I may thrash
I may run
I may scream
Or stand still
You won’t let go
Without
Holding me

 I’m not heard
I’m not seen
I’m that ghost
There within
So devoured by you
So helpless
Crouched low
Captivated
Arrested
In that void
That is you

Of course I knew and was very much aware of what I was doing. How could she doubt this? What was she thinking of me? That I’m one stupid nutcase who hasn’t realized that a blog is a very public place?

But thinking about it some more this was not what was so awful about her criticism. What really got to me was that between the lines she told me that my personality, my feelings are something better kept hidden and locked away. Needless to say, we aren’t friends anymore.

But apart from myself – and believe me, I consider carefully what I write about and how, and what I put out so that no one gets hurt – apart from what we tell and don’t every day, haven’t we since long come to a point where we rarely show our true selves? Isn’t a lot we talk about, even if it’s about such personal matters like sex, nothing but running away from what truely matters to us and moves us? And why is this so? What do we fear?

What can happen if you let others know what is going on inside of you, what you feel? Asking around I got about the same answer many times in many different words: the fear of getting hurt, of rejection. It seems as if opening up would somehow make us more vulnerable. As if showing ouselves were an invitation for others to destroy us. But is that so?

If you show someone your deep feelings, yes, maybe it will not be mutual. And maybe the other one won’t understand to be careful now, to let you know that the feelings are not returned without rejecting you completely. But should this keep you from offering the gift?

What happens if you close in your feelings and not let anyone know? What kind of lonely place will you be in then? How many chances will you blow? Chances to become happy? Chances for love? Just because someone might be so insensitive or so afraid of his/her own feelings that he/she laughs about You?

Yes, this will hurt, and if your feelings for this person are deep it will hurt like hell. It will get you burned badly but that doesn’t mean you’re going to die. It will take time but you will recover from it. But more importantly, showing your feelings is being true to yourself. And it might even give the other one the strength and courage to walk the road of fear and open up, too.

At the end of the day, feelings are all life is about. It’s not your house, your car, your job, your money, your riches what make you who you are. It’s what you feel, who you are inside. Forget about that transitory beauty of youth that is only skin deep and look at the ageless beauty within. There is no reason why you shouldn’t show that beautiful, kind and colorful soul that lives within your body. If you realize that your feelings are nothing to fear but on the contrary they are your key to the gates of the world no one will be able to destroy you.

So, fear is no argument. Chin up, deep breath. It’s never too late to tell someone “you’re the only one”…

I stopped dead in my tracks and looked at her, seeing the young woman to be for the very first time. “You’ll just know,” I said regretting it instantly.

“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” she threw back at me somewhat disappointed.

I swallowed some of my pride and decided to be honest. “You might not realize it at first,” I said and looked into her investigating eyes. “Sometimes it takes a while because when it’s real, pure love, it’s a new feeling you may have trouble to understand.”

“But how does it feel,” she insisted, “you must know, you’re nearly 50.”

I understood that there was no avoiding that. She wanted to know and was determined not to let me get away. So I made up my mind and told her what I know by experience:

It’s that one moment you encounter someone for the very first time and all pieces fit, all becomes quiet, there’s no more fear, and peace settles within you. It’s the one into whose eyes you look and realize that your heart allways knew.

It’s when you ask no more questions and everything is possible. When you know you’ve arrived where you belong, when you finally have found your place in life. It’s when it just feels so right that there ain’t one grain of doubt, that you’d leave all and everything behind, follow whereever just because you know this is the right thing and nothing will ever compare to this. Because this is the one who makes light dance in your blood.

It’s the Grand Cru of feelings, it’s when you give up selfishness because you never wanted anything that much.

By then night had fallen, the table was cleared. We had snuggled up on the sofa. Wrapped in the dim light of candles she asked me “has that happened to you, have you found this love of your life?”

“Yes,” I said and felt the familiar pain that left me unable to breathe for seconds, the tearing of soft skin, too thin to resist and barely covering my wounds.

