I tell the moon

I repeat it to myself in the night unconscious like a dark secret

I tell it to the walls

I say it to the angry hurried wind every time it rushes through, aggressive and violent, flustering me indifferently

I hear it in the noisy empty chatter of people, in the clamor of my old weary heart

I whisper it to the wise knowing moon when it rises calling me to the window..

I miss him

Are you a beggar begging from a beggar?

When I was in my twenties I told an old wise man that I found life to be complex and hard, his response was: “life is easy, it’s only the first fifty years of life that are hard”. I laughed thinking he was joking but when I looked at him, his face was serious and certain.

I think about what he said a lot, especially now that I’m in my mid-thirties and after so much suffering and so much struggle, I’m only just now learning how to live, only now understanding truths and waking up to life-altering revelations that I needed to know in the beginning of my life not in .. well.. what I imagine is the middle of my life (who knows!) but that’s the thing, nobody hands you a life manual when your ten or when you’re twenty. There is not life manual because everybody else does not know how to live either, that’s why there are philosophers constantly telling us that we need to change the way we think and live and religions controlling the way we think and live and people killing each other all the time.

I don’t claim I have the answers but one radical shift in my way of thinking has done a tremendous amount of positive difference in the way I am living today comparing to my younger years, the shift is loving myself ferociously. It sounds simple and easy to do but it’s not. Most if not all of you are products of inadequate parenting, the rest (like me) have grown up in dysfunctional families, saturated in mental, emotional and physical abuse. Because our parents didn’t like themselves they couldn’t teach us to like ourselves, setting us out in a hostile world searching for someone to love us because we didn't know how to love ourselves. We grow up full of hope in finding this “other” who will love us, who will accept us, who will give us care, attention, value, validation, only to be disappointed over and over again by people who like us did not like themselves and needed us to like them, we were like beggars begging from other beggars.

But those disappointments are very useful, because what they really say is this: “you gave another person the power to give you what you desperately need and now this power is returned to you once more because no one can give you what you need but you”, life will repeat this lesson until we learn it. Life was extremely generous to me because it gave me a dozen of these disappointments. 
Realizing that I am the only person who can love me the way I dream of being loved freed me, it changed my understanding of life and love and I am grateful, very grateful for it

Radical Cleaning!

I emptied the matchbox from all the burnt out matches

I mowed my overgrown lawn, I tidied the shed

shredded my wedding photos

swept behind the fridge

organized my chaotic underwear drawer

arranged all my books in alphabetical order

threw away all the odd socks; I gave up finding their pairs.

A turmoil robbing my heart’s quiet fell into peace, calm and silence

The stars in the universe no longer disarray

The wailing of my soul began to wane.

Some souls

I reason with your shadow

“It’s been so many years.. why do you still linger?”

it sits on the edge of my bed

its back turned to me

while a weak candle flickers

on the bedside table

“The door is open, let go, so I can let go too”

it says nothing, knowing, as I also knew

that some souls have planned

their meeting long before this life time

and just when life had nothing else to offer

just when they had nothing more to lose

tormented by despair

they sought each other out, in a brutal and violent collision they

destroyed one another imagining that love was nothing but pain

spending forever trying but failing to heal.

Should we remember or forget?

In the United Kingdom Remembrance Sunday is national ritual which commemorates the contribution of British military during the two World Wars.  Remembrance Sunday is held on the second Sunday in November but due to the popularity of this event in Britain; different activities such as wearing the red poppy, gatherings, talks, television programs and documentaries start late October and last almost to the end of November every year. In Kuwait, a similar thing happens (minus the red poppy) all through the month of August to commemorate the Iraqi invasion that took place in August 1990, the sacrifices made by national and ally troops and to keep the memory of war alive in people’s hearts minds. Each country has a similar national day where celebrations and festivals take place and a feeling of patriotism prevails.

There are different reasons and theories as to why the memory of war, pain, bloodshed, violence and brutality should remain and be constantly refreshed in the minds of generation after generation, the most common one is that we (the living) must honor those who have sacrificed their lives in order for us to survive, we are humbled by those who died for our land and freedom, we must feel a sense of gratitude for those who fought so bravely as without their courage we would not be here today enjoying our most fundamental human right, freedom.

The importance of remembering (as explained above) seems to apply only on the national level of things, on the personal level, however, we are encouraged to forget negative experiences, things such as childhood trauma, pain, suffering, abuse, violence and even grief. Such memories that provoke such strong feelings we are told, can cripple us further in our lives, lead us to depression, illness and sometimes death, therefore we are constantly told to forget them, forget they ever happened; “let go of the past” we hear therapists, spiritual and enlightened people say, or “the past is a dream, it does not exist” is another common expression in the spiritual world.

But should we remember or should we forget? I don’t have the answer for this question as I am struggling with it myself, but what I do know is this; when we are bombarded on certain months of each year with national songs, TV programs, photos, films, and logos to remember a very distant, historic war, the pain, the loss and violence that war had inflicted on society as a whole, and at the exact same time we are told over and over again to forget our own personal pain, suffering and struggle it creates inside us a feeling of smallness, the sense that our personal pain is not important enough or deep enough to remember or acknowledge, unlike a war that we may have not even witnessed. We as mourners for personal loss feel pushed back to the margins of a society that continues to care for the whole but not the individual.

Rejection is good for you.

I don’t claim to know the life of all the geniuses’ but reading in the personal life of my favourite philosophers: Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, I know that they were rejected by women they were deeply fond of, and in his youth Schopenhauer had been rejected by his own mother whom he loved dearly, as a result he condemned all women and questioned their competence as human beings in his writings during his adult life. Beethoven too was repeatedly rejected by women he was attracted to and for whom he had composed the most majestic sonatas, music that was endlessly beautiful and endlessly sad. The great poet W B Yeats was so obsessively infatuated with Maud Gonne, he proposed to her four times over a period of ten years, all his attempts were rejected by Gonne who continued to be his muse and the subject of his most passionate poems even after his marriage to another woman. In Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia stands a statue of Slovene’s national poet France Prešeren

staring directly at window of a house where once his adored Julija Primic lived, Prešeren was rejected by his beloved’s family due to the fact that he belonged to an inferior class. Sylvia Plath’s most powerful poetry was written after her marriage to Hughes whom she loved deeply fell apart due to him leaving Plath for his mistress Assia.

There are so many examples where unrequited love had provoked strong emotions, beautiful poetry, haunting music and strokes of genius, thought and ideas. Rejection seems to have the power to make us hurt and suffer but also to focus our negative emotions in the productive activity of writing, painting, composing or inventing. When we are rejected by those we love we suddenly turn our attention to ourselves and to our own interests and passions; all those intense feelings, all that time, all that emotional effort and mental tax we were squandering over our love interest is given back to us and we realize that we can take this immense energy and use it, really use it to create. We are inspired by our pain and inspire others by it too.

Easy

I know what is easy

Solitude it easy

Anger is easy

Bitterness is easy

Losing faith is easy

Letting go is easy

Hate is easy

Hurt is easy

Despise is easy

Despair is easy

Loathing is easy

Resentment is easy

Vanity is easy

I know what is hard..

Fulfillment.