Hope

Richard Hamilton - I'm dreaming of a Black Christmas

She sat in her bed looking up at the ceiling. She remembered her childhood bed, in her childhood room. It had stars on the ceiling. They glowed in the dark. She would imagine stars shooting across in the darkness. She thought of all the wishes she'd made; of which came true and which didn't.

Urban Ignorance and Rural Knowledge

Urban Vertigo - Eva Folks

There are realistically two ways of getting by in life; one is by earning enough to pay for everything, and the other is having the ability to make everything from scratch. If you do the math, it all boils down to the same thing: obtaining the basic necessities (at least) for our survival. Upon visiting a rural household, I realised how much we urban souls don’t know. We haven't as much to be proud of, as far as making ends meet from the bottom up, considering that all we can actually do is go to a supermarket and buy stuff off the shelf. At the house I visited, I noticed household items that I didn’t relate to, things I'd never touched, tools I wasn't even sure I could use if I had to. There was the mortar and pestle in place of a food processor, huge sacks full of unprocessed paddy and wheat which I later learned would be converted into rice and flour, and even cows and chickens to provide milk, curd, butter, cheese, and eggs. For dinner that day, we had fish from the nearby river, too. Talk about fresh food, for those who eat frozen meat all the time.

Love, I Beg to Differ

Michael Maier - The Final Cut (2007)

As we drove back from the lake, he turned and gazed at me in the car. The jeep followed a road that ran parallel to the sea, the water he loved so dearly, a vast pulsing blueness, different from the strip of azure seen from the mountains from where we’d come. I fought against my seat belt to cradle my head on his shoulder as his free arm stole around me. We laughed about the day, one more chapter of shenanigans in our ongoing courtship. We were old-fashioned, in this sense. We were young, but we savored our love.

To Reinvent the Wheel

"Why reinvent the wheel?" my father asked me as we sat down to breakfast. "Why not work smart? Not just hard. Smart."

"If you reinvent the wheel", I agreed, "you save time. You can just hop into the car, rev up the engine, and away you go".

"You’ll need to check if the brakes work, too", my mother cautioned from the kitchen as she threw away the emptied milk carton. "If it’s a strange car, you don’t know if everything works well".

"And even if they work, you’re not used to them". I swallowed a piece of sand-toned toast and with it my submissiveness. One man’s limits are another man’s beginnings.

"That is okay", he said. "That is risk. And that is why you must follow in my footsteps", he was saying. "I’ve created all I’ve created for you. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t be selfish. Don’t go chasing dreams".

"But chasing dreams—that is the risk, father. And that is the glory. And that is the creativity. That is the blood, the scrape and the bruise and the battering of body and soul as you fight your way to the top—alone—as you forge your way through the jungle—alone—as you count step by step through the desert—alone". I pushed aside my unfinished toast and cleared my throat, ready to attack.

I looked at him sipping his black coffee in the small white cup with the loumidis parrot hand-painted, savoring it with his eyes closed and his furrowed brow for once smooth. The highlights in his hair, pale as elephant ivory, slowly blinded me to tears. The creases chiseled around his eyes and mouth burned similar patterns in my heart as if a panther was sitting across from me, tail swishing and great black eyes unblinking, and raised a claw to mirror with marks on my heart the marks of his face.

It stung, but I didn’t know if and how the pain continued either way. His dreams, or mine? My father, or my future?

Long Distance Love

Long Distance Love Letter - Justin Perkins

Relationships are always difficult, especially the ones involving love from a distance, particularly a long distance marked by miles and miles of roads, telephone cords, and plane itineraries. I was not sure I could take it, not sure if I could survive it--but my partner was supportive, and we held on in hopes of a better future together. This vision, and the certainty of its potential is what kept us linked despite the distance. Maybe that’s what's genuinely the most important thing--finding and being with the right person; only this way will the relationship last through (or even deal with) "for better or for worse."

Running

Running by Will Bullas

This is dedicated to a friend on her birthday.

I have been running from life. Scared to face the truth, to accept it and move on. Well, it’s late, perhaps too late, but I have realised one thing, finally. You can’t forgive and forget both at the same time. One leads to the other, ideally. I choose now to forgive and remember, and make sure that I don’t waste any more of my years regretting past decisions.

Feng Shui Apples

Adrastia217 - Fruit Carving 01

Once upon an August sunset, he took her to the shores of the village dock, a stone’s throw from his late grandmother’s ancestral stone house. They sat together, hands and memories entwined, on the smooth gray pebbles of shore, pebbles that glittered like fragments of a half-forgotten dream.

The Mask

InertiaK - Mirror Mask

He told me, just the other day: "You have to assimilate into this culture. You have to learn. You must change. There’s no other way to survive". He stroked my hair as he said this, and his hazel eyes flickered with a warmth that could not be faked. I held still, like a swallow with her wings outstretched and waiting for her next heartbeat as the signal to take flight.

For Everything You Lose

Mariano Villalba - Slave Angel

You could, I suppose, move heaven and earth, if you wanted to. Hell as well, possibly. But everything comes at a price. As Faust sells his soul to the devil, as the Pevensei siblings who journey to Narnia miss centuries of Narnian life while living in “our” world, as any bargain or negotiation or prioritizing entails, you give up something to gain something else. From a positive perspective, for everything you lose, you gain something else; in a bleaker light, for everything you achieve you must sacrifice something different (time, love, money, a potential future).

