Please help. This is the biggest refugee crisis after world war two. Almost 20 million people have been forced to leave their homes and half of them are children. Mr. Gaiman's thoughts on this gut-wrenching issue:
If you live in UK, you can also donate by texting 'GIVE' to 61144 to donate 5 pounds to Save the Children charity, or by texting 'NEED2510' to 70070 to donate 10 pounds to United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees. Please help in any way you can. It's urgent and only human to do so.
This was part of an email I sent to my late friend on the
day she died. I didn't know she was so seriously ill. She never read it and
now she is not here anymore. Or maybe she is everywhere and everything, her atoms
travelling the entire universe. So it's time to share that email with the
world. We never talked again, but at least now I know what I have to do. I have
to make sure I don't give up, like she never did, although large parts of her
life were living hell.
"...I can’t for the life of me understand what I am
supposed to be doing here on this planet. I am 36 and still don’t have any idea
what my role should be, how to respond to any role, what it is that the world
needs me for, why I am here in the first place. I do know that if I go, this
world will be poorer, and I am not saying this due to any inflated sense of
self-importance. From that aspect, my creations are far more important than I
am. I brought them here from the dreamland, from the collective unconscious,
and I filtered them through my experiences and my unique point of view. No-one
else will manage to bring the same things here and express them like I do
because no-one else is me. I don’t know if I am a good writer or not, but I
love my ‘children’ like any parent should love theirs. Such a pity our parents
were such complete failures. Maybe if I had a different childhood I wouldn’t be
looking for meaning, because meaning would have been self-explanatory. A
psychologist once said to my friend A. that only children from dysfunctional
families look for meaning and a sense of belonging, because they never had this
offered to them. A happy child feels they belong here, they have no doubts or
fears or questions of that kind. I am not unhappy with my share, I do count my
blessings, and I can’t change the past. It doesn’t really matter now, and I
would miss the weird, quirky individual I’ve grown to be due to my fucked up
childhood. But the feeling of not belonging drives me batty and gets me so very
depressed. I guess we all have our demons and the better we get to know them,
the better company they keep us during those long sleepless nights.
When I feel very depressed, I always dig up my older
writing and read it again. Older heroes, some of them created when I was
fourteen or fifteen years old, most of the story plots not valid anymore,
because as I grew up I added elements and made it more and more complex and
less teenage fiction… Still they are mine, they are my first creations, written
in Greek on paper that by now has yellowed and creased and has been read
hundreds of times. Inevitably, trying to acquire a sense of belonging, I fall
back to my creations, I go back to familiar space, just like you would resort
to your music. They are my safe space, the place I built in this world for me
because this world didn’t have one reserved for me, or wasn’t willing to host
my being. I belong there, to my stories, not here, and maybe that’s the
problem. Children who grew up feeling unloved and unwanted open their hearts
and look for alternative worlds in which they are important, cherished and
protected. They grow up to be gifted individuals because to escape the outside,
from a very early age they turn inside. Most of them, through the inside, they
discover and open the door to the Other, they pierce the Veil and go to the
Other side. These children are always with one foot here and one foot there,
changelings that one side doesn’t want them and the other side can’t have them.
They also bring gifts here, gifts from the Other side in the form of art and
innate understanding. Outsiders, lost children, weirdoes, outcasts and social
failures, forever struggling to fit in and make sense of this world. I am so
tired of this world, tired of my legacy, tired trying to fit in. I read my old
stories like a child would run to the cupboard and embrace the dress of its
dead mother, trying to get a whiff of her scent, trying to feel her close,
trying to feel loved and safe. That scent is getting less and less each year,
until the child isn’t sure if they can indeed smell something or it’s a ghost,
a comforting memory cause they have nothing else to hold on to. I feel like
that child. I have no mother or father, no siblings, no-one. We’re all isolated
in our bodies and our minds and we live separate existences, and then our paths
cross with people we come to care about and then we’re alone again. We’re
always and forever alone and that loneliness sometimes kills me. It’s like the
cat you love so much and caress and keep close and sometimes that same animal
turns and claws at your face for no reason.
Don’t worry about me, I’ll keep going and keep trying. I
miss you, I miss you so much though we haven’t met. I need you to be here. Please
be here. Don’t go away and leave me, it would just make life even more
unbearable. I care about you so much and I don’t even know how that happened. I
really don’t, you sly, subtle Finnigami.
We’ll talk again soon, I’ll write you a normal letter.
I am sending you a chapter of my story. As I’ve said
before, I don’t write something for someone, but I do write things because of
someone or something. Can you guess who that piece refers to?"
It was the word I used to describe my current job situation to a friend. It reminds me of a person who fell overboard and no-one noticed. In my case, the entire country was pushed overboard. I've found myself in the middle of the ocean, swimming towards God/dess knows where. I keep swimming in the hope someone will discover and save me, as in 'hire me'. I can't reach the coast, so I'm trying to keep my head above water and my wits about me. I have no guarantee someone will indeed come to my rescue and the ocean is a very big place. I can't get out, I don't know for how long I'll manage to keep swimming and I can't give up, either. Months pass by, the unpaid bills get more, the money we have to borrow to make sure there is food on the table keeps getting more and we can't pay it back. It's fun! If your idea of fun is pinching pennies and counting days until the end of the month when my mother's pension comes in, it's great fun. I keep sending CVs, no-one bothers to answer and life goes on. I keep swimming in the hope something will appear. I have no other choice.