“But where is that person then?”

“Safely tugged into my heart,” I tried to smile, “but not knowing anything about how I feel.”

“But why?” Her young face looked so puzzled as if she couldn’t grab any certainty about me. As if she wasn’t sure about me anymore.

I took a deep breath. “Sometimes it’s just not meant to be,” I started to explain what I had so much trouble understanding myself. “The love of my life is taken since long and probably not feeling what I do.”

She looked at me for a long time, squeezing her eyebrows. “Does that ever stop to hurt?”

“No,” I mouthed the truth only to veil it again as my heart longed to protect that young girl from it. “But it loses its sharp edges and stops to cut,” I let my truthfulness drown.

Only after I had sent her to bed I stood and watched the full moon. I had betrayed my honesty because I wanted to shield that young life from the cruelty of love I hoped she might never experience herself. Should I have been truthful instead?

Should I have told her about that moment you bite your lip so hard that you taste blood because you need a real physical pain to accompany the one that spreads through your body like an infection? The blink of an eye that sends you to your knees praying to a god you never believed in, begging don’t do this to me? The moment you know you’d do anything, you’d beg, steal, lie to have that one person you love more than yourself? That second you suddenly know this is larger than yourself? This will not only break your heart, but your soul? This is the one who will always be in your blood, the air you would kill to breathe? That eternally freezed in moment you realize that no matter how firmly you made up your mind to break away your heart will be refusing you from now on forever and a day?

I closed the window and turned off all lights. My mind wandered to the one whose name is engraved in the secret corners of my heart. I couldn’t help but wonder if the love of my life ever thinks about me

How often do we hear this when things go wrong, when we doubt, when disappointment overwhelms us and turns our hope into weakness. A well meant advice but hard to take when we hurt.

And how wonderful if it were true, and this fantasy of being almighty when it comes to our own fate were a sweet reality. But is it?

Of course, there is truth in it. If we don’t believe we get nowhere. Our ability to succeed often is a state of mind because our firm belief in achieving our goal is what makes us take the risk to fail. It makes us get up and dust ourselves off and smile and try again. And only if we take enough risks and fail often, we can succeed in the end.

BUT there is no guarantee, and maybe we won’t.

To believe is not enough. To try and believe is not enough either. To try, to swallow failure, to try again, to swallow… may be enough, it may be not. But at the end of the day it might be not so neccessary to succeed like to have traveled that road.

And many times it can’t be done alone. We need reinforcement. Sometimes we even need someone who wakes powers that sleep within without us knowing.

Things ganging up on us and failing that one time too many can have even the toughest on his or her knees, not finding the strength to get up again. It can make you doubt in a way that you conclude whatever you wanted so badly is not meant to be.

You try to let go but then there’s that hole within you that swallows parts of your personality until you finally hardly recognize who you are. It might even eat you in a way that you go all numb, depression takes over, and you become one Sleeping Beauty.

A hundred years asleep, the castle overgrown with thick bushes, its thorns firm and sharp, it takes a very special prince or princess to save you. One who walks through the bushes unharmed, makes them crumble and fall, opens all doors and windows and airs out your heart and soul. Someone brave who is not afraid.

No, we are not almighty, and willing – no matter how firmly – won’t make us. But believing and denying to be defeated by failure takes us far, maybe even much farther then everyone else thought possible.

So, if you see someone down, take a breath before you tell that person that success is only a question of will. Be brave. Be a prince or a princess. I’m sure you can.

But what happens if we meet someone like that? Have you ever? How did that feel and what did you think? Have you been touched, moved, even shaken? Did it brighten your horizon? Shift perspective? Or have you run in fear?

In the book of my life I have encountered only one such person. I realized immediately that I was looking into the eyes of someone unlike any other. It left me shaken and breathless but in a most peaceful place. It made me think and look at life from uncommon angles.

