Love hurts

Sadness can turn to anger between two people who do love each other but fail to understand each other. The balance between them lost, both will scream, speak the truth as they perceive it so bluntly that it hurts their own soul. Tears flow in private. The communication break down has crept upon them. Yet they are a great team. She has failed to draw the boundaries clearly and he has overstepped. They can't understand the other fully and both get hurt. How does one show support for a person? How, in general, one can help another person without exploiting, using the person... and without being exploited or used. How to show tenderness among the hurt. Time flows differently for different people. One is fast paced, running, to cram as much into life as feels good. The other is in slow motion, thoughtful, deep thinking but not communicative, not speaking ever  about what moves on a personal level. A lot about the world, music, opinions, but hardly anything abou what makes this person tic. So, silence installs itself between two people and misunderstandings arise more and more often. How does one feel loved?

I see the blue-black eye

hear the nagging

and know the bruises of their soul

There is a war out there

Don’t wage that war on me

I lost my past and who I was

to find searching

a gentle caring sharing

need

But waves of anger

wash me to a breaking shore

Silver lining...

 Being a dreamer, the first saying my mother shared with me was:
"Who looks at the stars will stumble over the stones." I have thought and thought about that one as a child and was always totally offended at the stealing of dreams, being called to reality.

It changed when I learned the expression: "Every cloud has a silver lining." I live with a good window to the east and greet the sun rising almost every morning. This was yesterday's sunrise, illustrating the silver lining in difficult times. One just has to look at it every time there is a silver lining and feel grateful and look for the moon, greet the stars. I promise, you'll feel better. Never mind falling down once in a while looking up and up. You will have had many splendid sights, learned a lot and have many interesting encounters on a possibly rocky road...

Walking in the desert

When time is slow

the company good

you walk and talk

then laying down

on the outside couch

I smell the time of desert sand

opening my eyes

the mass of pinpricked stars

in my skies of blues

I name them Billie Holiday, Miss Ella and Aretha

in my darkest hues

eyes closed the reflection

of the sun in orange yellow glow

then in these silences 

tweets of birds

a far plane and someone’s plan

a car, a truck, a trick

and slight of hand

then swimming

in the desert glass and singing sand

 

Winter greys

Tiring are the short days with insufficient light, with weeks of cold, and often dangerous roads... The clouds hang over the houses, wisps of moist droplets fade out the horizon. I love to watch the clouds, seeing creatures from mythology, recognizing faces, following the changing drift. The winter seagulls and even a heron flying sometimes high and sometimes low. In summer it is the screeching of swallows and house martins. I always liked to meditate that way or to loose myself in the windy stream of imagination and life. Yet so much goes on, that pulls one back into the greyness of now. The short lived pinks and reds at sunrise fill my soul. So I give thanks and know that we are all related. We are concerned when more than 60.000 people have died already in Syria, where children freeze in the makeshift camps. We are concerned when a homeless man dies near Brussels central station. We are concerned when the media shorten our perspective, only concerned with the provocations of power-hungry politicians. The clouds thicken, thus loosing the view of another steeple... Maybe it is just a winter morning's blues that makes me feel this way. Or is it thinking about the funeral of a friend's mother, thinking of my own mother, smiling when I fuss over her. She who spoke four language, hardly uttering a few coherent words who is still among us but not quite. She would now be a perfect confidante, since three seconds later all is past and wiped out... Yet I never dared to test this theory since she seems to understand in the moment what one says. So she might feel sorrow. Thus I fuss over her, joke, act foolish, am the clown and she laughs and smiles in the moment.

