Change is good

An angel asked me to write more. Now, I know I've said in the past that I'm an atheist - I am, that has not changed nor will it - but that doesn't necessarily mean I don't believe in angels. Perfect souls do exist, which would imply souls must also exist, a very non-atheist belief but my atheism allows for the unknown. It submits to the magic that unites billions of miniscule particles to produce...THIS (look up, look around, take in the sky, the stars - if it's night, the wisp of cloud beckoning your imagination to join it in the freedom of space...yes, all of this). That magic draws us to the beauty of creation, tells us on some very elemental level that all of THIS is connected. Like a fading dream, like a magnetism where the soul is one pole and creation the other. This soul in particular, who often asks me to write and more often inspires me to write, is a long way away. But I feel its energy.

So I will write. Your wish is my command.

A poem:

[Untitled]

Shadow games in late evening,
when light loses its honey sweetness
and becomes something more profound, heavier.
The listing breeze to steady my spirit
as if the ground is too substantial to be real,
as if floating is the true state of humanity.

Floating away.

A ship would know what it is I speak of,
its sails embrace fluid motion,
dance with the insubstantial, the fleeting.

If I were that ship,
setting off into the great void,
what worlds would I see?
A ship without direction
wandering the endless expanse,
culling water for ablution,
abhorring the sight of land
as the end of its existence.

I am floating these days. A change of home can do that to you, like living between two very different worlds, like being an immigrant, a nomad. I'm leaving Besiktas, my very Turkish, very eastern home and moving into the clouds. It's a top floor apartment in the Galata district, the home of the yabanci, 7 storeys up with no lift (yikes!). But the view is phenomenal - the entire Golden Horn unfolding before me, mosques and minarets, ships and barges, the city like clusters of lego with a band of blue snaking through them. It's an old building, its history speaks to you in every misaligned floorboard and the wood-paneled ceiling like a pasha's drawing-room. The details are what give it its character: the fact that the toilet is a separate room from the shower and the modern heating system is in one of the bedrooms, settled there after some monumntal collision between old and new.

Well, time to move on, I suppose. I will miss Besiktas, with its accordian player and simitci. I'll miss my terrace, but not the rest of the apartment (certainly not the care bears trim). Change is good...