It was so intense and also intimidating that I became very insecure and felt as if I had to move through a firestorm, first. By now I know I needed that to be able to evolve. And I know how to go on down that path that at the end of the day will make me leave the world as someone better than who I was when I came.

But, of course, this isn’t so easy as it now may sound. These rare persons, they polarize and scare the hell out of many. And even if people are not afraid of the person, it is a typical human trait to fear change and everything that is strange to us, everything we can’t explain at once. So meeting someone like that many just walk away and so miss the chance for change just because it’s easier and feels safer.

But still you can’t ignore someone so unique. You can’t look the other way and move on as if there was nothing. Being rare means to stand out. Standing out means to be noticed. So, that leaves only two alternatives to choose from: deny and fight or take a bow.

I didn’t feel I had a choice. I was so fascinated, so drawn in that I simply couldn’t turn the other way. I had to follow as if that person were a magnet with a pole that fit mine. It was as if not I choose the path to walk but the path choose me.

This was no easy way. I tripped along a stony road. My life all of a sudden seemed to be a building that was taken apart, a puzzle that was destroyed and then the pieces put back together wrongly. I lost a lot and couldn’t see what I was gaining. I felt disoriented and lost out at sea. I didn’t know myself anymore, I had to get to know me again. And this was frightening.

It took a while but finally I realized something fundamental:

Just like there are people who bring out the worst in us, you are very lucky if life offers you the chance to meet that one person who holds the capacity to bring out the best in you. Don’t let it pass, grab it with both hands. It’s worth it.

Social networks have changed more than some of our ways of communication. They have provided a platform to get in touch with people we would probably never meet otherwise, especially when we live on different continents and share nothing more than a special interest in a subject. But here we are one day, chatting on twitter, liking on facebook, and plussing on google+. And it’s a fantastic thing that the fact that we are one world sort of shows in this interaction.

But as with all things, there is light as well as shadow. There is beauty in it but also a certain dark side we rarely acknowledge. All this communication can make us feel close to a person we don’t really know. It can fool us, mislead, and put us on the very wrong track so that we one day face the hurt of a serious crash landing.

I’ve already written here about “How close are we from afar?“, musing about the question about  how much of a person’s “real life” we want to read publicly, how this can make us feel and which chances and dangers are in it. But what if we are flattered because someone famous suddenly answers a question we threw at him or her? Once? Twice? Then again?

How tempting to think, you are special. How tempting to assume you somehow stand out, are different, mean something to someone who doesn’t know you at all. And yes, you suddenly might tend to forget that this person really might just have found your question interesting or even useful because with it you accidentally served that person a possibility to say what she or he wanted to tell anyway. Because you want to be seen. Because we all want to be heard. It’s human nature.

Now step into the shoes of that famous person who just answered you. Imagine it were you. Picture getting likes, tweets, comments on nearly everything you put out on social media. Taste that. How does it feel? Like a big “Wow”, right?

Of course. It must be so flattering along with interesting because you can eavesdrop on what they think about you out there in an unfiltered way. And you learn you are loved more than you ever thought. This must be just overwhelming so that something inside of you will start to crave for more and more of it. And there is a way to get it.

So, you react – if only because your subconscious tells you to, to make sure they go on, because it’s nourishing your soul. Because it feels so good. And of course you are thankful for them doing it. But does this make you interested in those persons, in who they are and what they do? Does it make you want to know more about them?

I really don’t know. I guess it makes you want for them to go on doing what feels so awfully good to you.  It’s another fix of that emotion you’re after, not the person who provides it.

Somehow sobering, that train of thoughts? Maybe. But then, it should not lessen your joy over some reactions you might get on things you say. But if you listen to your inner voice it might tell you something more powerful. That we are all just humans. That…

We are all different and alike.