Windows

The days shortening make me a little sad, yet last night having to run an urgent errant at dusk I was thrilled that people had turned on their lights. Many shutters were down, or the curtains drawn, yet here and there I could catch a glimpse of beautiful woodwork in an almost stately home or a beautiful rosette centering the luster of a crystal chandelier. But the greatest joy was seeing people going about heir daily life: kids  doing homework or crafts at the table, a parent puttering around in the background, cooking, clearing clutter and coaching from a distance. People eating or talking gave me a sense of warmth, a sense of caring and community. Of course there were some voices of crying toddlers, angry parents shouting, a couple fighting... There one felt how overburdened the people were within their situation, how hard it is to deal with the daily disasters. These glimpses give me an insight in what seems to constitute happiness, serenity and a feeling of belonging. Last night 's image I cherish most is an old man sitting and reading by a lamp near the window. He is secure in his place, knows where he belongs and so he is reassuring to me. These short flashes of unknown people's life seem to hold for me valuable wisdom and insights.

An old friend and life's surprises.

Let me introduce an old friend, let me call him Bert. He has a good mind, people expected him to do well. Yet his life turned out quite different than expected. One day, ages ago, I met him on main street and he told me proudly that he had joined the party. I innocently asked 'Which party?' He was astonished and answered 'The Communist Party of course!' He had a great heart, refused to do military service, went to work as a co-operant in an North African country, working as a teacher. Later he worked  in his home country for 'the' party. Being good at languages he was send to the motherland and worked for several years in Moscow. He didn't quite like the experience, nor the health service there which caused a lot of grief. When  his wife lost a baby during the fifth month of her pregnancy they returned. He went on teaching and writing for the communist publications and doing administrative work.  When his firm (I still mean the Communist Party) folded, he was out of a job and needed to provide for his family. Deemed too dangerous by most employers, he retrained as a truck driver and found a job. Being the smart one, they gave him the difficult jobs and one day discharging a volatile product the truck exploded. Having followed all procedures he survived the blast but still was badly hurt and suffered lasting consequences being quite crippled. Then the economic crises also hit the transport sector and being an older man, was laid off, now living on a small pension. This man listens to Bach, reads good literature and is lonely. He visits his mother in the nursing home once a week and that is quite a chore: walking to the tram, getting up on it and then off and to the nursing home and back. All that goes really slowly. In winter he once in a while takes a cab, since falling because of ice or snow would only complicate things since his legs don't work well at all. I never heard him complain, just that he doesn't have a girlfriend in his life...  All the best to you Bert, I hope you find what you're looking for.

water in the city

I love cities with water flowing through them. You stick your nose out of the door and voilà, somethings strange happens. A small pilot boat dragging two huge cranes in the sunset...

I love the reflections on the water, the activity on the water..
The tall ships I can actually see from my bedroom window and sometimes i see a glimps of the water mirroring the sky.

So the cranes disappear into the distance, soon to stand sleeping in the mild summer like night.

The problem is when I look at the tall ships, I also can see the smoke rising from the nuclear power plant at the edge of a million people's town.

No nuclear energy - change to solar and wind.

Route 66- continued

The route is all about the road, the place longed for, dreamed of, imagined in one's soul. The state of the road doesn't matter.
Neither does the means of transportation. being on the move, desire, solitude and beauty are the guiding lights.  

Restaurants I didn't stop at. And forlorn places where time was framed in old signs: Roadrunner Restaurant.
One  almost hears the jazz of those days in the purring motor.


Waterside property advertised in the enormous and beautiful Mojave Desert... No, no, not a sedentary life, near a moist air river.



It is all about the road, the encounters, the sharing of long vistas which heal your eyes. There is a road to where you're going.
May traveling the Route 66 help each of us find our road, straight or winding, up and down with left curves and straight ahead: a metaphor for life, a road with many futures.

 

Full moon in the Mojave Desert

 The moon moves fast
crawls out of the mountain
is on her way
this wandering sister

I see her trek
her rise
her arching back

and wonder whether the sea
of silence
is really still
or does the moon-wind
sing to sand
does the sand screech or howl
in the chase

or does all fall
still
on deaf ears
and does she so feel
filled

her predictable
migration
and the north star
as linchpin
to the turning
of the unheard movement
of the solace
of the sun

From one gas pump to a third in the time to write the poem...

