Poetry
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
IF- Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.
You are not depressed. You are distracted
(by Facundo Cabral)
You are not depressed, you are distracted, and distracted from the life that inhabits you. Distracted from the life around you: dolphins, forests, seas, mountains, rivers…
Do not end up as your sibling did, suffering because of a human being when there are more than 5600 million human beings in the world.
Moreover it is not so bad to live alone. I do very well, deciding every moment what I want to do, and thanks to the solitude I know myself, something fundamental to live.
Do not end up as your father did, feeling old because he was 70 years old, forgetting that Moses led the exodus when he was 80 and Rubinstein interpreted Chopin like nobody else when he was 90. I mean just to allude to two very well known cases.
You are not depressed; you are distracted. You believe that you have lost something, which is impossible, because everything that you have was given to you. You did not make a single hair of your head so you can not own anything. In addition, life does not subtract things, it liberates you from them. It makes you lighter so that you can fly higher and reach the fullness. From cradle to grave, it is a school, and that is why those predicaments that you call problems are lessons, indeed.
You lost nobody; the one who died is just going ahead, because we all are going there. Besides this, the best of him/her, his/her love, is still in your heart. Who could say that Jesus is dead? There is not death, but only movement. And on the other side there are some wonderful people waiting for you: Gandhi, Michelangelo Whitman, St. Augustine, Mother Teresa, your grandmother and my mother, who believed that poverty is actually closer to what we call Love, because money distracts us with too many things, and makes us apprehensive and doubtful.
Do only what you love and you will be happy; the one who can do what he/she loves, is blessed and destined to have success, which will definitively come, because what must come, will come, but will come naturally. Do not do anything for obligation or commitment, but for love. Only then there will be fullness in your life, and with fullness everything is possible; and possible without any effort because what will move you will be the natural force of life, the same that raised me when the plane crashed with my wife and my daughter, the same which kept me alive when my doctors predicted that I would have only 3 or 4 more months of life.
God has put a human being under your care, and that is yourself; so please set yourself free and make yourself happy, and then you will be able to share the true life with others.
Remember Jesus: “You shall love one’s neighbor as thyself.” Reconcile you to yourself, stand in front of the mirror and think that the creature that you are seeing is a masterpiece of God and decide right now to be happy because happiness is an achievement.
Besides, happiness is not a right but a duty, because if you are not happy, you are making miserable the lives of all those who love you. Just remember, one man who had no talent or courage to live ordered the execution of six million Jewish siblings.
There are so many things to enjoy ourselves here on earth and our life is so short that suffering is a loss of time. We have, for example, snow in winter to enjoy with; flowers in spring, chocolate made by the Perugia, French baguette, Mexican tacos, Chilean wine, seas and rivers, Brazilian soccer, The Thousand and One Nights, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Pedro Paramo, boleros composed by Manzanero and poems written by Whitman, Mahler, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Picasso and Tamayo, among many other wonders.
And if you have got cancer or AIDS, two things can happen and both are good. If it wins, it releases your body from so many things that can be so annoying sometimes: I am hungry, I am cold, it is my dream, I feel like I am right, I have doubts … and if you win, you will be more humble, more grateful, therefore, much more easily happy.
Liberate yourself from the tremendous burden of guilt, responsibility, and vanity, and be ready to live each moment deeply, as it should be.
You are not depressed, you just need to be busy. Help the child who needs you, and that child will be your child’s partner. Help old people, and young people will help you when you be old. In addition, service to others is an absolutely guaranteed happiness, as certain as enjoying and taking care of nature for those who will come tomorrow. Give without measure and you will receive without measure.
Love till you become the beloved, and even more! Love till you become the love itself!
And never let some few homicidal and suicidal people distract you neither confuse you; the good is majority, but you do not realize it because it is quiet; a bomb makes much more noise than a caress, but for every bomb that destroys houses, there are millions of caresses that nourishes life.
*****************
Every single time I feel bad I read this from one of my favorite poets/singers.. doing the right thing is hard sometimes and finishing something and starting from scratch is complicated.. but today I will move and break something that will not let me bloom completely into what life has to offer…
Wish me luck.
Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do your thing
I am not in this world to
live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to
live up to mine.
You are you
and I am I
and if by chance we find each other,
it’s beautiful.
Frederick Perls
(psss just to add a lil note :
The “Gestalt prayer” is a 56-word statement by psychotherapist Fritz Perls that is taken as a classic expression of Gestalt therapy as way of life model of which Dr. Perls was a founder.
The key idea of the statement is the focus on living in response to one’s own needs, without projecting onto or taking introjects from others. It also expresses the idea that it is by fulfilling their own needs that people can help others do the same and create space for genuine contact; that is, when they “find each other, it’s beautiful”.
At Gestalt Therapy’s core is the promotion of awareness, the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviors, and the contact between the self and its environment.
This was especially true in the 1960s, when the version of individualism it expresses received great attention.)
Bluebird (Charles Bukowski)
There’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you. there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
I am because someone dreams me…
…. a man who sleeps and dreams and sees me acting, living and moving – and who is dreaming at this moment as I am speaking to you. When he dreams, I awake to life; when he awakes, my existence vanishes. I am a whim of his inspiration, a creation of his mind, a visitor in his nightly fantasies.
Natalia Araya - Atelier 