Do you have something tugged neatly into a safe place in one of the rooms of your soul? A wish you try to forget that lives there, you even try to kill it? But it seems to have such a life force that you’re completely powerless? It’s larger than you? Then, hold on to it I’d say. But only if…

It’s that one magic moment after which there’s no going back. The second all pieces of your puzzle fall at their place and you see the whole picture for the first time. The intake of breath which makes you know exactly where you belong. The blink of an eye in which you look fear in the face and just don’t care.

It can be anything. The one thing you want to have or all you want to be or the one you love more than your life.

But it must be the one thing you want so much, you can’t imagine a thing you wouldn’t do to get there. You’d rather die than not have it. Even if you don’t think it will be granted because it seems so far out of reach, so unrealistic, that all common sense just shakes its head and watches you with pity. But if your heart and soul don’t speak the language reason does, if they won’t listen, then clutch it with all your might.

It hurts, it cuts, it rips you apart? It’s the end of you? Yes maybe, but believe me, there is beauty along with the pain. You can’t see this? Not now? I know.

I have it, too. Not yours, but mine. This one thing that runs in my blood and posseses each and every cell of my body. It’s always there, while I walk through the day, while I sail through the night. I can’t escape. I can’t let go, even though – no matter how many knots I tie into that rope – there’s nothing to hold on. It’s just like building castles in quicksand. Like swimming in white water and choosing to deny the rapids.

I’m captured by it. It chains me. It drowns me in rain, and binds my voice so that it always feels like screaming under water. Holding it loosely in my hands it still cuts my skin. It fragments me and then I crawl on the floor trying to put all those pieces that make me back together but somehow they never fit.

It even has me scared that I let the beast from its chain and there won’t be a thing to stop it from eating me alive. But the beast has a beauty of its own, one I might never have discovered hadn’t I fallen for it.

It’s simple. It’s pure. In the very sense. And that’s it.

Even in our world filled to the brink with temptations that whisper “buy me and you’ll be happy” there is still something I wish for so much that nothing else really matters. Its fulfillment wouldn’t bring me riches, health or other earthly goods. I can’t even be sure if it would bring me happiness. But I don’t mind.

It’s not what it’s about. In fact I don’t really know why this is more important to me than anything else, why it means the world to me. I just know it does. I’d give anything, I’d even take a bullet to get there. I know I never wanted anything that much. And that’s as frightening as beautiful. It’s completely overwhelming me.

It’s like a light at the end of the tunnel but then you don’t know what you’ll find there. And no matter how much it hurts to wish for it and not getting any closer to it, wishing for something so much that it takes away my selfishness has made me a better person. And in the end that’s all life should be about.

Broke my heart, broke my soul

But Can I walk from all the pieces

That have once been me

Try to put them back together

Try to mend what cannot heal

Because the one who lives right on the edge

Must be prepared to bleed

And all the cracks and all the shards

Reflect the light in rays too bright

And everyone around gets blinded

By the ashes of that sight

So I can try to get out of my skin

But can I really not be me

Can hide my heart far from my sleeve

Cover the hole and smile beneath

But who am I now to deny

Just where I want to be

When every cell in me just screams

When I can never leave

And when I feel you like the light

The light, the light that moves the night

When you are right here in my blood

And you are all the air I’ve got

So I can try to tame my voice

And petrify all that is me

But still the lion roars inside

Still hurt soars all through me

So in this noisy quietness

In the electricity of fear

Can you tell me where to turn to

Can you quiet the despair

Can you take care of that longing

That is eating all of me

Can you listen, can you notice

Can you for a moment just see me

Sounds slightly familiar? Well, let me be the first to confess I tend to get trapped in this sort of dilemma, especially when it’s about something that – or rather someone who – is important to me.

Let me give an example.

A while ago I met a person. We had a brief chat, brief but intense in a way. In this short span of time, while I acutally lived the moment, I was very sure of certain things like that there was some mutual sympathy, a few feelings about the other one’s character, a certain understanding for what happened… The usual things we grab with our senses while we talk to someone. Things that are communicated by gestures, the color of the voice, facial expressions, attitude, the general atmosphere that cushions the conversation.

