I met her in Paris where she worked as a maid. She was a peasant from around Burgos (northern Spain). Her mother died early and her father and stepmother treated her inhumanly. When she was five years old they sent her to a convent. There she wasn’t handled with silk gloves either; Spain was simply a hard country where the strongest survived. Five year old Carol scrubbed the convent’s floors and washed clothes from morning to night. She stood on a chair raised up on blocks … Read More
Wlodek was born before the war in a Polish prison. Mother– a Jewess — was an active communist and named her son for Lenin. Father — probably also a Jew — fell in some military action before or during the war. The Russians, when they entered Poland, deported her and the child to Central Asia and there she stopped being a communist. By profession she was a nurse and when she protested that Uzbeks and Kazakhs were injected one after another with one unsterilized needle, … Read More
No accolades, prizes
Shiney things, false mirrors/illusions
I don’t deserve more since
I have everything
Before me roads to unknown
For companions
…..emotions – come together/like a traffic jam
Sky of lead
By WM –on a scrap of paper, unfinished?
Purity, Security — the DDT Mentality
In the name of security, the strong one conquers the weaker with total impunity because who could determine his reasons and check his agenda. He has on his side the silent majority of gullible or cynical citizens. He always has the last word; when all is quiet, he’ll take credit for his “policy of vigilance.” If there’s trouble, he’ll say: “I told you they’re dangerous!” His victims are the masses on both sides, the defeated as well as the winners, because the dominant nation … Read More
The external world affects our brain which, in its turn, affects our body. But both – brain and body – have their center in the middle of the chest: solar plexus, there, where we discover ourself facing ourself. Solar plexus is our Kundalini, the center of our fight or peace facing life. It’s there where we discover our potential. Kundalini also teaches us that nothing is important under the sun because things that are really important, those of life and death, happen at the level of the exterior world, not … Read More
Esteban is a Spaniard of Catalan mother and Andalusian father. He grew up in a small Catalan city. He came from Barcelona to Paris with dreams of journalistic glory as an envoy of a literary magazine. He had the great sensitivity of a writer but for success he lacked two basic qualities: education and money. In Barcelona, the magazine published his rubric a la Dear Abby which he surely handled well because he knew how to dig into life situations and his religious morality concorded with that … Read More
Unfortunately I can’t give his family name even if, as readers will find out, it has an important place in history. Janek was born either in Westphalia like his parents or in France. He had some German blood, I am not sure from which side. In Polish he spoke correctly; in French, like a Frenchman. During the war, when he was 8 or 9 years old, his father sent him to the Hitlerjugend. Janek told me how the whippersnappers of his age sliced each other … Read More
Last month we learned about a sheep that escaped shearing for six years, hiding alone in caves in the New Zealand wilderness. To live solitary is already against the sheep’s basic instinct and the absence of the predators made its survival possible. But nobody, as far as I know, has posed the question: what made the sheep escape shearing, its flock and humans? I feel I may have answer:
Many years ago, I won’t say where, I witnessed a sheep shearing. Decent looking young men in their twenties behaved as … Read More
‘Vagabond’: My garden in cyberspace. Visitors are like wind in the solitude. Something will remain with the note: ‘author unknown.’
Extracts of Existence
I strolled along a busy urban avenue, I don’t remember in which city. There was a lot of traffic, noise and pollution. In one spot a wooden fence covered the view to passersby. When you approached the fence and looked over, another universe appeared, as if Mother Nature had been there since the beginning. There were grass, flowers, bushes, trees, fragrances, insects … something totally opposite the world on the other side of the fence. How do opposites affect us? Could we become opposite each time we drop into the … Read More
