... and I

I have awoken up to a stunning morning, not like any other my eyes have ever seen. It carries the innocence on its shoulders while stepping through the receding guilty sea. The heavens above have turned into bluest of aquamarine and the waking sun is breathing life into the world one lungful at a time. Everything stands still as it opens its eyes and tries to shake off the brisk early morning hugs. The white hyacinths have started to bloom over night and their intense fragrance has exploded through the garden of light. The world has given birth to yet another astounding day that only wisdom of ages could reason to be a dismay.
As I put a kettle of water on a stove, the familiar knock strikes my door. I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but somewhere in the past when the loneliness was trying to choke me I must have given him the invitation. All I can say is that it had to be a long time ago, because there he stands on my door every morning in his satin coat like any other friend. No wrinkly nose or provocative posture, and before I can open my lips he has already whisked by me and is looking for his favorite cup in the kitchen cabinet. Yes, we have developed this awkward relationship that has kind of grown its own tree of love with roots strongly interwoven through the ground, and now neither of us want to let it go. However, the time has been more than generous to us and we have become more than just good friends - we don’t need the words anymore to understand what thoughts haunt each others heads. So there we sit then behind the old oak wood table and have a cup of tea, Death and I, and look into each other’s eyes wondering who has more to say this time around. Sometimes we sit for hours there speechless over one another’s existence, other times we can talk the sun to sleep.
Every time his ice cold hands touch mine a white lily is born in my shaky palm as the time and the space become one. I put my head on his shoulder as I close the eyes and he wipes off my salty tears one by one. He knows I am more than scared, almost absolutely petrified, but not him, instead the shadow of my own - the duel that never seems to end. I can hear his voice softly telling me not to worry as he promises to lay me in the bed of roses and take good care until I could stand my own. But I am not worried and I’ve never been, I have always trusted him to be fair and honest, as well as stay with me when ever I need. As I drift to the world for most of us unknown, I hear him telling the stories about the beginning of time and from the presuppositions of our thinking to the creation of concepts that perceptions divine. I have never known anyone with such skill to speak so beautifully that their words can make the Universe flow like a river through your head.
He tells me how the sunset embraces the snowcapped Olympus that so rarely gets its head out of the clouds; how the islands grew out of the blue waters of the Aegean Sea and then became the cradle of civilizations for the mankind. How the bells in Tibet echo and the pi-wang strings play in the Himalayas, while the shaggy-haired yaks bear all the burdens under the Roof of the World; the sounding of mantras for Sakadawa in a capella, and whether one could ever reach the garden of Nirvana. How Genghis Khan, the greatest conqueror of genius of them all, seeded the empire so vast what even Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte could not grow. About his last battle against Tangut kingdom of His Hsia, and the legend of his nation rerouting the river to hide the grave, like the people of Uruk who diverted Euphrates for their king, Gilgamesh.
I always feel so betrayed when his icy lips kiss mine to bring me back to this world of “Homo homini lupus est” that is not my place to shine. Where every moment of life that flows through my veins dries up the skin as I’ve run out of tears. This place is so cruel and perpetually cold that it can spawn its own Ice Age in the midst of spring warmth. I have begged him to not leave me here and tried not to let go of his hand, but he just smiles at me and says that I need to learn to live before I can give him my heart. He has wisdom beyond my understanding and I know that I would never win this argument, because my premises would fall short of his knowledge of infinity. Next to him every one of my inferences would end up as the “reductio ad absurdum,” as they get lost in the jungle of modus ponens, modus tollens and all the rest. Thus I stand on the shore of another paradox - I don’t know how to learn something that I have lost the will for…
So we say our goodbyes, Death and I, to meet again in the tranquility of next morning, and to count the swirls of tea in the cup as we wonder how long this kind of friendship in this world is allowed. We’ve become partners in a tango full of passion where one dances to live while the other to die - makes you ponder who is more fascinated over life, he or I? In this manner he stands on my doorstep every dawn to make me a witness for stories of genesis and mortality all the way through the epoch of humans and more. But all I could think of is, would he ever choose to change his mind and take me with him, or do I have to walk through the valley of narcissism yet another day against my will.

Häly Laasme

What Is Love?

