“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in Kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018),
The Left Hand of Darkness
Art by Édouard Manet.
If you were to be enclosed in one word, what would that be?
We are already enclosed in small words, small events, small thoughts making up a bigger picture. But what if you respond to only one word?
My word is freedom. I know of nobody being free, but in our world populated with clouds that sweep away the silence of the sky above blue lilacs of amaranthine Spring, I am free. My freedom is but at the words’ length of a magic rub of the lamp of imagination.
Without freedom we cannot feel the wind’s promiscuous touch as if at ripe flowers and leaves, without freedom we cannot be as young as yesteryear’s roses. We cannot see the Autumn climbing up the vines and the heartbeat of the moon, alive and beckoning.
Only with freedom of vision and thought we can unleash our unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful world inside of us.
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them, I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody – Inside them they’ve got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds….” – Neil Gaiman
You cannot paint in colors and words unless your mind is free to travel to your imaginary legendary lands between the corner of sunset and the verge of dawn. Unless your heart dances at the tune hummed by a water-lily. Unless your mind is raving at the wild immaculate trees. With freedom and broken dreams you can do anything. The shards of olden dreams are lavish land for new unbroken dreams.
“A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.”- Elaine de Kooning
A painting is not a noun, it is a verb – to love. To love with fierce freedom and lovely despair of losing one’s self into the loving.
In love we are maneuvering a human mechanism that at times refuses to work…That is clear, but the trying is enchanting. Buckets of enchantment color ethereal worldly beings in agonizing freedom and…love.
Art by Gustave Adolphe Mossa.
Grasp = a firm hold or grip.
“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.”
― Simone de Beauvoir
My “situation” has a penchant for grasping more and more of the world in different and divergent sporting circumstances; cycling, skating, skiing… Sketching over one’s limits melts the stresses of fitting an imperfect representation of perfect living.
Art by Evyn Fong.
Dread = great fear or apprehension.
…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty. – Thomas Häfner
After a pack of dogs jumped at my bike wheels, I developed a “protective dream”. The dogs in the tall dream protected me of the dogs in the tall grass.
Art by Kinuko Y Craft.
The shape of goodness is the shape of life sometimes lived in the cold and fear of falling. My cycling season lasts for as long as the weather makes it (im)possible.
Cycling is my absolute passion. I do not care too much about anything else, with the exception of what I do which has many layers of passion, and roller-skating. I recite incantations for the weather to stay fine until late December. Come to think, for 4 or 5 years we haven’t had snow in Bucharest for Christmas. And I bought my bike 5 years ago. Before, I was a roller-skater. I decided to switch the hat the moment a biker screamed at me pointing that the bike lane was for cyclists. And this is how I changed “denomination”.
The Japanese have a blooming chart for the cherry trees. I have a blooming chart for cycling after lilacs. Every spring day starts and ends with the promise of a more beautiful and balmier day. Spring gives freedom and courage to watch the world from a cocoon of warmth and kindness. When snow is beating at the windows, I feel beaten and frozen. To jump-start my optimism, the beginning of the New Year is the beginning of Waiting for the Spring Festival. Also I get to “fight snow with snow” by tricking and jinxing Winter on my skis…
Cycling is an adventure…Everything can happen. Only this year I have been caught in the rain twice. I was soaked, thinking that if I sped, as usual, I got home in a jiffy. Didn’t happen, my breaks did not catch and I was not able to see anything with the rain in my eyes. I was attacked by dogs (of war), hit my head in branches…Met wonderful people…Saw the world raw and rough on terrible sunsets…Had my face cut by the wind…Shed tears of endearment when an icicle got in my eyes and stayed, for a while…At all costs in tears and shivers, it is marvelous closed circle goodness.
From cycling in the cold to breathing in the roar on two of the most beautiful days of 2017 – Christmas day and one folstitia-fire Spring day:
Mistake = an act or judgement that is misguided or wrong.
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.” – Neil Gaiman
Art by Gertrude Alice Kay.
Brevity = concise and exact use of words in writing or speech.
But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.
–Herman Hesse
Art by Pod Drzewem Serce.
“We’ve built a world where the only option is hubris. Where the future belongs to anyone willing to act like the gods of our myths.” – Seth Godin
When we strip away self-doubt and artifice we embrace the purity and freedom to feel and write as gods would do.
It is about running and battling with the beauty and the naïveté of the world at our side.
Freedom means courage…
Purity means courage…
Naïveté means courage…
Courage to strip away your soul and let it bloom before Spring is climbing up the trees.
Lately I have become part of a community that starts fires in a cold world, a community that grows blooming trees out of lackluster soil, that takes freedom, purity and courage to the other realm…There are many ways to say: “I love you”, many ways to say: “I am grieving”, many ways to say: “Thank you”.
I have found them all on A Global Divergent Literary Collective, where the Thank You’s, the Love You’s, the Miss You’s leave marks on shattered hearts and float towards our soul’s skin and pierce veil after veil to get to the truth. These are words that become warm at the reading…
I am humbled and honored that one of my pieces has been published on Sudden Denouement community. I feel free to borrow more of the purity and clarity of the world to write diverGently…
Art by K,Kanehira.
Trek = a trip or movement especially when involving difficulties or complex organization.
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” – Albert Camus
Art by Charles Courtney Curran.
Writing is a ladder out of Chaos.
My Tyrannosaurus writing has found me a path out of chaos. Chaos amidst which I found myself while trying to develop my business. Then I did not know that business world is sharks’ empire. I put it in writing in my Shark Tale.
Writing must be something of an Iron Tale, must be tough and sincere to the core of human perception of pain as valor. I remain the grumpy T-Rex who started writing out of pain, not necessarily because of a broken world. But now and then with words we glue shards and pieces and put them together with blood. As we sometimes taste blood, ours or others’.
“Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Be the one who cares, make words so disruptive that they create new worlds, hopes and dreams. Even if we are unhappy dinosaurs and find shelter in an Iron Tale or ruminate about feeling too much, whilst declaring colorless apparel, we should take power and strength from our stories. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”- Joan Didion
Writing is a ladder to the sky in your mouth when you are in love.
Pay toll to love in words. If I sing songs to the blooming trees, they remain in bloom. My words protect them from smothering summers and mellow autumns. The “herbivore” writing is sweet and protective. Still they are disruptive words that create ladders and unite…people and their stories.
“Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart, one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.” – Marvin J. Ashton
© Iulia Halatz
Art by Milla von Luttich.
She says: “Be the one who cares, make words so disruptive that they create new worlds, hopes and dreams. Even if we are unhappy dinosaurs and find shelter in an Iron Tale or ruminate about feeling too much, whilst declaring colorless apparel, we should take power and strength from our stories.”
Her published poems can be found in The Sudden Denouement Anthology Volume I.