During the weeks that followed I thought about the encounter every now and then. In between small things happened. Nothing that indicated that I had been all wrong in my perceptions. No, basically there was some contact that should have assured me but it didn’t. On the contrary, the more time passed the more I was doubting everything I had been so sure off.

So, how could that happen?

I think it’s as simple as that: Judgement got in the way and fragmented my experience. Sounds complicated? It isn’t. Basically, it’s what happens to all of us all of the time and what tends to complicate relationships.

When we experience something, the moment  we are in it, there is no filtering by thoughts. We live the encounter, we take in every nuance with our senses. We listen, we talk, we smell, we taste, we feel. Meanwhile our brain processes lots of information in nanoseconds. In this moment it is an experience. Just this, pure and simple.

Later, when we think about it (and when it was important we always do), we start to judge our experience. We look at things from different angles, question this and that, try perspectives, start to doubt, set our minds to find out if we understood correctly, if it meant this or that… As we do that the experience grows pale and sometimes even starts to fade while judgement claims more light and raises its voice. What once was clear, what we were so sure about slips out of our hands and makes us feel insecure.

Sometimes we even make it worse by asking others who have been bystanders. They, for sure, experienced the whole encounter differently and by now have come to their own judgement. If they tell us that, we are even more shaken and don’t know what to think and believe anymore unless we are one of those rare humans who are always sure of themselves (and while this should make life easier, I’m not convinced it turns us into someone likeable).

So, how can we get out of this? What is the solution to that? Is there any? Can we escape coming to conclusions tainted by assumptions based on unrelated experiences, fears, hopes and even old hurts?

To know about that trap might not prevent us from walking right into it but then at least we are able to recognize it fast. Maybe we can learn to hold on to experience and to not listen to that inner voice of  judgement. If we keep the experience itself alive in full color and dressing, if we return to the feeling instead of to the thoughts that danced around them and had them chained in their net, we stand a chance for less misunderstandings and better relationships.

The one person I would want to ask that, trusting she knows and would tell me the truth, is dead since 43 years. But if I put that question out into the universe, she might listen and smile?

I grew up to tales of my grandmother, who died when I was barely four years old, having been a witch. I listened to adults talking about how she had healed by just laying her hands on someone. There were stories about her garden of herbs in which she cultivated plants no one really knew and from which she mixed strange balms and teas. I learned that while the whole village came to her for help and cure my entire family didn’t trust her with so much like asking for something against a simple cough. Even her early and very sudden death at 59 was allegedly based on her witchcraft.

I missed my grandmother throughout my whole life and still do. During that short time I knew her she gave me warmth and the distinct feeling to be very welcome in her world. I never feared her, and there was always delicious chicken soup which we ate in the kitchen. Growing up I spent many hours wondering if she really had been a witch, and if so if witches in general maybe were kind although adults called them evil.

Today, I think all of these tales, often told in hushed voices with a quick glance at my direction when I was a kid, all the eerie feelings woven around them, made me deny a spirituality that still refused to die within me.

I kept my silence and raised an eyebrow when my mother told me the moment my father died she saw him all flashed in light in front of her. I didn’t utter a word when a friend of mine talked about her twin and how they would have a bond that made them know how the other was at each given moment. I called it coincidence every time I had a sudden and unbased idea how something would turn out that became a reality sometime later.

But going on in this fashion of a “disbeliever” what am I to make of the moments in which all of a sudden I feel a wave of strange energy wash over me and someone not there is here like a presence in my room? In which my heart starts to run with my blood like wild horses and my breath looses its rhythm? While all my thoughts crash into another before they focus? While I feel someone else’s energy like a heatwave roling over and through me again and again?

I have tried, but there seems to be no protection against it. The phenomenom strikes as it pleases, it never aks if it’s “convenient” right now. I wanted to deny it but it’s larger than me. This sounds so unreal to you? Go on, be my guest and call me a nutcase. I’m probably the first who will tell you that you’re right. But what if?