I don’t know if one can see love and I can not be certain over if one can taste it either, but I believe that it is what one wishes to see or is able to imagine, and thus only few of us ever find the privilege to make its acquaintance. It has learned how to walk so silent like a shadow among us, tiptoeing under the veil of the morning mist dressed in nothing but dew pearls entwined in its locks. Or it blows in gently through the open windows to our foolish hearts like summer breeze wearing a necklace with sweet wild strawberries and making us all, young and old, playful and naughty from inside to out like in A Midnight Summer Dream. It hides itself in the green meadows where the rivers are so lazy that they hug every curve, and spends days dancing through the waves of tall grass giggling as it tickles its toes. It will race over slippery rocks with the babbling streams that slither like snakes through deep forests, and play peek-a-boo with flickering sun in the groves full of berries. It will wander beneath the alleys of age-old pines jumping over the moss-covered stumps, run over the cloudberry marshlands soaking its feet in the croaking bogs, as well as over the countless fields of wheat and rye grass braided to a quilt that is sewed to the horizon. It will run and run like any mischievous child would without stopping for a breath of air, because it is young in heart like any love is and always will be, therefore so difficult for us to catch and see.
Then there are also those moments in our lives that don’t seem to have end, and where we find ourselves so grown into rose vines that their fragrance has put us into reverie. Oh yes, love can bind us in so many ways as it makes us speechless by swallowing all the letters or blind by distorting what our eyes could see. You can never really be quite sure if you are in love and not just imagining of everything that its lips blow to air. You start to wonder if love can make you believe in fairies or the magical beings who are the purest of all? And the answer would be,” Yes, it can,” and even though you would never get a chance to glance at one or find yourself stepping into the fairy circle under the ancient oak - the belief of their magic is what preserves their existence and fools your eyes to see things that only young ones do. Because, once you fall in love your mind flies to the enchanting world of make believe with gracious princesses, silvery unicorns and white knights who are always there to slay the fire- breathing dragons and kill the hungering giants to save their ladies of dreams. And you can call it a doing of Cupid’s arrow or fairy dust, but love makes you believe in fairytales from the wise nightingale whose songs saved the emperor’s life to A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Love makes us all grow backwards and tells the time to cease for uncertainty. Everything becomes like a dream in the never-ending book that gets thicker day by day as the author’s fantasies create new chapters. Imagination is a wonderful thing to have and one needs to learn how to appreciate it, because sometimes the life by itself can get lost in the dark caves and unknown valleys where you can feel so alone that it squeezes your heart to a tiny speck, and you wonder if you have been blown out of glass since everyone seems to look right through you.
That is what love is all about, giving the wings to your passions and desires, and letting them fly freely over seven seas and seven mountains until they reach the far away land that no one has ever seen before - only your imagination knows what it looks like and which scrumptious fruits you can pick, although the story itself is always a mystery that evolves as it flows in the endless river of amoré. Even if someone would choose to write down the words that give current to that river they would not make any sense, because the sentences would be like strainers leaking drop by drop as your feet are lifted off the ground and your head is spellbound somewhere in the puffy clouds. And one day when you fall back to the earth you are banned from judging its ways or trying to interpret its feelings, because every day it will choose to dress up into different colors of the ray that not all of us can see the same way.
It is sad how as we get older we occasionally become so ignorant over something that is so beautiful - as only love can be. On the other hand maybe it is not the lack of noticing its presence in our hectic lives, but rather our unconscious way of trying to protect us from feelings and emotions that are born with that kind of intoxication. Sometimes we are so scared of its taste that we would much rather hide ourselves between cold concrete walls or behind bamboo blinds than give it a chance to spice up our short lives. And love most certainly has so many tastes to flavor our world that it is impossible to describe every single one of them even with the most meticulous à la carte. You can be more than sure that it will never be dull or tedious in any way. Some days it can be sweet like crème brûlée with brown sugar crystals or melt like chocolate truffles in your mouth. While other days it can be bitter like dandelions or entirely sour like green apples that are too young to pick. But whatever taste it has, once you’ve had a privilege to feel its sweetness tingling on the top of the tongue you can never imagine life without it and will thirst for it as long as you live.
However, like everything in life, so does love work in mysterious ways, as one day you realize that what you thought to be love really was just a beautiful daydream. Something that you yearned for so much that it blurred the reality, and the truth is also that it would be very difficult to exist with your head in the clouds all the time. So you tell your conscious to be ignorant to the scents and emotions of this colorful world and choose the ordinary instead. And, even though it feels like giving away your heart to the snow queen piece by piece, your wisdom tells you that it is the right path do take. That love is not living in the world full of butterflies, but choosing to go home to the person who is waiting for you there and wishes to sit next to you by the end of the night. It is fighting over stupid things in life that nobody else cares about and then making up afterwards; learning to be there for someone else through pain and happiness; or growing the patience to accept them with their faults and weaknesses. It is making a choice to care more about someone else instead of yourself, and if you are really lucky it will grow little hands and tiny feet that want to crawl on your lap as the sun is falling into its fiery bed. Their big eyes will make you the center of the Universe and beg you to tell one more fairytale before the millions of kisses for good night.

Häly Laasme

We All Have To Go Home One Day

I know that often there are no words that could make the world better, because already from the beginning of time the pain and love have agreed to go hand in hand. We always hope for everything to turn out fine, but the truth is that even when all the affairs in our lives do not seem to go the way we wish, in some means it is and will be the way it should be. It is like the moon and the sun that move over the horizon as the earth rotates. For us, here and now, there will be always a new day after a starry night, and a waking spring after a cool winter. The seeds will grow to a colorful foliage if we’ll nurture them and will die after they have given the essence of beauty to the world.
Everything in this Universe presents itself by the beginning and the end - like the compositions in the music that are born in pianissimo and flow through crescendo to fortissimo followed by diminuendo. We are the masters who are trying to accomplish the art of arranging sounds in time to produce a continuous melody and hate to accept dissonance or atonality, because all we yearn is the sonority - the perfection of harmonic relationship that is not spoiled by dramatic tonal-tension. But no symphony can last forever, because sooner or later the conductor will need a break and has to leave the podium.
For some of us it is probably easier to see the life through the paintings that start with the white paper and primary colors. But as the life goes on we perceive the magnificence of creating the secondary colors; as well as various tints, tones and shades. And then at one point we stop and step back to look what we have created, and realize that - this is it! If we would add one more speck to it, it would become ruined. Thus the painting is done and it is time to move on to the new white sheet.
Throughout our lives we are the apprentices to our own souls who direct us to apply the colors to the paper. Some of us use more aggressive colors while others are drawn towards receding ones, but it is ultimately up to our will to make the choice between the paints. As Paul Gauguin has said, "Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them."
Life is the sacrifice that we all make, and although we wish it to last forever, most of us don’t dream to outlive our following generations. It is a succession of existence that carries on to the eternity. And more than anything we would like to believe that as complicated as all the biotic entities are there has to be more to this cycle of life than just to "be and die" - otherwise it would seem so senseless; because the "life," as we know, is such a small fraction of the time continuum.
The death is not a punishment, but the right for freedom from the duty that the Universe has bestowed on us . And it would be very selfish for the rest of us to try to drag these people, who have filled their obligations to this world down the longer road than they are destined to - just because we are not ready for it.
We all have to go home one day…

Häly Laasme