This is about collected things. Words, poetry, thoughts, music and images that I have stumbled upon, uncovered, marveled at and given place of pride. This is about cherished things, discovered and collected over time. It is about ideas, the kind of ideas that form organically after quiet observation, voyage and contemplation and slowly fit together like drifting continents revealing themselves to be a more honest version of the struggle of life. Because that's what it is, an exertion against the laws of nature from chaos to order and hopefully the highest level of existence: true freedom. So this blog is about collected things in my journey to freedom.
So where do we begin? We begin with a lesson on resilience; we begin with dandelions...
Dandelion Thinking
Dandelions
don't care
that nobody cares
to cultivate dandelions.
Dandelions
don't know
that everyone knows
they grow everywhere.
Underfoot. In cracks.
Extravagantly.
© Monica Cromhout
I love this poem by the Zimbabwean-born Monica Cromhout because the vast majority of us have not had ideal conditions to nurture our development. Our leaders fail us, loved ones leave us, hunger, illness and natural disasters plague us, we blunder and fall. It's a life of hard knocks. But look at us still, dreaming, growing, learning, discovering and loving "extravagantly." Dandelions are those among us who are described by Paul in a letter to believers in Corinth a couple of thousand years ago as "regarded as unknown...beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich". Dandelions have nothing, yet they possess everything.
Dandelion thinking is the beginning of freedom.
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| Freedom Square, Kliptown, South Africa. 3 000 resistors converged here in 1955 to draw up the Freedom Charter. |
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| Two dandelions. |
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| Will she make it through the cracks? |
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