Some people mistake their personal frustration for courage. They often attack their brethren for reasons of pain, and gloat in illusions of grandeur in their solitude. This is not courage.

Courage is to create something. Courage is to express something fruitfully. Courage is to have an idea and actualize it, with one’s own effort, and then to move on.

It’s not courage to destroy. It’s not courage to blacken and criticize others’ deeds . True, every person commands that freedom, but such words are worthless without a deed and a face behind to support them. To a meritless person everything seems free of merit. Everyone sees his or her denied face in the Other.

Courage does not seek an enemy. It does not seek recognition and an audience. It seeks accomplishment. The essential solitude of the being is the source and the measure of courage.

It’s not courage to put one’s life at risk. This is a decision. It’s not courage to throw one’s self into the unknown. This is curiosity, or love for questions. It’s not courage to stay and persist. This too is a decision, one of perseverance. It’s not courage to say ‘goodbye’. This is inevitability.

Courage is to stand behind one’s words and deeds before the others. Courage is to suffer the fellowman’s opinions of one’s self, invited and uninvited, pleasant and unpleasant, and to differentiate between the clear and true thoughts and the ill meant, calculated, and blinded ones, and also from thoughts that stem from friendship.

Courage is to change one’s self and in the new shape to say again, “This is me, this difference and novelty,” and express that change through humble actions.

However, the greatest courage is to stand before the mirror and deeply look into one’s self, one’s road, one’s heart and conscience, deeds and relationships, and into one’s end - as if from an infinite distance. 

This gaze hurts and appeases. It’s a good beginning. It changes the past and this change opens up a future. This internal gaze is the start of an unprecedented day, unprecedented distance and space, and unprecedented changes, words and deeds. This internal gaze is courage.

For days I’ve been waking up to the sound of car wheels splashing through pools of water in the streets. Clouds lie heavy on the mountain, touching the rooftops in nearly solid whirlpools of grey and white. It’s been raining for days.

The clouds, bewildered, wonder where is their heaven, promised and vaguely remembered, as they rain on us, they rain on us… Their tears are their deliverance, their final gesture of veritable sadness; once they cry their hearts out, the sun is said will burst forth. But there is no end to the floods.

They rain on our thoughtful destinies, on our paths so humble and coordinated; on us that come from the earth, made of muddled tears, we who drop leaf after leaf back into the earth, our steps slow and timid amidst the crying sky come down among us. It’s raining, under the leaden cover which spells out our doubts in ourselves and in all the promises we’ve made or we’ve been given, amidst the stubborn determination to believe that there must be a sun somewhere, there must be light.

If only for a moment we’d stop and cry together with the clouds, our remorseful shapes would melt away and a million of little suns would burst forth.

But we keep on pacing, decided to ignore the incessant rain pressing behind a dam within. We secretly hope that somehow some time a windy heavenly hand will come and relieve us, free us from all the mistakes we’ve ever done, weaknesses and wrongs and confused loves entangled in a dam, a life that somehow went wrong in a time forgotten, despite our clear visions and honest desires.

We hope that one day we’ll understand, once that this rain ceases. But autumn has come to stay within, and without tears and sun, a slow winter is the only lot.

Has anyone ever told us that everything is alright, everything is really alright?

It’s warm.

Ever since I woke up, I know only that I’m falling. I feel heavy. This wind carries me in turns and circles downward, always downward. I am falling. We are all falling. Since ever and ever, we have been falling.

This body is invisible amidst the blazing white. Everything but us is heat and grayness. My home is up there, but with every palpitation I know I am moving further away. My body has been made in one of the games of perfect concordance. I do not know who made me. My siblings are as perfect, each differently. That’s how it should be. We are warm, and we are falling. All caught by the same wind, humid and hot, which burns us and carries us into the grey.

It’s a bit sad, like this. I know nothing. Only that I’m falling, each moment I see everything around, the world turns around me, and my home is far up there, my silken and murmuring nest. I wasn’t a snowflake up there. I was something else, I just can’t remember what. I wasn’t only me.

Now I’m falling. And I’m watching. Currents of white, with painful beauty, curl into forests and streams into another, curved concordance in unimpeded space.

And I know, as if in a crystal dream, I see my end. A human child down there is standing by the window, the glass similar to my outstretched hand. Darkness is approaching and it’s warm, it’s hot, it’s burning me. It will set me to flames at the first touch. The space of our dance is growing warmer. Darkness is stirring. It’s burning my soul. It’s devouring my shine.

And the child will reach out toward my cased flight as if it wants to keep me. I’ll look into its eyes, it’s all sad and tearful, but I don’t feel like crying. My flight ends here. I’ll alter into something else, perhaps into something similar to the tear upon the child’s eyelashes. I cannot help it, and neither I want to. I cannot help the child’s eyes. I’ve seen so much, but one can only be the shine, not express it. I was the harmony of the shine. I fell and ended. That is well.