The eternal sunshine of a spotless mind

This afternoon it was my turn to accompany the students from Giessen and Lyon on their immersion programme. Over lunch, I chatted with the french students and was particularly impressed by one of the girls. At 16 years, she has already decided she will attend further studies in a school specializing in math and science and determined to become a doctor and the route she was going to take henceforth, to get her medical degree. She spoke with a clear passion that I felt carried away too by her enthused manner. I hope for this girl that unlike a lot of other teenagers whose dreams fizzle with time, that for this one, the dream will continue to shine bright.

this and that

i)
I remember this dream. How can I not when it comes to remind me again and again like a flashing scene from a projector that has finally given up its mundane job and would no longer be persuaded to continue.
Always the same place, the same window with the vertical steel bars that I look out from, to an immense and expansive field of wild grass that is blue and misty-green and suspended above it, the skies of the most magnificent and shocking electric blue. I always wake up and smile at this returning dream that has reached a status of becoming almost a friend and I never fail to wonder if its a remnant of another life long ago or a wondrous scene of a painting that perhaps I had seen once in my life that my subconscious mind kept carefully locked away and that it could never quite allow me to forget.

ii)
There was a huge flame of the forest tree in that field long ago. It must have been at least a hundred years old, its girth around 20 times the width of my small frame when I was no more than eight. Some days, as children, we forget to stand still and be awed by its size, our small palms brushing and grazing its roughened skin while we run around it, giggling wildly as we try to see who can outrun the rest, careful not to trip over the knee-high roots in the process. Round and round we run until its no longer clear who is in front of whom and our sides ache from laughing too much and too loud.

Bipolar

what do you get?
what do you get when you strip
off the thin veneer of gaiety
when the mask of normality cracks and the years
of existence is reduced to no more than a tumult
of confusion and the echoes of nothingness

Those nagging doubts

i wonder if its just me or other people are also constantly plagued by nagging doubts that just will not quit. Or regrets that refuse to fade away. People say time softens all hurt and heals all wounds but thats just the physical ones. I think time only makes certain kinds of hurt worse and you only feel it more keenly with each passing year.

So its been awhile

since my last post. No excuse except that life, or what it seems like anyway, has been much too busy for me to find time to sit down long enough in one place to think about what's acceptable of my thoughts, that needs penning down. Am gonna ease down to the process again by attempting to write a few sentences a day - all over again.

Running out for supper now.. will write later.