Close your eyes
if your heart so desires,
the surrounding forest
does not disappear.
The trees stand tall.
The grass still grows lush.
Animals make a home
and the birds a nest.
If I close my eyes,
the forest remains;
it lives.
As does this forest of love
I keep hidden
within the parts of me,
where light has no reason to travel.
It grows still, for the ways of nature,
life and the sun,
though easily perceived,
are seldom accepted.
©️Romancing Life
‘The Lilac Sky’
I seek the path that
takes me through
the lilac sky
framed in rose coloured glass,
to the road beyond
the limits of the eternal sun.
I seek the universe within you,
that something, which
you seek in me;
the light catching fire
in your eyes
and the dance of a smile
on my lips.
©️Romancing Life
Who is the sea and who am I,
I do not know.
I just know how to flow like the waves,
to and fro.
I flow without question,
I flow without hinderance.
I am destruction.
I am absolution.
I am the cradle of life.
I am a cemetery.
The giver of life
and home to death.
I am. I am. I am
I am beyond thought.
Where comprehension ends,
I begin.
©️ Romancing Life
Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? For those of you who haven’t, “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.”*
While familiar with the basics of the concept, I was never so intimately introduced to it as I was in the past couple of days. I am someone who by default runs on intuition; I tend to make decisions based entirely on strong hunches and feelings. I have spent all my life under the illusion, “I feel…,” therefore it must be right. I say things without thinking them through. “I am right”, I say, “being wrong isn’t even an option” and so it has been all my life until of course life finally decided to show me the mirror. In the past couple of days, a long string of conversations, a couple of forwarded articles have all lead to a single conclusion.
I have been a fake. A pretender. An ignorant fool. I thought I knew all there was to know because I felt it. It has to take someone wholly simple, someone utterly unaware of the basic universal principles to make claims of such kind and have the nerve to boast about them. I must thank my stars for Lady Luck has been kind to me, and so far I have not had to pay for my erroneous ways.
Socrates once famously said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” I am a fool, I realize. A fool for whom there is yet hope for the universe is never ending source of knowledge. Some of it is within my reach, so I will endeavour to scratch the surface but there is only so much I can grasp in the short time I have been granted on this Earth. Though, I am no where near wise, never have been, but now, this I have no shame in admitting, “I know nothing.”
© Romancing Life, 2018
*Source: “Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence” from Current Directions in Psychological Science
If I do not say it,
you do not listen.
If I do not show it,
you do not see.
If I do not express it,
you do not perceive.
If I do not live it,
you do not believe.
It matters not,
what I do,
or do not do.
Your mere wish
not to hear it
will not change
the truth.
©️Romancing Life
I consider myself not to be a materialistic person, odd for someone who places so much value onto material things; onto material things that represent memories. Take this postcard for example, bought of a street vendor lining the ever charming streets of Paris some six years ago. I intended for it to be sent to a dear friend, which you might have guessed from the forewords, never happened.
I found it recently, sitting pretty at bottom of my memory box, collecting dust. Albeit well preserved, a sad little thing if you ask me, holding onto something meant to be someone else’s memory. I never let it have that opportunity. I never let that special someone’s face light up with joy because I was selfish, that too in a way that served me no purpose.
My memories have a home in mind, in my heart, far more precious than a piece of cardboard with no address label or message of affection. All these years later, I wonder why I held on? I wonder why am I still holding on? Was I simply being selfish or was it because I didn’t want to let go of the dream?
©️ Romancing Life
I should have talked to you. Your soft smiles were an indication enough, I should have stopped you, but you were always so immersed in your ways. Shy glances and sweet sighs. So many confessions twirled on your tongue, like sweet hard candy, melting before I could ever hear their crunch. Every once in while you would smile, let the secrets reflect in your eyes. And, I would forget. Forget your pensive stares. To remember what was in front of me. A mirage, that was all you. You and a semblance of me. A shadow that bore our names. Us. Together. In a different lifetime. In an alternate reality. But this, I cannot forget; we are here, in the now, in this place. In this actuality, you don’t talk and I don’t hear. We don’t speak and you are not near. I live with regret, for the things I didn’t do, the words I didn’t let escape in submission to my fears. Perhaps, it is too late. Time is too far gone to say, I should have stopped you. I should have talked to you.
© Romancing Life, 2018
Artwork: @pride_nyasha (Instagram)
Romancing Life 