Supernatural Spirit

Striding up the Nietzche path to Eze, I inquire the spirit. What else?

Answers pour out from the stones I pass and greet

The shades of trees cross the dullness in my mind’s rear

Thoughts mingle, flow, emotions growl out to the light

A dog barks in the no house land, reason herds fear

Pouncing my heart wild, numbing love and awe of life, now vain

Beauty lost lustre, birds their voice, all fogged in my brain

Being human, my ego chides — I am one of a kind!

Such confident thinking renders my fear far behind

Yet, what have I done to my heart to beat so near my skin?

Is that dog controlling me? What was that voice within?

I give up as fast as I speak to myself in vagrant solitude 

With plenty of time to preoccupy the mind I notice the plenitude

In nature’s answers, as it seems that the wise seek her devouring womb

Sages use stillness as their tool, attract insight through straightening comb

That clarity can only be found in patience, curiosity and dedication

My mind hopes – vain or just being a fool – does the soul lead to salvation?

Can I purify myself to follow its lead towards the heaven’s door?

Empty fullness I seek, merging with opposites I defy human creeds for more

~RB

hiking Cote d'Azur

The slippery rocky Nietzsche trail to Eze Village on Coe d’Azur

~ For now a poem satisfies my spirit’s needs and questions — busying the mind with lightness I seek, and often find in nature laid in plain air ~

after rain hope in the sky

HOPE, a mirage of blue

We call emptiness dull, yet its potential is yet to become full

Vast ocean, a mirage of blue, a vessel of life hiding, but true

Only once we named what is deep under the azure sheet

Like with human psyche, we thought it a mere spirit’s quip

Unless we dare to dive in for the filling yet empty soul

Clock working unwound, the answering machine accepts your call

Perhaps God knows much more, while hope and space lure

desires and ephemeral needs to fill the Eden with weeds

Unlimited is only hope, the future holding on its rope

~RB

hope

The foggy perception of Western thought and reason on hope is best illustrated through poetry. Reasoning about this psychological aid in adversity will not fully capture its entire purpose. Why do we humans need and employ hope?

My favorite poem of the late American poetess Emily Dickinson, starts with this wonderful line:

Hope is that thing with feathers…

But I love it all

That perches in the soul.

And sings the tune without words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

This is one of the most famous poems of this solitary lady who published very little during her lifetime. Her sister collected the leftover scraps of paper and letter envelopes inscribed with her precious poetry and publish them posthumously. There is something strangely nostalgic about the future-aimed hope. Its effect belongs to the present moment when hope alleviates any pain present in one’s spirit or any bodily suffering. It is like a placebo that heals our present melancholy or sadness through a timeline of the past-present-future string of hope.