JUST STAY

How different life feels when you stop jumping around and stay with what you have at hand.

When you let your definitions, preconceptions quietly go.

When you embrace what you’d otherwise find pleasant or unpleasant equally, including the part of you that still might have the urge to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

How your perception deepens when you just stay. 

How full, fresh, stimulating and rich feels life then.

FORTUNE-TELLING

You are upset.

Indignant. Frustrated. Irritated.

People are not the way you like them to be.

Unresponsive, irresponsible, insensitive, messy, cruel, you name it, they are.

In short, they don’t fit into your story. (We all have our own stories. And sometimes they beautifully match for a while –until one awakens and starts to relate beyond stories.)

So, you are upset.

In order to look acceptable, you need to disguise the simple truth even for yourself.

Instead of simply saying “I’m upset because I don’t get what I want” you embellish it. Justify your reasons, ennoble them.

Now you are upset and righteous in front of this erratic casting. A double hunch camel with the burden you lay on yourself.

But in no time, in a happy moment of realization as the apple fallen on Newton’s head, it’s going to dawn on you, and the door to dramas closes and click! heart’s vast, vast eyes open.

THISTLE VARIATIONS

https://plus.google.com/photos/118198168542066911108/albums/5923352172001767425?authkey=CKmf0dO0u8TUdA

TO ASK NOW AND THEN

Am I able to let my loved ones go anytime?

No matter how much I love them. Precisely because I do love them and do not mistake clinging (to the strings attached or to my conceptions about how should things be) for love.

With whom do I have this liberty?

Do I allow change to occur? At any time and in any form?

Questions to see how free my relation to the people, and yes, to life itself at any given moment.

A practical test.

JUNKYARD AT SUNSET

A theme that never fails to fascinate me.

Rusty metal misleadingly so smooth looking in the evening light. Like a sleeping beast. Exuberant life in forgotten colors. Bits and pieces of things past. Plastic. A wild collage. Chaotic, tragic. Inspiring. 

Limbo between the ending and a new beginning.

A meaningless meaning.

(Photos:

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CHEWING GUM

Meditation at the dentist. The only way for me to bear what feels like some infernal sequence of torture is letting the mind wildly wander. Take, for example, the phrase “chewing gum.” A foreigner who had learned what to call the firm, fleshy tissue covering the alveolar parts of either jaw and enveloping the necks of the teeth might understand it as chewing one’s gum(s). Even more confusing are the words that are both a verb and a noun such as “rose” or the Turkish word “yüz” (which means face, hundred, swim and to skin). As if our imagination hung us all of a sudden out to dry, or maybe was fed up with inventing a word for each and every thing and so hurriedly huddles together the remaining things to be named regardless of their relevance. A strange economy. 

Come to think of it, languages’ vocabularies may as well have been developed in the various dental chairs of the world. 

ALICE’S RABBIT AND THE MISER

I watched him hurrying awkwardly. Already running late, he was performing a mysterious choreography which cost him further time. The frantic victim of the poor time-management. “You look like the Rabbit in Wonderland” I said, laughing.

What an inspiring observation these beating-the air behaviors are in someone else (as opposed to the acrid feeling of being in their grip oneself).

There seems to be a strong relation between hurry and its derivative, worry, and the resources both psychological and material.

The more anxious we are, the scarcer it feels they are, and eventually get to be.

Like money in the hand of the miser.

Or time. As long as you see it as an external oppressor, like the rabbit sees his chain watch, you will desperately try to ignore it until the last minute.

Or you can pay regard to your inner rhythms and walk gracefully.

This is the difference between running like a beheaded chicken (as we say in Turkish) and being a well adjusted dancer; The difference between hurry and excitement.

"So be calm and act counterintuitively, openhanded with what you’ve got. Time, money, love, care.. Spend (not waste), give away and offer,” I said to myself, quietly satisfied with my train of thought when the black sunglasses he left on the table caught my eye.