True Love
Just like any of you I have experienced life in a multitude of facets, from love to loss, from friendship to betrayal, from adversity to success, from good to evil.
As I grew up I found it hard to learn who is a friend and who is fake around me. But in time I have learned a simple thing that is extremely powerful: “you know a tree by the fruits”. The same applies to people, you know the character of a person by their actions. Once you establish this, it takes not very much time to separate good people from evil people and users from people who share generously their true love.
I have personally known many bad people and not so many really good people. And the amazing thing was that bad people have appeared and then suddenly disappeared from my life, while good people have always been there, constant and reliable, even if distant at times. Bad people are a sad memory, but good people have truly marked my life. Bad people I have certainly forgotten, yet the good people will always be in my mind and I will always love them. True good people and true friends are like stars shining in the night. Every simple little thing they do with you or for you brings you joy and guides you on the sometimes dark path of your life.
There are many so called friends out there that never support you or take your energy but never care for you. They expect you to always listen to their problems but they never bother to ask you how you are. They take advantage of all your support, they take all they can from you, but when you face bad times they fail you embarrassingly in the least expected moments. If you know such people, get them out of your life and carry on. Imagine them as fleas on your jacket, just get them off you and carry on, you will learn from the experience and it will make you stronger. The true friends would never betray you, never despise you, never laugh at you, never share your secrets, never purposely hurt you, even if you are absolutely broken, or especially then. Friend is someone who loves you as you are, with all your flaws, someone who supports you no matter what, who may criticise you but who unconditionally truly loves you.
An act of true love is to help others knowing you have no expectation of reward, benefit or praise. I have met few people in my life who have done just that, and to whom I am forever grateful. They are not only very kind and generous people, but they are also humble, private and very intelligent as well. It is as if God’s goodness is spread through their hand.
There is a Christian saying : “do not let your left hand know what you left hand is doing”- meaning that if you help someone you should not brag about it, nobody but God should know about it. All I know is that there is a karma, and that one day God will repay the love and goodness with much more love and goodness in return.
What will God do with the bad and the traitors? No idea. I have seen karma at work. I have seen people having only bad luck in all their actions and not realise that they were treating other people around them very badly, causing them lots of grief.
What we give returns to us, sooner or later.
Food for thought my friends.
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600 words, memyselfandela, July 2015
Photo: Twitter
The Return to Innocence
Memory. One of the strongest muscles in our being. It can contract and ruin your life crushing you underneath or it can gently lift your soul in the light, no matter what life throws at you.
When I was a child my grandmother used to have in a corner of her garden a columbine that used to grow again and again every year. I remember how fascinated I used to be as a little girl by the filigree shape and the delicate yet robust structure of this flower. I could study it day after day when it bloomed or when it’s petals were falling. I used to be very caring with the flowers. And when I say flowers, I mean beings, living creatures that I respected deep in my child’s heart. It never ceased to amaze me and make me happy whenever I saw it, because only there, in that corner of the garden, hidden in shadow under a lilac tree one could have found my columbine. There were no others, it was unique and the neighbours had none. It’s incredible how simple things that adults don’t even notice can be such an awesome thing for a child.
Many years I grew up with the beautiful columbines, studying them as they opened their purple-blue flowers. Columbines meant holiday, freedom and childhood. Not in so many words, but with a warm cosy feeling deep within. Words meant nothing then, only the heart was full of feelings and of a light that an adult is losing somewhere on the way.
This year I was contemplating my bare garden, frozen and with no trace of life. Then suddenly an incredible invisible force, a singular touch of grace has awaken the life in the sleeping buds and wrinkled flowers that rose their heads and stretched their beings in the warm sunshine. Then mesmerised I have discovered hundreds of columbines.
Is it God’s message that life is beautiful and full of diversity on a multitude of layers at the same time? Or is it just a cosmic coincidence? No matter what it is, it has brought back to me that warm cosy feeling in the midst of a busy life full of stress. The morning when I saw the columbines bloom I felt how one must feel when they win the lottery. To others this means nothing. To me it means the return to innocence.
400 words, memyselfandela, June 1st 2015
Photo: Adela Galasiu, May 2015
The Sound of Missing You
The sun paints a last trace of life before dying in agony. With it’s last drops of shadow it lingers under my tired eyes.
