spokes

This morning I woke up in the work. It was six o'clock and a false alarm. The telephone rang again at 7. I had had four hours of sleep. The enteritis I had got of a sandwich in the cafeteria was burning and ballooning my stomach. I was hungry with a headache and zero appetite. Did my job and took off as the next guy showed up. My home is so ugly that it hurts. The furniture consists of four chairs, a table, a sofa and that's about it. But there is big glass door to the garden that lets eyes breathe.



I took to looking at my post. Friends are good to have if they know when to be there and when not. I love my loneliness. Only when I am alone I can get in touch with the Other Guy, the one who knows about beauty. He likes to be a little bit drunk so I've bought him a bottle of Canadian Club. After seeing "Lost in Translation" I'd wanted get Suntori instead, but, alas, not available here.

Alone I meet the music. I do not really know how to play but I like the sound I am making, My guitar is a Strat. I savour the harmonies, I listen and dream of fingers that could do the things ringing in my head. So many fantastic melodies pass through my head and I barely catch a note here another from there. The dogs outside are howling.
Margaritas ante canes.

I do not think, somebody else is doing it for me. This someone else loves oxymorons and great gestures. Today he said: "The opposite of love is fear". Then he shut up.

At noon I took a nap. There was a gentle figure all dressed up in winter clothes (the air con was at full blast) and told me about the things I've done. All the things she said began with: "If not for fear".

I woke up and it took me quite some time to know where I was.

From what I remembered of the dream, I reconstructed parts of my life. And, hell, that was the truth I had been looking for so long. I picture feelings as a cart wheel. In the middle ar the axis there is the state of "not-feeling". There are spokes that shoot in different directions. Your total feeling-state is a vectogram of these feelings. Now I realized that love is not an opposite of hate. It is easy to love and hate somebody at some stage of the relationship.
Love is not an opposite of not-loving, either, Zero has no opposites. (that's why so many people make themselves zeroes even if they could be somebodys).

I picked up the Strat and took on a harmony. Boy, do I love its sound!
I dropped some notes, came back to the original and made some arpeggios.

The music strenghtened my new view.
The opposite of beauty can be ugliness but before accepting this you ask yourself what is beauty.



Then you can ask what is ugliness and what is the good of the the two.

Beauty is something to approach, to have, to relish. I think that beauty is a branch of the tree of love.
Ugliness is something to run away from, to root off. Ugliness is nature's gift to know from the first encounter that this is something not for you. Trouble, stomach ache, worries.





The opposite of ugliness is not "tolerable". That is the state near the axis of the wheel of feelings.
The opposite of fear is not "unfear". That is a state of non-feeling. The opposite of fear is attachment.

In the search of beauty I search for love.
Please, do not confuse the industrial mush with Love,.

Love is not something that can be given or taken or lit up or killed.
It either is or then it is not. The best you can do is find it inside of you and show others that it is.

I say no more.

sunset soundtrack

The austral autumn nearly did me the trick this evening. Two weeks ago the sun set at 7 pm. I know as one of the highlights of my day is to go down to the seaside and contemplate the sunset. What is the big deal about sunsets, one might ask. A question like that define a person more thoroughly than I ever could. I just say that birds love sunsets, the muslims do their prayer at sunset, people here gather on the cliffs to look at it and as I know, even the monkeys of Upper Nile get together to howl on the riverbanks facing west at dusk.

Sunsets here are a real treat. When the sky is clear, the blue is overwhelming, penetrating, violent. When it is the monsoon season and whimsical winds throw about clouds of various sizes, shapes and textures, the sun's rays and the laws of optics put together a show that beats any home theatre set 6-0 6-0.

But tonight I nearly missed it as we are just about to reach Equinox and days shorten at a remarkable rate. At 6:30 there was hardly any light left.



Going down to the beach I had Pat Metheny's Travels playing in my iPod. Perfect strolling music! The waves were reflecting the still-lit sky in a shade of sheetmetal.
Clouds looked dirty. I sat down on a fence and changed to Remember Shakti 's "Shringar". It is scenery music, not going anywhere special but constantly in movement like the leaves of the trees or the ripples on the lagoon bay. As the flow of the music intensified, the colors went through their sequence. The sun set in the clouds, the light was very gently rose until it faded.
The music ended. I dried my eyes.



I did not miss anything. There was nowhere far away I longed for. All the loves I had were the times they were. All my dreams, my successes and my failures had no meaning whatsoever. I was in the now. The beauty and the harmony emptied everything, all my ambitions, cravings and regrets, of all the emotional significance they might have gathered along the years.
I was in the Now.

"Beauty is only skin deep".
?!

My foot!