Experience and expiry dates,paths and roadblocks

Surprinsingly walls fall down easier when something has an expiry date. It's not the inevitable ending that scares some people, but the fact that they do not see the ending, being incapable of knowing when everything will suddenly stop.
The thought of having a limited period of time, helps them to dive in, fearlessly and thouroughly, without any shadow of regret. When the expiry date comes, they know they have made the most of it. And even when that experience leaves deeper marks on them than they had expected, they still feel happy knowing they'd had the courage to take the risk of giving in, of losing their solid ground for a moment. But was that truly courage? Or was it the comfort of believing they did all their best, of knowing the pre-established end was not their fault and that they would not bear in any way the responsability of a break-up?
Courage implies moving onto a path , despite fears and hesitations - for some the terror lies in seeing from the start that their their path is blocked, for others in not seeing the roadblock at all...

Within Temptation - All I Need

The conflict within

Disappointment and anger, followed by the fear and the refusal to confront the situation...you must have felt that at one point in your life. Sometimes all those feelings are pointing a certain person that did you wrong, and without knowing you end up dispising them and hatred wreathes the mere memory of what you had shared with them. The first impuls is to blame and to dispise the other, thinking that if they had acted differently things would have been much better. You strongly believe that the seed of your dissapointment was made of the other person's wrong actions. You want revenge, you might even succeed in getting even, but still you can't come to peace with yourself.
However, time has a weird way of putting things into a different perspective, when you switch from the heat of the moment to the coolness of retrospective thinking. Life's wind of change sweeps away both positive and negative feelings and also helps you to look inside yourself, without rushing into blaming the other.
After questioning yourself about what happened in a dusty past, you realize that you don't disdain the person that hurt you, as much as you hate the person that you became, while being with them. You don't throw stones at them anymore, since you feel you are responsible for the negative influence they had on for and for the person you turned into. You realize you don't hate them, but you hate what they are reminding you of.
All the feelings, if there ever where some, have been washed away by daily living, the charm of other love thrills and the embrace of other arms. However, you still don't feel comfortable with that person, because they remind you of what reprezents the weakest and the worst in you. Although you are strong and confident now, their mere presense evokes the image of a part of yourself that you despise.
You don't care much about them anymore, their life doesn't interest you, and you may have even forgiven them. And yet you can't stand them, not because you hate them , but because you haven't forgiven yourself for what you were once. Neither hate, nor love prevent you from being indifferent, but the fact that you still charge yourself for having been weak.
Only when you forgive that part of yourself that was once wrong for so long, will you be able to confront that person with a bright look in the eyes that shows a peaceful indiference, say hello and ask about the weather as you ask any other common aquitance.

Martina Topley Bird - Poison

The longing...

I remember even from the early literature lessons the history of the romanian word "dor". Romanian teachers used to say it cannot be translated, but if I come to think about it more, there are possible translations. The english word for "dor" would be "longing", the german one "Sehnsucht" and the list can go on.
The Romanian teachers also used to say it cannot be defined, tough some tried to explain it as a diffuse and acute feeling, triggered by the absence of a person, object,or place with which a person feels emotionally connected. In this case, if I come to think about it more, "dor" cannot be defined. The longing is based on a emotional connetion, but is it the same thing with sadness, love,hope, outrage, nostalgia, or is it a mixture of all those and many others? We love something that is missing, therefore we feel sad; the absence urges us to revolt against a fate that we call unrighteous. However, tired of asking ourselves questions, we come to terms with the so called fate, dwelling in our nostalgya the memories of the object that we are longing for. "Dor", or "longing" doesn't only imply revolt, but also sad acceptance, sometimes with a feeble flavour of hope, but also many other contradictory feelings. Can we get a coherent definition out of the description above? Not really, and if we tried we would inevitably cut from its complexity and magic, in our attemp to make it fit into a logical structure.
Ceasing to run for generalizations. there are two things I could say about longing. Firstly, there's a paradox about it - a multitude of feelings ,triggered by an absence. Secondly, there's something pure and unselfish about longing - it implies the kindest feelings, without expecting anything in return, since the object of the longing is always away from us...

Ducu Bertzi - Asa-mi vine cateodata (Sometimes I feel like...) -a romanian folk song about fate, bad luck and longing

The relativity of being home

We are all pilgrims in one way or the other... wether we travel with our minds in search for things that could fulfill us, wether we scour the world to see sparkling cities and breathtaking sceneries, or go afar to see the ones we love. Yet every pilgrim has a home - it might be place where they first started their journey, but it might also be the place where they arrived.

Some travel so much, as if they had thickets. Many leave their hometowns to go to other towns or even other countries, in search for something where they can feel they belong.