What if we are energy that can reach out for someone and be reached? Energies, that can form a bond so strong no distance can cut through it? Energy, that manifests itself in a feeling we can’t explain and not even understand? What if?

I wish I could question my grandmother about this. Whatever she might say, it would make me feel less insecure, less shaken to my bones. And then, maybe, I could start to believe in this spiritual energy that might livewith in me.

This sounds theoretical to you? Then, step into my shoes. Get into my coat. For a moment pretend you are me…

There is this twittermate of mine. The distance between us is a continent and an ocean, the gap between timezones. Yet we see each other every day. We comment on each others tweets, we sometimes even discuss at length. And of course, there have been some direct messages.

I am used to her being there at certain hours, to seeing her share information and sometimes her anger. I know close to nothing about her but still I can read between lines and feel her.

Then, one day she didn’t tweet. Strange. Her reliable presence was missed by me – and others for sure. And when her avatar appeared again in my timeline I exhaled. But only until I read. It was not her tweeting but someone was informing the twitterworld that she had a stroke.

I sat very still and watched this tweet. I held my breath and willed it to go away. But it didn’t. I felt a light-headed sort of vertigo.I absolutely wanted to know how she was but I didn’t want to be a witness to someone’s serious health issues on that public basis. It felt all wrong and yet right in a way.

The person tweeting in her name posted updates of her state for several days. Seeing the avatar appear was always anticipated in fear and relief by me. Fear, because I was scared the person would inform us that she was worse, and relief when I read that she was getting better and thanking us for the well wishes.

She was back one day all of a sudden. She didn’t have to say it was herself again, the wording of her first tweet spoke mountains. And I am awfully glad that this sad story turned out so good.

Now, get back into your shoes. What did you feel? But most of all what would you do? If you were facing a real tragedy would you hide it or tweet about it? And just in case you now want to turn away and say it wouldn’t matter, I disagree.

I believe how we act in such personal things determines if we embrace the changes of our world and manage to define our relationships in a new way. It may be the fundament for being able to transfer a new way of forming friendships into our lifes. It might even be one important step to make “we are one world” our reality.

While we take a bath, put on some new nail polish, get dressed and all spiffed up that feeling of excitement spreads like champagne through us. We look forward to that new day, the new year, a new dawn. We reach out to a future that never seems as close as on that last day of December.

Many of us make resolutions, promises to themselves to make it better, to make an effort and to succeed with it this time. Everything seems possible in that moment before we cross the line. But from where do we take that solid belief that things will change just because the year count adds a number? Why do we think we could outsmart that continuum of time and place? And why do we tend to put so much pressure on ourselves?

I admit it. There isn’t a single New Year’s Eve in my life I had made a reolution. I gave up smoking years ago in August without even telling myself I would never do it again (instead I said to myself I can start again when I’m 70 because then it won’t do so much harm any more). It was never in me to drink or eat so much that I had to go on a diet (lucky me, you might think, but to tell the truth, I often had a hard time not to loose so much weight that I would get ill). And when I set goals as to what to achieve I always do it when it occurs and I try to put realistic deadlines to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to outline that I know it all, do it all better and am the queen of wisdom in general. On the contrary. I fail a lot in my life. I stumble, fall, and get up again. I hold a torch and get burnt. I have those moments in which I’m not sure how I should ever find back the power to go on. I get tired of being a fighter. Hope slips out of my hands. And in my darkest hours I loose it just like anybody else does sometimes.

What I’m trying to say is don’t be so hard on yourself. Don’t put so much pressure on your shoulders that you can’t stand tall anymore. Make resolutions tonight if you want to but keep in mind that failure is not what counts. You won’t get nowhere if you won’t take risks. Failing and trying again is part of the plan. With each try you will get better, and in the end you will get what you need.

In this sense I wish all of you a wonderful New Year’s Eve and all the best for a fantastic 2013!