I once had
a plan to woo a heart
with a serenade. I found a song,
my friend helped me practice.
But I failed.
That failing
a happy accident
because it paved the way I needed
to travel to find my
way to you.
It’s Valentine’s Day this coming week. A day like any other day, but also one to celebrate your love for someone. For me, that would be the love of my life, my muse. The mother of our 2 fantastic children. She was, however, not my first love. As is likely true for you as well. It’s rare for first loves to be loves-of-lives as well. More often, we have to travel a path. Make a journey. A journey of failings, perhaps. Or, paraphrasing what Thomas Edison is claimed to have said, a journey of many ways that did not work. Doesn’t that count for many things in life. Sometimes you have to figure out what does not work first, before you find what works.
Well, that is how I see my journey. And I’m happy I ended up where I did. I don’t think I could have ended up in a finer place. More importantly, maybe, I wish you all the very same. So, find the ways that don’t work, until you find the one that does. Enjoy the journey, and the friends you make along the way.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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The poetics of life
We are a curious species. A species of finding out many ways things do (not) work, a species of exploring. Not just our planet, but space. NASA is preparing a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. And they have something special for that mission. Watch this:
And in more science news, researchers have discovered a new form of ice. Not the one you can eat, by the way. No, a new form of frozen water. To create it, they made it ultra cold and then smashed it. It seems really something silly to do. What will humanity benefit from it? Well, apparently doing that mimics what happens on icy moons and planets. And understanding what happens there, especially when it comes to understanding (frozen) water, might be crucial for further human exploration of space. To spread poetry, we need water.
Poetry elsewhere
When you talk about failings or learning ways how things do not work, you will learn a lot of things you will never do (again). And if you have the writing talent of Sherman Alexie, you can create a magical poem about that. Read Things I’ll Never Do. For me, especially in the last stanza, Sherman shows his brilliance:
Failing and love. A combination that not only goes for the love of you for someone else, but also for you and the person you see staring back at you in the mirror. How do you make sense of your life with the person in the mirror? Poet Krupali wrote about that in her poem Hollow Music.
It is easy to find the differences with others. To find the things you disagree on. And then take that to make “The Other” “The Enemy”. But when we do that, we fail. We fail our friends, we fail our fellow humans, we fail ourselves. And from that failure we should learn, so we can all feel better and be more okay with ourselves. I may not agree with Julia Fae about some things, but that does not mean I don’t like her poetry. I really do, I wish she writes more. This poem, I Am Half-Steeped Tea, is beautiful and powerful:
Beautiful Arjan :)
Wow Arjan, that is very kind of you.
I've been thinking a lot about your ideas of first steps, and finding connections. I think I've previously thought about healing as finding a way to heal the disparity caused by differences. Whereas now, with this thought you've introduced, I can see a light shining on a way to heal that is wholly accepting of these differences, whatever tragedy they might infer, and instead put focus entirely on the things we can connect on.
Aloha <3