Somewhere Far Away In the Middle of the Ocean

There's this little stone protruding out of the ocean somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere, and on it is a little red house.

From the sheer banks of this small island rises a wooden ladder that leads to a wooden boat down below. Go up this ladder and you will find yourself standing precariously on a narrow ledge, its sides crumbling down to the ocean bed below. A path then leads you round the little rock to a corkscrew staircase. This spirals up to the little house that stands on the highest point of the rock, a metre or so up high from your head. 

The little house is lit with lanterns dangling out from each corner of the attic. On the roof is a black cat. It sits there at night looking at the stars, meowing at the occasional comet that flies by. The cat belongs to the carer of this lost world in the middle of the ocean. She's a little girl with a pair of wings, and petals around her waste, very much like a skirt. Her name is Lillipid. 

Every morning, when the sun breaks through the misty clouds that rest on the water under the house, beneath the rock, Lillipid opens her eyes gently and jumps off her bed. She stretches her arms and opens the curtains of all six windows round her little house. Then off she goes down the staircase and through the path and onto the ledge at the bottom of the rock. There she looks down towards the wooden boat, to make sure it is still there (for where else would it be, I sometimes wonder). She climbs down the wooden ladder and hops off onto the keel. The boat wobbles on the flat water line. 

Lillipid's wings flutter with excitement. She looks in the water to say hello to her reflection. Then, she sits on the stern of the boat and puts her bare feet in the ocean. With kind strokes of her feet the boat starts to glide on the surface and off she goes, little by little, away from the rock towards the sun. 

At night, when Seth the cat, has gone up on the roof, you can see a little boat moving in the horizon. From a distance it looks like a piece of wood floating in the middle of the ocean. But little by little you start to make out the shapes of Lillipid and her boat as they wobble slowly towards the rock.

Eventually Lillipid manages to reach the ladder, and off she goes up to the ledge, as swift as a moth. She looks down at the boat to check if its still there, then hurries back up to her red house. 

Six curtains close shut as the moonlight breaks through the mist. The lanterns dangle from the corners of the attic and Seth meows at a flying star, somewhere far away across the night sky. 

Heart Beat

My heart, it beats, slowly.
My head rests on the table, and I look down at the floor.
I can hear my heart beating in my chest.
It pushes against the table.
Wonderful isn't it, how nature works?
Just a collection of cells that beat, in a rhythm.
I am struck by its beauty.
I cannot believe something like this can even exist.
Yet, here I am, looking at the ground.
And my heart keeps beating.
It has done so for the past twenty years.
And it will do so for countless years to come.
Then, one day, my heart will stop.
I do not blame it.
It needs to rest, and so would I.
It would have been a beautiful journey.
Life itself, this miracle of nature.
A consequence of evolution.
13.77 billion years of causality.
To a point in time, that is now.
As I look down at the floor.
And my heart beats, slowly.

Come Tomorrow, I Am Here

We all suffer.
I can understand you.
I can, in the very least, associate your pain
with what I have felt in my life before.

But do not worry.
Time will pass, people change,
the world changes and you will change.

Hope is all we have,
fate our only guidance.

Come tomorrow, look at the morning sun
that rises every day,
so that you may see the beauty of our lives.

Come tomorrow, lose your burdens,
for you are free and there's so much left to see,
yet so little time worth wasting in worries.

Look Around

Thirty minutes was a long time to sit quietly and think about my life and the life of all the people going past me. 

There was this old Maltese couple going up hill and another British one going down. Neither of them held hands and the women took the lead in both cases. I could see the fragility of their bones in the way they walked and in their posture. Separated by a nation these old souls still had the same problems in life, and sooner or later, they would be no more.

Then I saw a BMW go by and in it was a young family. A girl not older than 18 years had a blooming smile on her face as she reacted to her parents from the back seat. For those three seconds or less that I saw her, I knew she was happy - at least in that moment - and that gave me a smile of my own. 

There is so much going on around us. We just have to stop and look.

The Story of How Man Came To Be

From the archives, something that I wrote 4-5 years ago in 10 minutes when waiting on a couch at my grandma's, to leave for private tuition. I felt a kind of enlightenment, and this was the fruit of a surge of thoughts. Keep in mind how long this have been written, and thus I excuse myself for any grammatical or syntax errors. Also, my ideas have changed quite a lot from that day, but the essence is in this essay, and my ideas have all originated form this work:

"God. He, she or it, is someone many devote their lives to. God is pictured as a superhuman or a transparent floating ball that has the power to create and destroy on his own will, whenever, wherever and however he likes. However, these are all hypotheses man himself has created. The truth lies beyond imagination and beyond our hopes of finding a god. A god as we know it doesn't exist, but a much simpler, much more perfect 'God' does proliferate and his in his own way created us.

