The same fears and the same tears...

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about - don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise if you can dream - and not make dreams your master; if you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same; if you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss; if you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them "hold on". If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much; if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the universe and everything that's in it, and - which is more - you'll at long last grow up.

Standing strong forever...

Vedno ne vidim zvezd,

sam ostanem sebi zvest.

My burden is heavy...

If we walk far enough, 

we shall sometimes come to someplace.

Here's the thing ... people can bring you down, situations happen, you can feel like life is the shittiest thing to deal with. To that I say bullshit! If you're walking through hell, keep going. Everyday there's a new challenge. Face it. Deal with it. Move on. To every problem there is a solution or a way around it. Stop being a sour mongrel and think life owes you something. No one will do anything for you these days. Start fighting. Get rid of all the shit people around you. Grow some balls of steel and work progressively through everything. Step by step or whatever mad method you have to get you back in line again. Who cares if people don't like you. Let the bridges you burn light your way. Because there are many roads to cross and new paths of the universe to explore. It starts with you.

Like a snowflake waiting for spring...

When your mind is full of thoughts,

you can listen how my heart beats.

When your burden is heavy

you can take refuge in me.

Ask me what keeps me going forward,

achievements and distances.

When a leaf goes with the wind and resists it,

I go with the flow and resist it.

I go with the flow and resist it...

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I, on the other hand, don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, they make them. They manifest them by sheer force of will. And it may be risky and so scary, and yet at the same time, so beautiful. Maybe the truth is, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing, because then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. Even though it feels awfully terrible being down in the gutter. Getting out is the key. Or least trying to. For when something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder - if not impossible - to lose.

Even stars don't always shine...

My dearly beloved shot me down...

It's the beating of my heart. The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It's the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I'd found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there, I was still the one locking the door every night. Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. Because I haven’t been very impressed lately. By people, or places. Or the way a few people said they loved me and then slowly changed their minds.

Don't get distracted by the radio...

It appears, from all that I have learned, that our eyes are uncertain. Two individuals look at the same clock and there somehow they can disagree on the exact time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. It is because of this reason that I don't let myself too confidently try to play the part of the third person, who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that I are mistaken in turn. I'm learning to see, without looking too closely at things and the world: they look better from a distance.

Don't quit - even when your latest efforts fail. Even when your performance is scoffed and ridiculed or when you're told you have no talent and you come in dead last. Don't quit when it seems an uphill fight to keep going and you can't see any possible way to achieve your goals. Don't quit when your last supporter is you alone and when discouragement and depression seem your only companion. For time and time again you will crave relief from the harsh fight of trying to succeed. You will falsely think that quitting will bring peace and reprieve, but alas, only regret and disappointment await the quitter. Victory means never ever quitting. So don't do it. Never quit.

A hit of dopamine...

My night shift...

It's been a wreck me week,

sixty plus from dawn to dusk,

in the red dirt heat.

Busting it up for a couple of bucks,

but it ain't no thing,

just another day till I'm on my way,

to them cool, cool sheets and you and me.

Graceless lady, you know who I am...

Fate is never fair. You are caught in a current much stronger than you are; struggle against it and you'll drown not just yourself but those who try to save you. Swim with it. and you'll survive. Realizing this, it is easier to understand why I couldn't have known that even this was a lie - that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all. But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Tip toe through bliss...

Back in one loop...

A beautiful stone vase in my kitchen created by the hard labor and sweat of his father. A game of chess that somehow reflects the journey he is currently on. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life in all its magnificent forms, taking shape only to once again disperse into countless seams of possibility. What configuration might it carve next? Something already seen and experienced? Something recognizable and within reach of understanding? Or perhaps something not of this world. Something so unique that it shall give birth to a new spirit ... a new universe. A new god. 

 

Turn me into a savage...

He is the sum total of everything that went before him, of all he has seen done, of everything done-to-him. He is everyone and everything whose being-in-the-world was affected by his. He is anything that happens after he is gone, which would not have happened if he had not come.

Memory is truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own. So go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things - childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves - that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.

All the places I have been...

Drowned in living waters...

Oh, to see without my eyes,

the first time that you kissed me,

boundless by the time I cried.

I built your walls around me,

white noise, what an awful sound,

fumbling by rogue river,

feel my feet above the ground -

hand of God, deliver me.