I carry within the memory of what love used to be. I can still hear our fading steps on the same old roads, on the same grey pavement. I can still feel your arm tight around my waist and your laughter.
Near me other couples chat like we used to, holding hands, blessed to not know how futile and doomed this moment of happiness is, sentenced to only live for a glimpse in time.
*
I was a fool to believe that you can make a choice. No. I chose you. The one you really are, not the one that hides his face. The one in which I believe, not the one that never believes in himself.
Darkness rises all around. In thoughts, in the shivering cold, in the unspoken emptiness. My once loving heart bleeds at the thought that you’re gone, yet nobody can take me the smile that you used to have in your eyes.
Maybe in your dimension you dance now with other masked faces and other smiles give you a passing smile. Yet deep inside you will never find your path on your own, there’s no path without love.
**
Rain strikes my cheek like your fingers once used to, falling cold, quenching the marks left by your ardent kisses. My lips whisper the shadows of the same name that never ceased to linger in my mind since I last saw you.
Countless prayers go your way, but you don’t even know it. If I would have stepped off the edge of my life I would still have never found you, for you are far, much further than my thought can reach to kiss you good night.
Memories of a madman fill up the sky as I lay myself to sleep. But even in my dream there will only be this burning love that has never ended.
***
333 words, memyselfandela, January 2014
Life on a platform
I live waiting on the platform for my destined train. Sometimes I overslept in the waiting room and missed it, but most of the times I was here on the platform when it arrived. I have travelled for a while, I have learned new things but when I got off the train I have realized it has brought me back to this station with a name that I am still trying to decipher.
It’s just a normal train station like all others. With a huge clock, with huge windows, with many people carrying around small and big luggages and baggages stuffed with their own existence. Many run after trains they almost miss, others wait a bit restless for their journey, but the most rare kind of passengers are the ones that radiate happiness when they see their train arriving. Not many smile as they step in their train.
Above my head, on a wall, is scribbled Paler’s Decalogue, for some a blasphemy, for some food for thought:
“1.Wait, no matter how long.
2. Wait, no matter for what.
3. Don’t remember quite anything instead. The only good memories are the ones that allow you to live in the present.
4. Do not count the days.
5. Do not forget that any waiting time is temporary, even if it lasts for a lifetime.
6. Repeat yourself that there is no such thing as a desert. There is only our incapacity to fill the void in which we are living.
7. Do not put in the same pot both the prayer and God. Prayer is sometimes a form of hope of the one that does not dare to hope on his own.
8. If this thought helps, do not seek to admit that you hope because you don’t have something better to do or even in order to prevent the outcomes of doing nothing.
9. Bless the opportunity of completely belonging to yourself. Solitude is a whore that doesn’t blame you for being selfish.
10. Remember that Paradise was , most certainly, in a grotto.”
No days or nights are the same. They are all different and this is a blessing in itself.
Sometimes moths circle around the glowing beauty of a single light in the night, in a dance that fascinates me so much that I forget how much I still have to wait to see my train coming. Their mesmerizing dance takes me out of my world for a while.
Sometimes the dirty light reveals the faces of all the unknown people still waiting by my side, some worried, some cheerful, same frowning, some left with only few more drops of life.
Life goes on on the platform. The days grow, the nights slowly fade, the time sometimes pauses. The most beautiful light of all is the sunrise invading like molten gold the quiet platform, flowing between trains and passengers, flooding the huge waiting room in which some just enter and some still wait for an eternity to finally get born.
500 words, memyselfandela January 2014
Photo: Photobucket
The Happiness Diary – fragment, by Nicolae Steinhardt
“1968: Outside a bakery an old beggar, small, discreet. I give him 3 or 4 lei*.
He takes off his hat, respectfully, and thanks me for a long while. Why, I don’t know – the memory of my father, the physical resemblance (small and stooping) – his gesture – so polite, the shame of being saluted by an old man for a few lei, the onslaught of images of prison in my memory, revelatory of the human condition’s wretchedness – but I burst out crying in the middle of the street, like a madman.”
The Happiness Diary- fragment, by Nicolae Steinhardt
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Translation: memyselfandela, 2012
* Lei was the old comunist Romanian currency. In the present we use RON (New Romanian Lei).
memyselfandela 