My idea lies on the fact that our basic knowledge is so futile to assume and depict our God. Hereafter I will try to explain how my vision of god is different and that for me 'God' itself is an improper word. 'Existence' should be the term used to describe creation, the universe and all the laws and the physical materials residing in it. Existence is energy, and it is energy that is god or if we say that god created energy then we are saying that god started the start. However, we know that the universe started from a big bang, as scientists denote. This bang is or was energy - a fixed amount. With 'time' it grew into a universe with planets and stars.

My idea is that if the universe was and will, that is had a start and beginning, then it never existed, or else will exist forever. This said we can therefore assume that god is part or whole of the universe. Existence on the other hand is the version of how things come and go. How causality, chance and energy shape each other to form a picture we can ultimately understand.

This picture is the universe itself, which in turn is a fixed energy, which is god - it will never change, never end, it never began. It was there from day one or else from day zero. The changing of this energy in matter and laws is only the picture we see, because ultimately the energy remains the same, in the same place, texture, space and time and thus there should be no change.

The force which makes Existence is Existence itself. This ultimate form of perfection has its own fluctuating habits. At the start, that is, when god or existence started the cycle of life - manufacturing forms in its own existence - we came to be. Life is therefore the routine of this existence. Like a tape rewinded and beginning from the start several times. So therefore why should such a perfect Existence have a routine? Simple. Existence is energy as we said and this untouchable soruce which takes shapes does so due to its own existence. It is like a god controlling a god to control humanity. Similarly, existence is one unity. It is bound to create things to amuse itself and to stabilize itself.

Ultimately, Existence is trying to understand itself. No god can understand why it is a god, because it is bound to be by its own. Existence was never created, it didn't even create itself, and therefore its manifesting the wish to understand or else react - give out signals - that manifest in forms, and planets.

When these forms or we can say the Existence's ideas, are created, they are bound by existence itself to ask questions, confronting their own existence, and as they do so they come to believe in a god, that is Existence itself. Thus, Existence can comfort itself that it, in its perfection, is indeed existing."

There's So Much Beauty In The World

From the amazing movie 'American Beauty'.

"I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all. It stretches on forever, like an ocean of time. For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout Camp, watching falling stars. And yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined our street. Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper. And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird. And Janie, and Janie. And Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry. You will someday", Lester Burnham

Trees, Photos and Moments in Life

What do you see in this photograph? Maybe a tree and its orange leaves ablaze in the sun? Isn't it very normal to assume that what we see is what we understand to be the essence of a photograph? I feel, however, that there is something deeper lurking beneath the facet of colours presented here. There is undoubtedly an intrinsic beauty in the form of the bark and the depth of vision with which the above captures our attention. Yet, the beauty hangs not in the picture itself, but in the moment it captures. 

What makes this photo beautiful is to understand that there only exists one tree of that shape in the world. There may be countless other similar trees, but this tree is unique and timeless, for there shall be no other tree that will grow in the same form, bend the same way, branch into such  intricacy.

The photograph is also a snapshot of time. This artefact of nature took years to grow, and there can be no other time in the history of the Earth that it will be seen the same way again. Even the lighting and the position of the sun on that patch of leaves is momentary, captured into essence that can be viewed but never experienced again.There can only be one moment in which this photograph was taken, which was experienced only by the photographer.

 In my opinion, this is what makes beautiful photographs; captured moments that can never be again. A smile of a child or a tear on the face of soldier, a couple sitting in a sunset, or a tree in the morning sun. 

Movies and their Soundtracks

I have always said that a movie is a great movie if it has a great soundtrack. Movies such as those directed by Christopher Nolan, Aranofsky and Malick all have amazing music to tell a story. I cannot not mention my favourite composers; Hans Zimmer and Clint Mansell, but there are so many others out there that create beautiful masterpieces.

Recently I have watched the trailer for Terrence Malick's upcoming movie 'To the Wonder' which has left me awe-struck. The chosen track for the trailer perfectly matches the mood of the film. It transcends beyond words and cinematography to give something deeper to the observer. It is as if music is necessary to satisfy all the possible senses of a person that can be stimulated within a cinema. 

A musical score, without words, without lyrics, can still convey so much to us. The story is told through notes and melodies. An example of this is 'Death is the Road to Awe' from the great movie 'The Fountain'. The track itself, as I interpret it, is a journey in life of a human being. It starts off slow and then grows until it dies off with a brilliant climax. Suddenly, it reignites as if life is given back to the deceased. This is pretty much the story of the movie, in which rebirth is the main theme. 

The beauty in music is that it is a personal experience. We cannot argue with each other whether what we saw, what we understood in a movie is right or wrong. We cannot have dilemmas on whether Cob was still in a dream or not at the end of Inception, for music is something personal, something deeper than the story of the movie itself.

I do believe that a very good movie must have a very good musical track. I would suggest searching your favourite movies and their soundtracks and see whether I am correct. Until then I will be seeking more movies to watch, not for their plot or special effects, but for their beautiful scores that defines them as masterpieces.