What is life? What is love? What is death? They are gifts. Coldness, restraint, a look to the future to some distant African horizon. You gaze as if into the night, sitting at your eight-hour desk in the office. Suddenly you can see the night clearing before your eyes to reveal a sunrise behind the dormant lashes in a prairie, in Alaska, in Kathmandu. Anywhere but here.
But that all is an escape and imagination. And the imagination pulls, entices, and does not allow peace to reside long in the heart. These landscapes cannot be seen clearly by the mind. In truth, the mind sometimes catches them, but only to shortly send them by urgent dispatches to the heart, when the boredom of daily routine sets in. Then that horizon above the savanna awakens in the heart; I don't know if it's dawn or dusk, but I know it's hope and freedom, and the most beautiful thing to see - a longing behind your eyes.
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Siberian landscape (source: Pintrest)
Fyodor Mikhailovich used to live in the Siberian taiga, where the solitude of cold summers and even colder winters ruled over vast tracts of land and human hearts. He was imprisoned there among the rest of the inmates. He tried to preserve a little bit of his humanity, which was as if you wanted to preserve a drop of water in the palm of your hand in the middle of the Sahara.
In the midst of the horrors of the perverted image of God distorted and desecrated by crime, weak character, dormant conscience, and the general weakness of human nature, Fyodor Mikhailovich realized what life, love, and death mean. Managing to preserve his humanity and acquire the spirit of understanding human nature in its beauty and ugliness without passing judgments were two miracles equal to that of coming across a camel or a well in the middle of the Australian desert.
If you came across that well, it would tell you more words in its silence than thousands of empty words that fall out of almost every human mouth like sea glass in a child's mind are gems. That well would give you true water to drink. That well would not give you the look of a lion going around looking for something to devour. If you lean over that well, you will see new riddles. The well will ask you, who are you? Why are you looking? Where are you looking at? Are you looking for yourself or someone else? In order to gather and clear your mind, nothing, not even thousands of sitting poses and postures, nor clearing the passage of life energy, nor the shamans, gurus, teachers, mentors, nor midnight screams can help. Nothing but silence. The silence that we touch with the wings of suffering. If you find such a well - lean over it, and linger for a while, and keep quiet. Don't throw a coin, don't look for an echo, don't drown your boredom in it, but drink and don't expect answers right away. Because if you send a whisper to a well with that aim in mind, you will hear the rejection of that same whisper, you will hear an echo, but you will hear no answer. Waiting is required to get answers. Patience.
A well somewhere in Sarajevo (my photo)
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Here is what a well in Sarajevo whispered to me one summer day. This right here is your desert. Your savanna is right here where the gazelles, zebras, and elephants graze peacefully and pick up their restless ears. Where they tremble in anticipation of that true lion that will not tear them apart but give them the strength to escape even faster and further in search of a shelter, and then on and on into the heart of the savanna.
Notes: Fyodor Mihajlovic is Dostoevsky's name, full name is Fyodor Mihajlovic Dostoevsky The text was written for me Comments and criticisms are welcome. Leave a comment, suggestion critique. Thanks.
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