15.08.2024 - Procrastination Seneca wrote “The fool,[...]is always getting ready to live.” Sometimes we permit ourselves to be in a rut. A position that is exhausting and drains our energy bit by bit, but requires very little of us day to day.
Growing, at times we have separated from people in our lives that may be well meaning, but overbearing, or those who wish to put us down for their own selfish reasons. People that criticised our every shortcoming, perhaps delighting in our failure. The same force, that helped to shield from them helps the procrastinating mind dismiss the uncomfortable truths behind their opinions.
A friend is one that will be at your side, and be with you in your petrification. A good friend will also remind you, that you should move on and will not let you rationalise yourself into inaction.
25.08.2024 - Small Hero A participatory study published in the Journal of positive Psychology by Tribot et al. (2023) on 'What makes a teddy bear comforting' has found, that above all else, being cute and cuddly, feeling nice to the touch and smelling good, it was the personal emotional bond that made a stuffed bear a comfort. Ownership and emotional attachment, or rather – as I like to think of it - the bear's true character. The story we tell about them in our hearts.
The monsters under our bed, summoned by ourself imagining them there, cannot touch us, for our bears are brave and strong against foes such as this. And sometimes their comfort shields us even against the woes of the waking world.
07.09.2024 - Alone After air to breathe and water to drink, after we are fed and rested, we crave the company of others. To see ourselves reflected in them. To be perceived by them makes us certain that we actually exist at all.
Though we may appear to walk through life a Monad – as Leibniz wrote: a self enclosed 'windowless being', drifting through the cosmos – in truth, non of us is ever so free. Within us, generations of social instinct make us seek out one-another, since long before we were human, perhaps long before we were mammals even. But then, we are never as alone, as when we are among our kind and remain unseen, unrecognised, overlooked and unnoticed.
At least in solitude we imagine, that another would know us for who we are, if they were with us. Anonymous in a crowd we may be faced with the existential dread that we are in fact perhaps, truly alone.
02.01.2025 - Hope Nothing can be as cruel as Hope. The elder of written western poetry, Hesiod, presents us hope as one of the evils Pandora had in the jar she was given by the gods. At the very bottom, not as a relief, but in fact as the greatest among them.
Hope makes us toil in vain, makes us endure the Shakespearian sea of troubles, instead of taking up arms against them. We hope things will turn out well enough in the end, if we persevere, if we hang in there just a little longer.
In short, it is that thing that makes us keep going beyond all reason and rationale. And by that it is a most human, most essential quality. But it can seem malicious sometimes. The purpose of hope is not to deliver us from peril, nor to grant us our wishes. The purpose of hope is to see, that there is someone that may struggle, someone to make wishes to begin with.
06.01.2025 - We're all mad here “‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here..’” — Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The reasonable world of adult and serious people, with its strange rituals and all it's presupposed, preconditioned, assumed suppositions seems utterly bizarre to the uninitiated – the child, the divergent, the outsider. Yet at the same time the ones who call themselves normal may look back in utter perplexity and cannot grasp what they see in terms other than the strange and mad. And so it is, that the ones touched by weirdness and those insisting on their reasonableness and all those in between look at one another without comprehension.
12.09.2026 - Forgotten “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians 13:11
The Christian apostle Paul writes to the Corinthian congregation, admonishing them to be mature of reasoning but ignorant of evil. Well, he can't be talking to me, for I am neither Christian nor Corinthian. I do not desire to be unversed in things of evil, nor to let go of childlike thought. In pursuit of the respect we think maturity affords, all too often, we reason our way out of things we once held dear. We let go of parts of ourselves because of what we believe society expects. We unlearn empathy – that complex skill that was so hard to acquire as children – it isn't appropriate for an adult that needs to make hard choices and believes to work towards a greater good (despite all evidence to the contrary).
We learn to forget our dreams and quell our enthusiasm, for fear of looking foolish, naïve, ignorant, uncouth, unreasonable... “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys – Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys” goes the line in Peter Yarrow's 'Puff the magic Dragon'.
Uncountable are the friends left behind in the autumn mist of distant seashores. Lost and forgotten. Forgotten but not gone. A dragon lives forever and what is lost can be found again.
15.09.2026 - Humility “Wild man, who sang the sun in flight and learned too late they grieved it on its way.” — Dylan Thomas
Much hardship and tragedy is brought into the world by great men demanding "to get what is theirs". The wealth, the respect, the influence and recognition, the satisfaction of all their immediate desires... All the things they are convinced the world has promised them. But they are quite unjustified in causing these ills. For in fact, the world never made such promises.
17.09.2026 - Body Politic In 'The True Believer' Eric Hoffer describes the average person that falls to the siren song of totalitarianism as possessed by a loathing of the present times and its many perceived moral failings; A reactionary longing for a mythical and purer past; The hatred for that insidious other, conveniently responsible for all the world's ills.
They play-act what they think is strength, style and class. They feign virtue and preach morals, they neither truly believe nor wish to live up to themselves. They escape into the comforting unity of a crowd. All in order to escape that most terrifying concept that freedom and enlightenment demands: responsibility.
By their desire to belong, to loose themselves into a pool of like minds, by their disgruntled egos wounded by life's manifold rejections and frustrations, they turn themselves into easy prey. Fodder for grifters and fraudsters. And they become willing participants in the megalomania of narcissist demagogues, who step on them in their pursuit of power.
22.09.2026 - Summer & Skye Jean-Paul Sartre in “L’Être et Néant” wrote about a most singular and frightful freedom. Every now and then we experience 'l’appel du vide', the powerful realisation of just how much agency we have. The sudden knowledge that with one radical act we can upend our life utterly and completely. We stand at the edge of a chasm, mesmerised — and if only for a second — by the shiverous feeling that but one small step divides us from a fateful plunge. Alas, we are reasonable creatures and we do not succumb to the temptations of the void. Not just yet at any rate.
25.09.2026 - Attention There is scarcely a happier — albeit inconvenient — thing, than a cat demanding the fullness of our attention, sprawling all over whatever it was we were doing at the time.
"Sweetest cat with skulking claw slink close and think, lie flat and paw and blink and yawn and thereupon needle-sharp latch on... and you are gone my pet. You are asleep. A loafing heap, purring so deep." — 'Feline Indulgence' a Rhyme d'Atelier by EHN
I wrote a couple of poems with an intricate interwoven scheme and realised it was very close (but not quite) to the 'Rhyme Royal' rhyming stanza introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 15th century. That one goes ABABBCC. And While Chaucer's is more strict on metre, mostly iambic pentameter, mine is more complex with dependant interior rhymes. I try to stick the landing at ABCCABCDDDDAEEE. I call it the 'Rhyme d'Atelier' (because who is to stop me?)
