le non-dit

There is a lot to be said for le non-dit...things that are left unsaid.

It is because these words can be left unsaid that makes them much more nicer to hear when they are said à haute voix.

There is a lot to be said for le non-dit.

Judgement Day

During the past week or so, two of my girlfriends asked me to "not judge them" while telling me of a decision they had just taken.

Friend #1 has decided to have some minor plastic surgery done. An Aside: Why do we call it plastic surgery, her surgery involved zero plastic (and zero saline or silicone for that matter -- for those of you who automatically thought she had a boob job). En tout cas, this friend of mine has gone through a lot of self-improvement (I hate this word) over the past couple of years, after ending a marriage that wasn't all that bad, but more importantly, wasn't all that great. She has grown and matured a lot, and I am very proud of her.

Friend #2 has decided to have a little bit of fun, while on vacation somewhere hot where the men speak spanish. Sounds like a good place to have fun, if you were to ask me. This friend of mine has also gone through a lot of self-improvement (did I mention that I hate this word?) over the past couple of years, after letting go of a would-be marriage that wasn't going to be all that bad, but more importantly wasn't going to be all that great. She has grown and matured a lot, and I am very proud of her.

Both of these women decided to tell only a few select friends of their recent decisions, in fear of being judged. This is the reason for writing this post.

Why do we sometimes judge our friends and make them feel bad for decisions they have taken? Why do we feel that we need to give our two cents, when our friends are actually rich enough? So what if we wouldn't make the same decisions? Nobody asked us to. We are all different people, at different places in our lives. We all have our scars, many of which we hide from each other, and we all have different needs and vices. We need to respect that.

So, here is my interpretation of why these two friends have taken their respective decisions:

• Friend #1: She changed something about her outside-self as a symbol of all of the positive changes she has made to her inside-self. Now, she can physically see an improvement, to validate all that she could only feel. We have five senses, why not use them all?
• Friend #2: She is a serial monogamer at heart, she wants the husband and 2.5 kids -- and she will be great at it. She has had some hopes of that life fade even though she tried very hard to maintain total control and play by the rules. What she was doing was not working, so maybe she needed to let go and play by no rules in order to gain some control. She is alive and young, so why not live a little?
  

I think that we should always try to 'be there' for our friends when they want us to 'be there', and sometimes 'being there' means just listening and smiling...

...and reminding them "no glove, no love"...safety first! :-)

Une Parisienne

I have a friend who is going to live in Paris for a few months. She is going there to be inspired and write like many famous writers have done in this great City of Light.

She wants to discover all that Paris has to offer, and hopefully discover a lot of herself in doing so. I am envious and proud of her at the same time.

She is a mother of two and a wife to boot. Above it all though, she is a young and dynamic woman. Paris is for her.

I can't wait to meet her when she gets back.

I wish her safe travels and beaucoup du courage et de l'inspiration.

Found Words

I came across some of my old journals, and in them I found poems that I had written almost a decade ago...These are two of them:

Untitled #1
I remember those cherished nights
When you roamed my body
As if claiming what was always yours.
When your eyes preyed upon me
Drowning me in your Pacific blue.

I cannot forget those cherished nights.
You prowl through my darkest dreams.
The smell of your skin invades me still.
You take from me, what I cannot give,
Intoxicating me, rapturing me.

I remember those cherished nights,
As I am drenched with distance
And stripped of time.
Remember those nights, remember me then
In silence I love, in silence I'm lost.


Untitled #2
One day I closed my eyes
And reached out my hand
To find you there, waiting for me.

Today I opened my eyes
And closed my heart
So that my tears would blind me,

As I watched you walk away.


And this, is one of my favorite poems by Czeslaw Milosz:

INCANTATION
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1968

Danser - to dance

A special friend of mine recently loaned me a book of short stories written by a famous literary giant. One of these stories touched me in a way that I was maybe not ready for. The ideas, fears and emotions expressed in this story paralleled a little too much of my recent past. At the end of reading this story my initial reaction was regret for having read it, and yet I was strangely compelled to read it again. At the end of reading this story for the second time my reaction was regret for not having read it earlier. Progress.

Sometimes I tend to avoid things, en disant that "it isn't the right time". The more I grow and experience, the more I realize that the world in which I choose to live does not have to march to my beat, but instead, I need to find my own rhythm between the beats around me.

I have not always had the best rhythm, but as time goes on, I become more willing to dance anyways. Progress.