Magnolia blossoms…

The season of yellow leaves and frightened trees is gone. Life is
coming back to life. Luxembourg is blossoming…

You see Neruda today sitting on a bench in a park. He seems lost in looking at two
teenage girls on the grass, reading perhaps a naive love novel together and giggling for no reason. Just
nearby a big magnolia tree is shouting at each passerby, “It is spring, it is
spring, see what spring has done to me”.
You take the seat with Neruda. Neruda looks at you and smiles, and you know what is buzzing in his mind and he too knows, what you are thinking…..

I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

You ask yourself what would Neruda have said if he has seen Magnolia flowers blossoming first and than you remind yourself you  still need to see the cherry tree blossoming.

It is relatively early summer here. You are seeing the season within the people changing here as well. You see more laughter and smiles on the faces than when you arrived here few months back. The season inside you is still cold and icy, but you are feeling
the heat from outside and hearing the sounds of happiness from inside. You ask yourself if you
should allow the two seasons, the inner one and the outer one, to influence each-other. You hope that this will do good to you, but you also fear of the
not so far away autumn and winter coming.

Yesterday a friend called you from your home country. He spent some of his early years living in Europe  and having his own opinions and experiences. He was saying, one thing that you will learn from living in Europe is how to be completely at ease with your loneliness.  (You find it hard to translate the word he used, to describe the feeling of being completely-at-ease. It’s something like a feeling of two people living together and have gone through all the dominance and passivity curves in their combined lives and dropping all the guards now, are completely at ease in living together. Like what Rumi was saying the other day about meeting someone out-beyond the concepts of right-doing  and wrongdoing.)
But this feeling of being at ease and dropping your guards takes time and specially when the beloved you seek is no other than ‘loneliness’ itself. You think how beautiful and simple your home language is to describe so complex concepts, and you think a bit more about how to be at ease with loneliness

A squirrel runs past by you. You come out of your thoughts. The two teenage girls in the park are now sleeping on the grass, perhaps dreaming some naive and innocent love affair with all the drama, sounds and fury.  A magnolia flower is falling slowly on the ground in slow motion, the ducks moving seamlessly in the nearby lake. Time stopping itself for good…..

You hear Neruda saying …

Someday, somewhere — anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and
that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life