He died for our dinner.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!

—Rudyard Kipling

We came here, amongst the empty smoke stacks, re-purposed rooms, and the broken skylights to find ourselves.

The brick buildings, crimson and patient.

We make the choices not because they are easy, but because they are hard.  We take up the slack of life in the form of the infinite challenges that we face each day.  It’s never enough to look in the mirror each morning and say “This is all there is.”   It’s the boldest lie, the greatest distortion, an incredible oversight.

The question remains, while the steam floats from the shower, the bags under our eyes billowing, the toothbrush in hand:  “This is all there is?”  And then—you’ve done it, you taken the first step, now take the  next:

Roll your eyes to the back of your head, as if to die.  Throw your head to the ceiling, as if to sing.  And jump as high as you can, as if to fly.  And for that small moment, while you’re suspended in space and time, drop whole words and letters and leave yourself with something simpler:  “Here! all this!” and open your eyes again to look at the world for the gift that it is.

Of all the people you will know in a lifetime,
You are the only one you will never leave nor lose.

To the question of your life,
you are the only answer.

To the problems of your life,
You are the only solution.

Look to yourself.

In the future, after a tremendous effort to save the world from our mistakes, there will be sustainability. And we’ll all be quite bored by the whole idea.  I imagine the world will be a lot like Stockholm Sweden is now—entirely too perfect, yet filled with people who still manage to complain about something.

When I wander around that city I have an unsettling urge to start a riot. It’s too perfect, and soon this earth will be too perfect as well.  We’ll all wonder, “Where’s the suffering, where’s the new issue to tackle? Where’s the next big project?”

So we’ll do something amazing, something incredible… something that changes everything. It will start as it has already, a minute curiosity: the itch to explore the universe.  We’ll begin simply, with a weekend to mars, a day trip to the moon.  And then someone like Richard Branson will say “forget this planet; there’s a whole universe out there.”

And before you can recite the first four digits of the speed of light (2997) you’ll be bragging to your friends about how you scored a cheap space-flight to somewhere in deep space.  You’re off to start a new life—you adventurous spirit!

With that new pursuit we’ll all be on our way– to committing a whole new set of mistakes that will inevitably lead to the potential destruction of the universe.  But I’m sure we’ll solve those problems as well—we’re good at that kind of thing.

A taunt, a tease,

A kiss.

There’s the sizzle of a bacon hitting a hot frying pan, a single thought. And as it’s edges curl inward, while the fat runs, she decides– that it wasn’t such a good thought. And the frying pan is emptied, and a new thought is cracked open, to be pondered and scrambled. As it bubbles and pops, turns from opaque to clear, and steams into finality, the missions is understood: Cereal would be better.

…And as the spoon clinks against her teeth she wonders if pancakes would have been the superior choice.

(About Skhizein) | (By: Jérémy Clapin)

My camera broke, and incredibly, life goes on.

Ed & Julia: Montreal, Canada

Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?
-Woody Allen