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Are thoughts the shadows of our feelings?
Ever wonder why things often seem so much more alive, when you travel to new places? Why the colours are more vibrant, the details so memorable? Is Auckland really more beautiful than Vancouver, or is it simply, well, different? Is it just something about being there, not here -being away, in other words? There seems…
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The I’s have it… don’t they?
Sometimes the Past is instructive; sometimes it is embarrassing. I mean, are we meant to learn from the past, or to learn when we’re actually in it, wallowing through its turbid eddies, lost in its sudden shadows? You’d think I would have figured it out by now, wandering as I am through my own autumn…
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Every offence is not a hate at first
What do you do with a gift from someone you once respected, a gift that seemed freely given at the time, but which turned out to be a mere façade? What do you do with a love turned sour? A love turned selfish? All love is selfish, you say, but it is your experience speaking…
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What really happened?
Tell me, what are you supposed to do when there’s more than one version of the same event: when you have multiple choices? Tell me what you are supposed to think when there are a variety of remembered histories, each claiming its own validity, its own proof. If it was a tale of conquest, a…
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Will this look of thine hurl my soul from heaven?
‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, wrote Yeats in his magnificent poem The Second Coming. That’s how I feel sometimes, when I think about the things I was taught and came to accept. Came to expect, because what we see is so often laden with expectations. We accept what our culture paints, so we are…
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I hold the world but as the world
I suppose very few things resist change; we filter most things through the eyes of our culture after all. But I, an admitted closet-pareidoliac[i], am still amazed at the variety of pattern-reading throughout the ages. What is it that changes the look of a painting, say -its feeling? How is it that the same person…