Ahh.

Lovely.

A song

Your body is a landscape

It's a landscape and a wonderland. The steps you've taken saved in your cells and the smells of damp, crisp flavoured air embedded in your lungs, continuing your travels with you. You're a physical testament to the places you've been and the things you've touched. The lines on your forehead are a map of your detours with your scars as fireworks on your arrival.

Are you a desert or a foreign land? A mountain or a hill? An ocean or a waterfall? Is your skin full of butterflies or tigers? Or are you simply the surface of the moon?

I'm the asphalt floating by two story houses with driveways lined with hedges and a cold blue sky and leaves in change, a distant sound of traffic and a scent of autumn rain drying in the wind.

Burn this fire

If the forest was to catch on fire while the men were fighting for their land, would they lay down their weapons to put it out or would they put their heart into the slaughter hoping there'd be enough time for the victor to escape?

There are things in life worth fighting for and possessions is not one of them. If you look up the Swedish word vämjelse it translates to disgust, but if you look up avsky it gives you so many more options to choose from. Should this moment be spent to find the perfect word to express vämjelse? Loathing? Abhorrance? Disrelish? I'll never feel the English expressions gut stabbing effect in the same manner I do the words of my mother tounge. Perhaps I've forgiven words too easily because I simply don't fully understand the abomination they represent.

Words are powerful things, but some of them hold more fear than others, some of them are things we commonly as humans have learned to unite to avoid. Fire. Run. Small words containing so much of our history. Our survival have depended on our understanding of those, but now, at times, it's heroic to run straight into the fire, right into the pit of disaster. What happened to those other small words? Love. Lust.

It's possible to combine them yes, four words holding most possible outcomes for human interaction. Add a couple of "to" and "from". Try. Run to love. Love from lust. Lust from fire. Fire from lust. Run from love. How many times do we not find ourselves as part of it and we trust our instincts to make an appropriate decision. It's hard to believe that run from love to fire is in our best intrest.

So, why can't we stop saying those disgusting things and lay down our differences and let the world be a peaceful one? Yes it's another plea on my part, my tiny attempt to show that I will not respect you if you can't stop setting the world on fire not with your words, but your lack of understanding for the mess you make. So please, just stop.

In lyrics

I was really startled before, I thought something was going on outside, but it was just a bluetit enticing the cats. Humans are equally easy to distract, willing to accept just about anything they're told. Natural followers due to the love of the path of the least resistance.

We all rebel on occation, but surely, isn't it really against ourselves? But it can't help but make me wonder who the leaders are if people are generally followers. I have a tendency to be a bit bossy at times (yes, take a break so you can finish laughing before you go on) but it's a process, just like everything else. When two leaders are put together they must do a few rounds to see who's the bossiest. You can have an endless amount of followers while there's only room for so many leaders. I've done this on occation, and I quite enjoy the challenge. We're animals in that sense, pack animals, some claim it's civilization. Maybe it is, I don't really care as long as I get my way.

I didn't really see myself as a leader, I still don't, in all reality, but people do tend to listen to my suggestions and go with what I say. (Yes, darlings, I am seeking help for my addiction to commas!) Maybe it just means I have good ideas and I'm not afraid to stand up for what I believe in.

Today I believe in the weakness of mankind and it's inability to solve even the simplest of tasks, even if they're necessary for societies' wellbeing. Trust me, it's in all the lyrics of all the songs. Just listen.

"Love will turn you around"
"What's with that sod face, has your heart been beating at too a slow a pace?"
"And you're still out there, darling, clinging to the wrong ideas"
"Would you lay with me and just forget the world?"
"I know it's gonna hurt your pride though, to have to put away your knife so, I come back here tomorrow night, alone, and you can take anything, you can take anything that you want"
"I change shapes just to hide in this place, but I'm still an animal"

Surely you don't need X university credits to read what lines like that really say. Surrender, let someone else do it for you, nothing but you concerns you in this world.

Critical thinking

In a way there's nothing that is "knowledge". Just use the easy thing of what you know about yourself and what others know about you. The rest of "knowledge" is similar. What universities teach you isn't necessarily knowledge, it's tools for you to gather your own knowlege and tools on how to deal with it. Repeating something a teacher has told you isn't a proof of you having learned anything at all, it's just a sign that you have accepted a certain amounts of facts. Whether or not those facts will lead to knowledge is up to you. Sound familiar? Places, dates, names, wars, events, revolutions, political parties, words, words, words. It's all good to have in your memory when you watch Jeopardy, but what does it lead to?

It'd be silly to think that one person can know everything and please everone's desire for the hunt of understanding the web that we would actually call, if not knowledge itself, but close to it. It's easier for a teacher to put out a test and expect his or her own phrases to be repeated, it'd be a bigger task to actually value the other thoughts brought up. Is this why in the academic world repeating well selected words is at a higher value than new ideas? Ideas and the urge to move forward is, ironically, what that world is built upon. Curiosity and creativity are two pillars that shouldn't become hollow and later on collapse.

Just like a poem can mean more than the poet intended the things taught aren't but seeds to be planted in the garden of the mind. We must water those seeds and let them grow into something splendid, and in doing so we can't answer questions in well prepared phrases, we must be humble to the fact that we don't know everything and instead develop a way of thinking that lets more ideas become the fertilizer for our mind garden so we can blossom and later on pick a flower and pass it on to someone else.

I'm not arguing that it's impossible to know things, but everything depends on the angle and what those facts are going to be used for. History is my favorite child for this "Many think that history has been written once and for all - that we already know everything we need to know to understand our past and and future. That is wrong. The picture must constantly be questioned and reevaluated." I think it was Dick Harrison that said it, and it's my translation from Swedish.

Language is another aspect of this. Nothing can be expressed exactly the same in two languages. Simple words like "yes" and "no", surely. But just think how many different things the phrase "Over there" can mean, so, what you're looking for is "over there", you just need to find it depending on your current position.

A moderate selection.

Sometimes I feel as if the whole world concerns me, sometimes I feel like nothing in the world concerns me at all and at other times I feel as the whole world should be concerned about me.