To the love that gets me through the day, even when I don't realise.

To the heart that is always true.

To my God,

To my guardian angel,

To the heart of all hearts.

Whisper low in our ears

And carry us high;

You will carry us up to the stars.

--<*>--<*>--

Change comes on the strength of the ethereal winds,

carried by its own wings.

Like a shaft of sunlight

in a dusty room.

O heart!

sweep me up in your eternal spring

take me

away from my dusty room

then bring me back again

dew-soaked

new

and true

The letter I can’t answer

from Paulo Coelho's mailing list

The letter that I can’t answer is lying right here on my desk. It reached me through the efforts of a Dutch couple who sent me an e-mail in June 2006. I lent it no importance, and did not answer. At the end of that same month they wrote again, and again I paid no attention. And then came the warning phrased in more serious words:
“This is the last time we are asking you this favor. It is up to you to write to Justin or not. Or to put it better, it is up to your conscience. I got to know your books because he recommended them. Yours truly, Jacobus” (I shall omit his surname).
I read the text of the e-mail carefully: it says that Justin Fuller, prisoner #999266 at the Polunsky Unit, Livingston, Texas, will be executed exactly on my birthday, the 24th August. His lawyer, Don Bailey, has already been to all the appeal courts, and it looks like the cause is lost. They are not asking me to denounce the fact publicly, or to take some position on the case: they just want me to send this reader some comforting words.
I type Justin’s name in a search tool. I see his photo, then I discover that there is a page with the names of all those who are (or have been) in death row in Texas. I see his criminal record at www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/fullerjustin.htm
I write the letter. The week following my birthday, Jacobus writes to me once more: Justin received it, and answered me before he was executed. The letter is waiting for me in a hotel I usually stay at in a certain town, and that I used as the sender’s address.
Finally, at the end of October 2006, I stop at the hotel. I know that a letter from a man condemned to death awaits me. I know that he has already been executed. I collect the letter, enter a bar, and read the words from someone whom I will never be able to answer. Whom I will never be able to ask permission to publish extracts, but since we are talking about a true aberration of justice – death as an instrument of the State – I shall copy some parts:
“Dear Mr. Coelho:
“Death row is the arena where the policies of Power, Retribution and Violence are applied to a man using materials such as concrete and steel, until this man turns into steel and his heart becomes as hard as concrete. However, though steel can be hard, it can still be flexible, and though the heart can be transformed into concrete, it still beats. Beyond the concrete and the steel stands the man, his love of life, and the great principles that rule human beings.
“Your letter surprised me. And it is very strange that my transcendence (Justin always uses this term instead of “execution”) is to take place just on your birthday. Of course, I hope it does not take place, but we both know that life is always accompanied by death. In the USA they execute prisoners in the name of what they call “justice” without taking into account whether they can be well represented in court, the circumstances of their birth and their family environment.
“While I wait out the last appeal to the Supreme Court, I feel full of life and strong, and my spirit is completely free.
“If I transcend, I will finally be able to float in the wind and enjoy freedom. I have realized that although my body is imprisoned, my life has changed and my soul can still love, because all freedom is mental. Many people in this world, although they are on the outside of prison, are far more in bondage than I am.
“Only when these people come to understand that freedom is a state of the mind will they be able to really enjoy it.”
The letter that I couldn’t answer is much longer. It describes the relationship that we built through my books, and it wishes me and my family all the best. And now it sits on my desk.
The letter that I couldn’t answer, from a man condemned to death, arrested when he was 19 years old and executed when he was 27, contains not a word of lamentation: it speaks of freedom and life.

So many of my days are spent running around, turning upside down, not knowing where I am and furrowing my brow. I get caught up in study, I get caught up in arrogance and trying to show I’m right and so losing any claim I had to being right. I walk where I’m going without really knowing. I love without savouring. I drink tea, I gaze at the trees, I gaze at my tutor, I hold my boyfriend, but these just flow over my head and I think the only real things are those weighty emotions that drag me down that I’m so tuned into I can feel so well, but don’t really know all the true ones. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Underlying all my days has been a slowly growing awareness that God is everywhere with me. That God is in me, right now. I’m not always sure it is God. It’s this warm feeling inside that floods without really flooding, but it’s lovely and it’s in my heart and going beyond and I praise God for it except I don’t because I don’t See yet. After a fabulous break from uni, I now know that I can’t ‘force’ it to come into my existence more, or ‘work on it’ in the way that phrase sometimes feels. Rather than identifying the feeling and trying to psychicly push it throughout my body, take a bit of a shortcut, all I have to do is focus on God, pray, read, meditate, and I arrive at that blessed state I did in the holidays where I did not snap at anyone, where I treated them with the respect they deserved, where all I had to do was negotiate with my negative feelings and pray and they would be gone. Ok, it wasn’t completely ‘perfect’ as I make it sound, but it was heartening. It showed me that I can do it, and it showed me a way of doing it, and for that I am so grateful. Even though I’m having trouble with the next step of maintaining that during the semester, not falling into stressed out cruel arrogant student academic mode. See, by the end of the holidays I let these thoughts through – criticisms about things, starting off small, just the normal everyday things that people talk about, and then it spiraled out of control into this crazy place where I was just so arrogant and I’d sit in tutorials sighing about how other people didn’t know what they were taking about and I was so much better and…But I’ve strayed from my point and I’ve indulged these things again, and that only strengthens them and I am lost again as to what I do – reject them altogether, which I have vowed to do haven’t I, but then in the context of ‘the world’ that seems so difficult sometimes and though I know I should I just can things clearly, can’t act clearly…But my point in writing this really was to talk about the Wonder. Talk about the fact that underlying all of this has been that energy coming from my heart that gives my head shivers and makes me sit in tutorials looking at the tutor or whoever’s taking or the walls smiling as though I’m in love. Because that’s what I love to do, I just don’t want people to get freaked out so I keep it in check, haha. But this feeling has been my companion since the holidays and I only hope I can be worthy of its presence in me for I have been so blessed.

