Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Culture

Inarticulate

So little left to express. Spleen? Acedia? The signifiers have lost their signifieds and are straying. Ideas, heavy as rock, sink to the bottom of rivers waiting to be swept away by a sudden flood of effervescence or settle, with the mud, along the banks of dam lakes and rot. Occasionally, some debris resurfaces –…
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Quote of the day

“Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (…) It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.” Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)
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Words of wisdom, cautionary words

On creativity: “If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished. (…) So, if the next generation is to face the future with zest and self-confidence, we must educate them to be original…
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On migration and diasporas

“To live “in diaspora” is to reside in one place but to keep in motion an emotional, cultural, or political relationship with another, whether it is the site of one’s nativity that subsequently became a point of departure or an ancestral “homeland” virtually conjured but never visited. (…) Diasporas (…) are platforms where received notions…
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Quote of the day

“To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal. (…) Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous (…). It means, rather, examining and bearing…
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Leave your shadows behind

that hour. on the long path to spring, when darkness clears and the trees drop their skeletal shadows in the snow like a bad memory, like baggage one no longer needs to carry. when the frost glistens with a gazillion different suns in a myriad different eyes and the crows’ croaking falls silent silent… that…
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September reading

here I am, sitting on a bench next to autumn absorbing the last of the scorching sun and watching the ants move like clockwork in a playground we call our own. here they are, mapping the maze with staccato precision. I am reading a poem, like every other year. later, I’ll get up to go…
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Spirituality, modernity and Brownian motion

Just a thought… So many of us feel depleted, drained, stressed out. Our beings flogged from within, our lives – our biggest gift – turned into empty chases. Pursuing a zillion things that we can grab and touch and display, but which aren’t real. We live in societies that prioritize task efficiency, competition, action, and the accumulation of stuff over…
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Discoveries

Venus – that ancient goddess of carnal desire – has a poisonous atmosphere that might, just might, hold the life of a microbe. Immediately, the microbes here on Earth began to show signs of restlessness. fighting each other for supremacy and claiming poison as their territory. Copyright A. Sepi 2020. All rights reserved
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To Belong

when she first discovered water she did not go in. she stood hypnotized. it was too wonderful. she was, like the lot of us, gripped by a fear of drowning, arrested by the vastness and the gleaming. to discover beauty is to discover the heaviness of self and the terror of irreversible sinking. but look…
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Hold them in your hands

Dear friends, My poems have now become a thing. A something you can buy and hold in your hands. You can turn them into paper airplanes and give my words wings, you can write comfort food recipes on their back, or you can put them on your bookshelf for the benefit of generations to come…
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Behold the searing wind*

It is upon us. Its blistering tongues lurk behind the levee, They pounce like savage beasts Mercilessly they wheeze Blowing the tumbleweeds against my doorstep. A goodbye kiss, crackling dry. Deserted yards, howling. The yellow earth swelling and swirling, It is in my eyes, my nostrils, my teeth. Every time I spit, I…
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