Tiffany Dawn Smith: 10/01/21

Friday, October 1, 2021

Keep building those inner fortresses

"What we achieve inwardly, will change outer reality." -- Plutarch

Yes, exactly. One person looks around and sees a pit of despair, of boredom, restlessness, and disgust, while the other touches transcendence and senses God in the simple movement of wind across their face, or light bouncing around the ground, though they both stand in the very same place.

“Nonadaptation” by Czeslaw Milosz

"I was not made to live anywhere except in paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries
For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.
And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song."

"On Urge to Withdraw" by Naida Muslic

"The withdrawal from the world - into forests as a mad mystic who plays lute to birds and visits the towns only to scandalise and scare people who were too adapted to the world and its ways, seemed the only way to exit the wheel of samsara. I felt aged - like I've already seen it all, had hundreds of children and husbands and wives, like I've been a criminal, a priest, a queen, a prostitute, and there was nothing left for me to be anymore. All the roles seemed too familiar and already explored and lived. It wasn't nihilism that was behind the urge to withdraw - it was inability to see any evidence of my belief that there had to be more to life than dying with a stomach more full than you started with."