Jazz Middelheim II

Saturday night was great. Chet Mood with Philip Catherine. Nice sweet atmosphere on a languid summer's night. And then came Toots Tielemans with his Dutch Trio. Toots is a Jazz aficionado since 70 years. He and his harmonica and the three great musicians on the base, the drums and the piano giving joy and beauty. The gentle working together, the amicable atmosphere was just contagious. T.T. played several songs for his wife, it was mothers day after all, and as an encore he gave us a heartbreaking rendering of 'Ne me quite pas'... I chocked up, tears streaming... The lyrics by Jacques Brel floated into my head through this exquisite painful piece: I'll be the shadow of your dog, I'll bring a drop of rain from a country where it doesn't rain.... Fragile breaking sound and feeling. Melancholy and Romance on a summer's night in the park in Antwerp.

Help for the blind

The small Brussels Griffon in the back is 16 this month and if she were a human person she would be classified 'legally blind'. I am developing a whole new admiration for guide dogs: they have to anticipate every obstacle or possible pitfall, puddles that are too deep, steps, potholes, people, bicycles, you name it ... And now I have to learn how to do that for my Toots.

Time

Suddenly there is time.
Father Time fell off the shelf and limping will lavish me with a stretch of clocklessness. I cast off my corporate identity, a dog without a dog tag, an unringed bird and return to cyclical, natural living. There will be space for emptiness and wordless thoughts. So I enter the spiralling flow and gamble on eternal life in the quiet of night.

Futility

It was a scraping the ice off the day.
A skein of geese in the morning sky. When I got my bearings, I saw them flying south.
Good choice. Go to warmth and light.
Unaware of my approval they go on and leave me superfluous, non-essential, aware of my futility.
The geese follow their path, don't need nor want my sympathy - they pass me by, never note my longing for love and light.

Day & night

Friday mornings are my teaching time: Turkish and Moroccan women who want to learn the local language. The first hour is spend on 'what is done in following buildings': post office, hospital, train station, police station, job centres... I am working with a small group of 'advanced' students, so they can explain quite a lot. They freely share personal aspects of their lives, talking about visits to the hospitals, naming procedures, glossing over the, in my eyes, more than borderline harassment of the controlling doctors of the social services. Same background noise at the job centre where a seamstress is send for a job as computer programmer. Of course she has to physically go to the employer, who is as puzzled as she is about this job offer. The employer kindly signs the paper that she showed op where she had been sent to by whom? An incompetent dimwit or a power hungry aggressive passive borderline racist? Ladies, I doff my hat to you. The second hour the handbook wanted us to speak about food and traditions concerning food... Fatima gave me the recipe for Moroccan soup, Hediye favours Turkish pizza's over Italian ones and explained how to make a special sweet to end the period of mourning after a year. Ilham likes to eat out... I explain the difference in etiquette between US and Europe and they add the beauty of their culture to the mix...
The night offered Maurice Béjart. For his 80 st birthday a special program was made: the patricide, of the grandfather of modern dance by his students called 'L'Art d'étre Grand-père', followed by the exquisite Brel and Barbara with among others fun parts like 'Rosa, Rosae', 'Ne me quite pas' which brought tears to my eyes, the incredible, grand 'Valse à mille temps'. La Solitude, made one indeed feel lonely and 'Quand on a que l'amour', which as far as I am concerned, they can play at my funeral as a last message, maybe followed by 'Avec élégance, where despair should be pretty and at the end is even combative and hopeful. The movements at times where literal transpositions of the texts, other times the rhythm dictates the form. Then after the break followed the gentle, generous virility of the Bolero of Ravel, a monument of dance. I think it was the 1961 interpretation of the music that was performed. Then it was a scandal and a shock, now my parents, both also around 80, loved it. My father said: 'I have seen Béjart before, but I understand it now. I didn't then.' Working class became middle class and appropriated the avant-garde master... Well an early Christmas present turned out great. Thanks for beauty in the world.