy cats sleep on outdoor love seats, stretching their fury limbs in the direction of the sun and yawning sleepily at admiring bypassers.

Townspeople have come out of hibernation to drink cold beer in makeshift sidewalk eateries. The temperature has barely reached into the 60s, but the men have bared their hairy chests and women are strutting their white newly shaved legs to the warming sun. Here, neither animals nor people seek out the cool shade in summer, if they did, it would be considered equal to swearing in church. The sun is a rare, highly treasured guest in this part of the world, and we like to think of ourselves as her favorite host.

The seashore turns into an exhibition strip of pale bodies. Young and old shed most of their clothes and give themselves over to the national favorite summer activity: tanning. The brilliant blue sea shifts from black to lapis lazuli to aquamarine in the never-setting sunlight. And the archipelago becomes a playground for sailers, windsurfers and speedboat races in the daytime, and a treasure trove for young crabbers in the pale greyish dusk of the summer nights.

Many first kisses will be made in these long lawless nights. Hearts will be broken, new friendships forged and memories, to warm and sustain in the sunset years, will be made by unsuspecting youth, happily unaware of the passing of time.

Little red wooden cottages dot the shoreline surrounded by wildflower hills and yellow buttercup meadows. Some of them are boathouses, occupied by old fishing trawlers and temporarily by holiday-stay-at-home teens looking for a nocturnal hideaway. Others are aging holiday homes, sole survivors of a simpler time, when second-home owners were rare, and cabins with proper plumbing and electricity even rarer.

Woofing canines, leash-less and playful, prance around garden-style cafe tables, jumping to catch an occasional piece of prawn-and-mayo sandwich before it is snapped up by greedy whining giant seagulls.

And as bright days turn into a little less brighter evenings the smell of hot barbecue and daylong sun block fills the squares and the baked streets. Cover-ups and sleeved blankets hide the day’s work of skin darkening and some relentless, annoyingly repetitive radio summer hit with an irresistible foot-tapping appeal is boomboxing the awkwardness out of the otherwise quiet townies.

Time slows down during these precious sun-rich months in the cold north. Reserved introverted northerners find themselves dizzily drunk on too much vitamin D and transform into loud, half-naked, fun-seeking southerners, basking in the glow of the metamorphosed landscape, as though they were on a tropical island, carefree and uninhibited.

Nordic Summers are as intense and desperate as young couples in love, unfolding as though time did not exist, yet hurrying to blossom as though there was no tomorrow.