Sometimes you don't know what's real...


I was 22. I was playing bad guitar in front of my tent.
It was very hot. It was nap time on the campsite.

All I was interested in at that time was to learn how to play the guitar but I was quite bad at it. I did not realise that my approach to music was entirely wrong. I wasn't playing music. I was just desperately fighting for self worth. 


I didn't know how to learn. I wouldn't have trusted a teacher. I wouldn't have trusted anybody for anything.

I was doing my little things when I heard a loud male voice. "Stop it!"

I instantly put the guitar down and looked around. Nobody was there. No angry beard nothing...

I was not sure I had really heard. It must have been in my head. Then a little boy came up to me. He was about 3 years old. He laughed and told me: "I told you to stop!"

I looked at him, I found nothing to say, and he went....


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The fish on the sink

Image
Dear unknown friend, Where were you? I was a little boy, maybe 8 years old. I had a great admiration for my uncle Raymond. He always arrived late for Sunday lunches when the family was gathering at my grandparents. Instead of wearing dull and stiff Sunday clothing, he turned up in sportswear, sweating and went for a shower. From the point of view of a little boy who would be sternly told off for being two minutes late this meant great freedom. Raymond was a fisherman. I was fascinated looking at the big fish he brought and left to die a slow and distressing death on the kitchen sink. They were barbels and so full of bones that my grandmother never prepared them. It takes hours for a fish to die. Paying close attention I could feel the exhaustion that squashed them and kept them quiet whilst the agony of being out of the water slowly built up enough strength for just another hopeless spasm… Flap! Flap flap! …. And they were quiet again, though I knew they weren’t dead and I somehow
Read more

Antivenom for the soul ()

Image
Dear  friend, Do you how antivenom is made? Venom is collected from snakes; horses are injected with it. The horses fight the venom. Then the human draw blood from the horses, the antivenom is in it. This is literally true, and this is also a metaphor. Dear friend, maybe you are a "horse" as well... It's our job to be poisoned and fight within our own souls. Whether we know it or not, we are useful. The suffering is more bearable when it makes sense though. We are making antivenom for ourselves and others... A famous verse of the Emerald Table goes like this: "That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing" A way to understand what it means is to see anything that exists in the material world as a reflection of something that exists in the invisible planes, that is the psychological and spiritual planes... If some beings, in our case horses, do make antiveno
Read more

In the psychiatric ward

Image
  When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just ill! I am still thinking of the people I met there… Let me introduce them to you.    Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger.   One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance called “the tree” Sh
Read more