Note to self

Stop talking, and listen

So, here's something of love that I need to get out, rather than 'needing' to get out, I don't know, how it's so unfair that I have to work all day Saturday and Sunday as well as Monday and Tuesday nights when I have an assignment due on Monday and another on Wednesday. Because when I 'get that feeling out' it makes it a feeling. Before I say it it's not that bad, but when I choose to say it it grows and it seems like a big issue. So then maybe the same thing can apply to happy things, which, when people ask me how I am or what I've been up to or something I don't often say because they're potentially boring, not what people want ot hear, more difficult to communicate, not normal. So to hell once and for all with saying 'negative' things just for the sake of interactivity - better to have no friends or be seen as a little weird than to foster an idea that things suck.
So my love thing that's worth getting out?

This song by Sarah Humphreys (www.myspace.com/sarahhumphreys) that I've mentioned before, April, that I've listened to over and over and over again. That is my love thing. If you go to that link and listen to the song it may not seem like anything special. But the fact that the first time I heard Sarah's music she was playing it live, and it really struck a chord in me because of just the whole context, which is made up of everything ever . And so I heard something that night, so that now, when I listen to her music, and April in particular (although she didn't actually play it the first time I saw her...or maybe she did and I just didn't notice becuase it wasn't at the time as striking as others?) I hear her in the music. I can feel her play, feel her mouth forming a word in the unusual way it does sometimes, feel the slight movement of her head when she dips up to a note, feel her little smile as she closes her eyes just as I hear the smile in her voice. And of course there are the ittle idiosyncracies of her voice - the way it breaks, or dips in place, or her strange accent and not-quite-articulated words. She taught me finally to not sing along all the time, but just to listen, to really listen, a lesson I've never before followed through. And when I listen to that song, sitting here at the computer, stopping eveything else, I can feel the spark of life, of the essence, in my heart, and I smile with my whole being.
That, I think, may be me discovering love

People say they write the unsaid, or that they write to sort things out, make sense of things so they can deal with them.

The wonders of life remain far more unsaid than its dark and its dreary times.

And I don't know about you but I feel like I really need to sort out these intense feelings of love and wonderment. They're so big I have trouble comprehending them, or even doing them the smallest amount of justice.


Fixating on the dark and dreary does not make things brighter.

Dwelling on all the terrible things in the world does not heal it.

Hating the rapist and the murderer just breathes more hate into the world.

Hating yourself for what you've done to another does not rectify the situation.


You who want more love in the world, who want to see it blossom into a web of equality and understanding and tolerance:

What sense does it make to breed grief and hate?

You know what's a miracle?

That our hands make hearts

you take what's alright and turn it into a work of art

I've been lied to. Uni really is a lot of work!
Yes, I'm a fresh little first year uni student now. I should probably go out and burn my bra or something, ay
Uni's pretty good. A lot of work, but it's alright. I've met my twin. She too wants to be a writer and for the same reasons as I and wants to tranfer to international studies and go to France and other things. Making friends is easy. It's easy to chat and ask people things about themselves and tell them about yourself etc, but what happens after that stage is over? All shall be revealed in good time.
Jack Kerouac is my muse, and every time I want to get inspired I just read something by him and voila. I wrote something for my writing subject in a way that, in my limited experience of writing, I haven't done before - I just started with the opening few words and watched where it took me, and where it took me was somewhere with more heart than anything I've written before (not that I've written much...), and I handwrote it, which I used to not be able to do very well - I'd always use the computor if I really wanted to get something done - and it was the reqired 500 words without me having to regulate it - it just fell into place.
Apart from uni, I've fallen in love. Her name's Sarah Humphreys and she's taken my heart with her melodies and her alternate sweet/aussie voice and the way she bends her notes and her little smiles. She won her heat of the singer/songwriter's competition hands down. My obession with her peaked in the latter days of the latter week until it stopped me studying because all I could do was hum her song to myself and I decided it was getting a little out of hand...But there you go
:)

Credo

"Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich. For it is true; this is so. Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don't mind critics, don't mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don't know what they're taking about, they're way of the track, they're cld; you're warm, you're red hot, you can write all day, you know what you know, like Halper; you remember that, Kid, and when you feel as if you cannot write, as if it is no use, as if life is no good, read this over and realise that you can do a lot of good in this world by turning out truths like these, by spreading warmth, by trying to preach living for life's sake, not the intellectual way, but the warm way, the way of love, the way which says: Brothers, I greet you with open arms, I accept your frailties, I offer you my frailties, let us gather and run the gamut of rich human existence. Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget. It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness.....Kid, you can wip up a little tale, a little truth, you can mop up the floor with a little tale in no time; it is a cinch, you are the flow of smooth thrumming power, you are a writer, and you can turn out some mean stuff, and you will turn out tons of it, because it is you, and do not forget it, Kid, do not forget it; please, please Kid, do not forget yourself; save that, save that, preserve yourself; turn out those mean little old tales by the dozens, it is easy, it is grace, do it American-wise, drive it home, sell truth, for it needs to be sold. Remember, Kid, what I say to you tonight; never forget it, read this over in your gloomier moments and never, never forget.....never, never, never forget.....please, please, Kid please....."

--Jack Kerouac