If I had my life to live over – Nadine Stair

I would like to make more mistakes  next time!

I’d relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip.

I would take fewer things seriously, I would take more chances.

I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers.

I would eat more ice cream and less beans.

I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day.

Oh, I’ve had my moments! and if I had to do it all over again, I’d had more of them!

In fact, I’d try to have nothing else!

Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day…

I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute!

If I had to do it all over again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.

I would go to more dances!

I would ride more merry-go-rounds!

I would pick more daisies!

I read this poem in my first year of faculty and found it in one of those huge handbooks of General Psychology.  The author is a lady called Nadine Stair and she was 81 years old when she wrote the poem, as her part in a research on regrets. It stayed with me ever since, either on my closet’s door, in my mind, but mostly when deciding for a second cup of ice cream! :)

Sentimental story – Nichita Stanescu

Then we met more often.
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora.
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth.
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight.
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I loved you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things.

Translation found here.

Pierre Matter “Kiss Cube”

Snow

It’s snowing obstinately outside and it is cold…but my room is warm and silent.

I find it amazing how each time it falls, the snow equalizes everything under it’s whiteness, making it all one. Like a fresh start or a glittering morning… The trash, the faulty roads, the dark pavement, the left-overs or long-forgotten  bits and pieces become hidden for a while… Spring could not have asked for a better predecessor!

Snowing over the lake. March 2005

Sun setting over trees and snow in Central Park.

Hiding place.

I’m finding myself dissatisfied with the snow pictures I’ve taken so far so I  have posted some photos my uncle took  during previous winters, in Gherla…

Somes River.

Curiosity…

Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventure.

Loyelle Drachman

Boy with a kite in San Francisco, Cali. August 2008

Here I love you – Pablo Neruda

Here I love you.
In the dark pines wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorus on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

Pablo Neruda “Here I love you” from “Twenty poems of love and a song of despair” (Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada), 1924.

Continuing the series of the love poems…Another favorite of mine, Pablo Neruda.  Chilean born, Nobel laureate for literature in 1971 and probably, one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century.

I bought his book in a small library found on a hidden street, somewhere in Barcelona, while outside was raining slowly.. His poetry is simple and romantic. Everytime I go back to it and re-read those 21 poems, my heart finds a certain restful joy… Like I am finding some sort of “home” for my own feelings of love.

You can read his wonderful poems here, in Spanish, and some others translated in English here.

Time…

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.

The Bible: Ecclesiastes, 3:1-8

Zhang Huan “Man with a tree”

The little things

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Evelyn Waugh “Brideshead revisited”

Back “door” of  a venetian library. August 2007

The golden age of love – Nichita Stanescu

My hands are in love,
alas, my mouth loves -
and see, I am suddenly aware
that things are so close to me
I can hardly walk among them
without suffering.

It is a sweet feeling
of waking, of dreaming,
and I am here now, without sleep -
I clearly see the ivory gods,
I take them in my hands and
thrust them, laughing, in the moon
up to their sculpted hilts -
the wheel of an ancient ship, adorned
and spun by sailors.

Jupiter is yellow, Hera
the magnificent shades to silver.
I strike the wheel with my left hand and it moves.
It is a dance of sentiments, my love,
many a goddess of the air, between the two of us.
And I, the sail of my soul
billowed with longing,
look for you everywhere, and things come
ever closer,
crowding my chest, hurting me.

From the book “Bas-Relief with Heroes”
english translation by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru.

I wish more of Nichita Stanescu‘s poems were translated…However, I understand why such a thing is hard to accomplish. Mingling with the grammatical rules in its own peculiar way, juxtaposing the material, artificial objects with the processes and depictions of love in a single thread, he created his own unique language of love and words, a barrier in itself, at times.

Glorious day…

Wires intertwined in perfectly little knots. One following the other in a tenacious symmetry. Magnificently spread over the wide open spaces, the white plains. The sun set up, and then down again, in the same  quiet rhythm, over the good and the bad alike. Not one single moment more importantly acknowledged than the other. Simple and totally insignificant day. The kind that just bridges solemnly between other significant ones.

Retezat Mountains National Park, Romania. Nov. 2008.

On Love…

Those who love, friends or lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.

Albert Camus “The Rebel”

Charles Curran “In the Luxembourg Gardens”, 1889