Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Life

11 million electric bikes

The age of sweat is over. The age of skid marks is here. Deep trenches crisscrossing the country. Every which way, everyone’s rushing – each one of us thinking that we can squeeze more life into that cracked hourglass: 61 seconds to the minute (going on 62), can pedal faster than the rest and come…
Read more: 11 million electric bikes
As mourning follows night*

back home I sleep with my ears unplugged the windows flung wide open into the guzzling night I remain watchful here, in the places my people have – one by one –trickled into the fatty earth I dive into the holes they left – deep dark enticing pools of fresh darkness – I eavesdrop: the…
Read more: As mourning follows night*
(Be)longing

belonging is not something you do. it is something that is done to you as early as your mother’s womb before it cramps and convulses and rips out its own lining to reveal breath. belonging is not something you chose. it is something the not-you chooses to surround you with, so your voice, screaming, can…
Read more: (Be)longing
Have you?

Have you completed the sacraments of life? Have you bowed to the April sunrise? Have you worshipped the brightness and the honeyed light dripping on the fresh leaves? Have you helped a blind mole across the gravel road and kept it safe from the fury of bikers? Have you touched bark or beetle and gladly…
Read more: Have you?
Springtide

Heat. April heat. Deep, penetrating. This afterwinter sky – unfamiliar, molten, aglow – splurges on timid leaves, permeates clothes,and burrows into skin. Out by the river I am sitting on a log. The gulls have just taken off, shrieking, treading water, flapping their wings against the dormant, mirror-cold, reflected images of trees. Seconds later, suspended,…
Read more: Springtide
Quote of the day

“When we refuse to admit the interchangeable character of ideas, blood flows… Firm resolves draw the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter. No wavering mind, infected with Hamletism, was ever pernicious: the principle of evil lies in the will’s tension, in the incapacity for quietism, in the Promethean megalomania of a race that bursts with ideals,…
Read more: Quote of the day
Quote of the day

“A century ago, the physical environment was for most of humanity that of the natural world, with its rhythms and cycles, its organic, ever-growing and ever-changing interdependent life, a world to which it seemed intuitively obvious that we belong; now it has been replaced for many by an unyielding, inert, confrontational environment of non-living surfaces,…
Read more: Quote of the day
Times

Are you disillusioned because the world has gotten worse? Or has the world gotten worse because you’re disillusioned? Was it ever beautiful, spellbinding, full of magic, fresh, or were your eyes just kinder then? Were you under the spell of youth? Did you believe in fairies and princes and happy ends, and the pale pinkness…
Read more: Times
Roamers

I like the people here, by the river: wood-roamers, quiet-seekers, seekers of quiet truths that need no explanation, hunters of oxygen and light and the late-rising brume, dog-walkers, gatherers of solace, birdwatchers – seekers of the trilling heart, vagrant explorers, yielders to the humming fullness, finders of quiet joy contained in greens and blues. no…
Read more: Roamers
Haikus conjuring spring

Far in the distance, church bells announce midday. The sun glows like a halo on your shoulder. I squint into the blinding glare: the trees grow wings of light. Below, your steps and mine. Footprints on a mud path. Slowly unfurling, our shadows sway. Up in the barren branches, life throbs in little feathered bosoms.…
Read more: Haikus conjuring spring
Immersed

I’d like there to be only quiet between us. Let us swim in a sea of quiet, lurking below the surface like the basking sharks or with our heads bobbing above the waves like two forgotten buoys far from the freighters’ routes or, better yet, let us make somersaults like the dolphins. I’ll know what…
Read more: Immersed
Quote of the day

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. (…) There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning,…
Read more: Quote of the day