For my parents the question was: in which city from Romania should I settle down? For our generation the dilemma grows even bigger: in which country of this whole wide world shouldd I live? It is better to have more options, but it's also more frightening. So in such an uncertain and open world, what is the meaning of home?

Experience has taught me that home is more about having the people you love around you, than being in a certain location. I have felt home in Winnipeg, Montreal, Wildwood, in a little mountain town in Austria, in Iasi, Bucharest and neither of those is the place where I grew up in, but in those places I was sorrounded by people that made me feel like home. No matter how far, even across the Atlantic Ocean there are those places that I can relate to as home, because that is where some of the people I love are.

So that is the relativity of being home. It's not a place, but a state of mind, a feeling that the people around you can help you achive. It's where you feel you belong, where you feel content, even if miles away from the place you were born. We might not know where we are going to live, we might even go through more places of residence, but somewhere on the road we will eventually find that inner balance, that state of mind called home...

Enya - Pilgrim

Life in an amusement park

Round 'n round

Carousel

Has got you under it's spell

Moving so fast...but

Going nowhere

(Norah Jones - Carnival Town)

I have entitled my blog lifecarouselle and posted the song by Norah Jones long before I knew I was going to work for three months in an amusement park called Morey's Piers. Wildwood, New Jersey is where I spent all the summer of 2010, and Morey's Piers is the place where I met the most interesting people from all over the world.

Working in the park, having fun in all the rides,parties over parties, no worries and no future prospects to consider, just getting into the dazzling rhythm of the moment, that is what the life in an amusement park meant to me.

Everything was moving fast, there was always something new happening, some new people to meet... friendships, crushes, all moving with an increasing speed, just like the whirpool of a carouselle. You fly off the ground while in a carouselle, you lose your sense of ballance, you feel dizzy, yet excited. We flew off the ground during summer too, losing connection with our homes and going with the flow. Ouw world became the park and the ocean, and three months felt like a lifetime.

There was craziness, happiness excitement, but there was also goodbye. The carouselle is spinning in circles, it does not go anywhere. We have been spinning the same way, losing ourselves through the ride, but every ride had an end...

The carouselle does not go anywhere, it spins until it stops.

Summer left us, and we left the park. We left our world to go to our worlds...

Mads Langer - You're Not Alone

Behind the Forbidden Door

One of my favourite books is entitled The Forbidden Door by Gabriel Liiceanu, a romanian writer. The whole book is full of insights into the human spirit that basically help you to discover yourself in his writing, but a certain fragment particularly remained imprinted in my mind.

We all travel through life dressed in sobriety, shame and discression. For some it's more pronounced than for the others, but in a way we all wear a mask to cover our emotions. We don't always cry, laugh or yell when we feel like and we almost never want to let the others see that we are fragile and vulnerable. The shame that arouses as a result of our interaction with the others acts like a censor, a censor that decides what should go pass the forbidden door and what should remain only inside ourselves.

However, as the writer describes, this door does open sometimes, and this is, after all, the meaning of love. There is a place for everyone where they can be sad, or experience ecstasy, without being afraid that their image might suffer. There is a balance between taking our clothes off and revealing our souls, and love is when the shame of undressing our body and the one of undressing our feelings are both defeated simultaneously and in correlation with one another. Then we are light and free. All that has been hidden and untold comes out, the clothes and the masks fall down and we are exposed in front of the other just as we are, while witnessing the intentional fall of our censor and our protective sistems.

"So, this is the secret! Each of us could cross life dressed in sobriety, shame and discression. We might be severe, distant and appear unbreakable. On condition that there is, or was, at least once in a lifetime , a person in front of which we can stay with our soul naked , without feeling ashamed. "

And even if that love fades and we close our forbidden door once again, a memory of the freedom of undressing our bodies and souls still survives. And that memory is what gives us confidence, strenght and peace. We don't discover yourselves or truly live when we hide behind that door. The best way to explore and to set ourselves free is to open the door for the other.

Hooverphonic - Inhaler

The Drums that guide my steps

This post is about a song from Florence and The Machine called the Drumming Song .

When is comes to certain choises, even the strong ones follow the haunting drums inside their heart, while crashing the image they have built for the others to see. We always care what the others are thinking about us, we always think about the consequences, we always question the future. Yet, from time to time the voices of the others, the gossips, the worries that screams about the future are all reduced to silence. Calm and cerebral as they might be, in the end they do only what they want and feel. Only drumming noises inside their heads, and those are the drums that guide their choises, probably the most sincere ones.

Who are the others to tell them what to do? Why should imaginary rules prevent them? The ony rules that I follow are those drums, and whenever I hear them I know I am right to step further...

-Painting by Sabin Balasa-