Recently a friend told me I need to change attitude and be more flexible and positive. Maybe they are right. Maybe I indeed need to be more positive. I try, but my mother's pension lasts for ten days, and afterwards we live on credit, charity, bottles I collect and borrowed money. So perhaps offering advice while their current situation is radically different than mine is a moot point. As for flexibility, I exercise two to three times a week in the hope of acquiring a super sexy tummy, but haven't seen any results yet. My neck is as stiff as always, things moan and groan in my body and my tummy remains rather rude. There are days I feel like an old ship that's three months pregnant; bloated at parts and creaky all over. :D
You know what the funny thing is? I don't need pity or sympathy. I am not sick. This isn't a goddamn funeral. I need a job, and
to retain a certain level-headedness despite my stress and the friction
with my mother. Find what makes me push on, chat about something inconsequential, eat some ice-cream. That's what I really need. I would also be quite happy if my mother stopped using my nerves as a trampoline. When I am alone in the house, I don't get stressed. I am so blissful I could be on drugs. I do what I can with what I have. When she is in the house with me, she relieves her stress by snapping at me and reciting long-winded monologues of doom and gloom. She adds her worry to my own. It doesn't help. I try to ignore her, keeping in mind she can't help it. This is how she is, and she's not going to change now, a breath away from her seventies. But I can't help it either, she gets me low, angry and stressed.
Then I came across this lovely video and it made me smile. Maybe it will make you smile too.
By the way, the first season of Daredevil was excellent! I am in love with Deborah Ann Woll. Have been in love with her since True Blood. That girl shines from the inside. She enters a room and everything changes by her luminescence, by the white of her skin and the way it glows, by her smile. She's indescribable. I kept spitting on my laptop screen to avoid accidentally giving her any negative vibes (what Greeks call the evil eye).
Aaaaand off we go to hit 50.000 views for this humble blog. :) Go me, and thank you. (If you enjoy my content, please consider supporting what I do. Thank you.)
"There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with
wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour,
gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like
an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its
point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually,
we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their
origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our
immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The
spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all
along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead
stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country
sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff.
Keep looking up."
Jerry Waxman
Small things make me happy because I can't have the big ones I dream about.
I can't leave this planet behind and travel to the stars, except maybe as stardust.
I can't understand everything, not without leaving this personality behind like a discarded piece of clothing. And this body, this personality has not had enough experiences to leave it behind. It's good to be human before giving ascended master status a go. It's good to scrape your knees before you learn to fly out of your body; to have mundane love break your heart before you draw conclusions about the Heart of Everything.
It's good to see the worst this world and you have to offer before you don yourself the title of messiah, avatar, empath, lightworker, earthly angel or whatever else.
Never before have I seen dust of our kind. We're dust, nothing but dust, yet the night sky speaks to my heart in the voice of the perfect lover I never had. When the moon is at its last quarter, it rises late, bathing everything in a weak yellow, almost negative light. The wind blows and shakes the branches, making me shiver with longings I can't put in words. It's four in the a.m., I am standing at the rooftop and can sense I'm not alone, but no human is awake at this hour. Four a.m. is not an hour for humans, except maybe for the sick, the mad, the broken and those too young to have responsibilities.
It is a humbling experience to find yourself alone and outdoors in the small hours of the night. It makes you realise how insignificant you are. I can feel it during those late nights with waning moon. Other beings and entities roam the night and sneer at me, and the same rooftop I've been to hundreds of times is an alien, scary place. The stars are hesitant to lend their light and the failing moon spells sickness and death. Crawling night serpents with scraping, poisonous scales, and other, blacker things the names of which I don't know fill the skies and the shadows. My heart is a bird frantically trying to escape from my chest, and my only ally is my resolve. I know that same moon shines its leprous brilliance over swamps, and ruins, and nightmarish, desolate places forsaken by the so-called champions of light. So I kneel, and call upon the darkest aspects of being. I call upon Hecate, Hel and Kali, and the Angel of death, and ask for their blessing. Those strange, horrible landscapes are as much a part of this reality as everything else. I can't understand this world or myself without them. I can't reach comprehension unless I embrace them too. Because as above so below, as within, so without. Everything is part of myself, not just sweetness and light. And the night obliges. The heart slows down and opens. The soul drinks and is sated.
Oh, what would I give to go back to whatever dead, dark star the atoms of my being originated from. To go back home. But I can't. And so I strive to find a job, and find someone who understands, and love my cats and my friends. And make this world a better place, not because I love the light, but also the dark. I love the dark with all my heart, because the Heart encompasses everything and everyone.
I serve the needs of the Heart, and through the Heart, all my needs are served.
PS: The soundtrack of one of my most favourite movies is as good as the movie itself. Enjoy.