When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”

 Rollo May

Song of Myself [sections 20]

20 

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; 
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? 

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? 

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, 
Else it were time lost listening to me. 

I do not snivel that snivel the world over, 
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. 

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity 
goes to the fourth-remov’d, 
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. 

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious? 

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with 
doctors and calculated close, 
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. 

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, 
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. 

I know I am solid and sound, 
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, 
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. 

I know I am deathless, 
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, 
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt 
stick at night. 

I know I am august, 
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, 
I see that the elementary laws never apologize, 
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, 
after all.) 

I exist as I am, that is enough, 
If no other in the world be aware I sit content, 
And if each and all be aware I sit content. 

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, 
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten 
million years, 
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. 

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, 
I laugh at what you call dissolution, 
And I know the amplitude of time.

Walt Whitman

Worn Out

What do you do when “I love you” wears out?
Do you panick and fill with self doubt?
Does it mean that it’s worthless,
That you don’t feel that way?
Just because you’re running out of ways to say-
That you love someone.
That you need them.
That you can’t imagine a life without them?
Does it mean that at all?
Or is it that the best things, are felt and not said.
That love touches the heart and not the head. 
That the love is just silent- not dead.
I love you, are just simple words- 
written on a page.
They can’t be felt and sometimes do sound strange.
But what matters is the love i feel around you,
that will never change.

By: Evilsprouts.co.uk

203

We don’t even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those of have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I’ll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world’s darkness.

the book of disquiet_fernando pessoa