Death within

We are used to think of a seed or a child in terms of potential. The seed holds in itself the potential to become a tree. The child holds the potential to become an adult human being. Do we carry death within us? From the moment we are born, from the beginning, an end is…

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The sea that unites all islands

I think about the public in a concert or a mob in the street. They act as One. People doing things they would never dare doing if they were alone. For a few moments they stop being individuals with an independent conscience and they become one with the group. They abandon themselves. They surrender to…

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The wanderer

I am in a train. I can see the outside world changing. Day, night, rain, sun, clouds, trees, unending concrete cities, a mountain. A succession of images outside. Inside, I remain still. From my perspective, I do not move. I am not surprised that Man once thought that the planet where it dwells was the…

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In the fall of ‘no’

I don’t know what the title means, it just came to my mind. ‘Yes’ seems so invasive, so active, so demanding. ‘No’ means to stay with myself, peace, nothingness. ‘Yes’ is outside. ‘No’ is inside. I have as a desktop image a photograph of a path in the forest, full of bluebells (here it is,…

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Surrender

Sometimes we read an apparently harmless line, and we can hear the hammer hitting the nail inside us. ‘Whack!’. Then, silence. The small drop hits the lake and slowly, relentlessly, the wave it produces reaches all the corners of our being. A shiver. Our world has changed. A hard truth we always knew, possibly. I…

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A window

The music of Philip Glass makes me feel at home. Apparently flat but deeply mysterious. The nuances of repetition. Change in no change. Peaceful and yet disquiet. A tension of opposites. Quiet and yet so loud. An inbetweenness. I often dream of windows through which I get ‘to the other side’, usually some sort of…

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On doing nothing

I recently finished watching the fourth season of The Crown. Throughout the series, the characters explain how the Crown and the elected Government represent the two sides of power. One side that is changeable, works hands-on, gets dirty and suffers the blame, and another side that is eternal, idealised, immaculate, almost magical. There comes a…

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The Void

And who am I? This question fills me with a kind of emptiness, as if highlighting what’s missing, rather than what’s present. The void. The nothingness that accompanies the lack of answers. The void has been with me since my early childhood, draining energy, will, and light. I tried to escape from it, to bury…

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Clones

Am I unique? Am I not repeating the pattern of so many human beings before me? Haven’t I been ‘me’ before, in another one? Am I the first of my kind? Don’t I make the same mistakes as that who was like me? Won’t another come later who will be like ‘me’, with my same…

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The living doubt

I see all these people with strong opinions. As if they were experts in medicine, virology, immunology, biochemistry, statistics, politics, law, economy and football. I guess strong opinions give them some sense of control over the ever changing reality. A sense that they ‘know’ what is going on around them and hence they can predict…

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