Natural Love

Linnea Lenkus - Babies

In the past few weeks, I have been surrounded by babies. In the midst of this current festival season, I had relatives coming over from around the world--with their babies and I realised how easy it was to fall in love with them. Human beings I didn’t know, couldn’t judge, and couldn’t get angry at. Even after one of them nearly broke my glasses, the other swallowed my pen drive, and the third (just a month old) couldn’t stop crying.

There is No War

Riolctr, “Surreal World 2008”

In dreams, trees spring from patches of lawn which branch from trees emerging from the ether. In dreams, planets revolve around patchworks of galaxial dust, a crystallized web-work of miasma, debris, and . In dreams, you are with me, alive and health and safe. In dreams, we can touch even the purest nothingness of the universe—the dust, the moonlight, the miasma—and nothing can touch us. In dreams, there are two of us again.

Little things go a long way

from Dalton Ghetti's The Cemetery Collection

A little thing in life can go a long way… even something as insignificant as a loose coin, a simple bill, a mere humble pencil! All you need is a little bit of creativity to change how you perceive something. I mean look at that! The humble pencil used to make amazing art sits there as an art in and of itself just because of one man’s vision and thought to create it! What did the first pencil-sculptor envision? What ridicule could he have faced? You’re going to make a what? Out of what? What?

Lonely at the top

World of dreams by Nimit Malavia

Being at the top can be lonely. Being feared, being in control, being the one responsible—these are not always the most favourable of qualities. Most political, economic, and social leaders of the world, number-one hut artists, and even celebrities suffer from loneliness, that feeling of everyone knowing you, but you knowing no one. The feeling of you not having anyone to share your time or heart with.

Video: Just a stack of photos

Once upon a time I read, for the first time, about video shooting and editing. The first thing the book said was that a video is nothing but a series of still photos, or frames, as it called them. I felt cheated. I had thought that I was capturing motion. That I was capturing not a moment in time, but an incident. A video had to be more superior than a still photo. Then I learned about flip books and how cartoons were made back in the day: one page at a time. Strange, but it was disturbing. Every video I watched now was like a conspiracy, as if it was a secret to the common folk that videos are simply a series of photographs.

The Grass On The Other Side

Stop for a moment and consider the ironies of life. When we were children, we couldn’t wait to get older; now that we are older, of course, we wish we were kids again. It’s strange how the grass is always greener on the other side. Children grow up looking for someone who represents their role model, their ideal future self. They search for a reference point—something to aspire towards to attain their definition of perfection. What they should be encouraged to do instead is to be themselves and enjoy the time they have while growing at their own pace.

Nothing is forever

Reception at the Annual Ice Hotel. Photograph by Rolf Hicker

Does anything last forever? Few things, if any. Art is supposed to last forever, capturing an emotion, a moment, and keeping it always intact. But not exactly; ice sculptures can’t last forever, they are merely in place until they melt. Maybe that is what is so realistic about ice sculptures: the fact that they are not forever. Nothing in life is forever. Every moment is a passing phase; we can hold onto something only for a time before we have to let it go. Even living is not a permanent element in life. As Patricia Briggs had once said, “The only certainty life contains is death.”

From within the metal cage

My mother’s cage by Hong Chun Zhang

I thought I was free, until I realised I was free within my cage. Once I tried to walk out of it, then I felt the resistance, felt society’s talk about how a single woman is not safe alone in the world. I was safe in the cage, repeating the constant muttering of my owners. They taught me to fly, you see—but only as high as to the dome of my cage. I was well fed and taken care of, like a parrot behind bars. But is that how you define love, by keeping your “possessions” locked up in boxes, in safes? I have grown, the cage is too tight now. I need to get out before the bars cut through my body and kill me. My soul is bruised already. My heart has given up, strangled by the steel, but my mind still pushes me on, the only thing untouched by metal. I need to get out to survive. I realize that I would rather suffer and die a free bird rather than remain alive as a suffering soul stuck in this place…

The Urban Necessity

Urban Jungle II, Jose Babauta

Once upon an era, food, water, and shelter were all we needed. It was enough to survive—it was enough. Then we became donning clothes, and eventually the definition of “basic necessities” changed. I need a house. I need abed. I need a mattress, cooking gear, soap, shoes, and the list goes on and on till, oh, maybe say a decent internet connection. In the everyday struggle to make ends meet, we keep forgetting that luxury things have slowly become necessities, and the definition of luxury has changed too.

Being the lone tree

A lonely tree by Debolina Sengupta

Sometimes being alone in life can be a boon, instead of giving us reason to be depressed. Aloneness gives us the opportunity to think uninfluenced and helps us grow choosing our own path. And it is that time in life where you find out who your true friends are, emerging suddenly—perhaps not when you want them, but when you need them. A very childish acronym for a friend: First Relative In Every New Difficulty. It might be a way to sum up what a friend should be. Alone, when you think you have no one to turn to do you realise your true potential and strength to rise, to succeed, to reach the skies.

An Interview with God

"Priestess of Aeth" by Kathryn Kelton

God. Who is God? Who is this powerful entity who allegedly created the universe? Who is this creator whose creations launch wars and feuds in his name? And if He exists, what if He be a She, the creator, the woman who has the power to create life?