What does the world really feel like, and what is the most true way to feel? In the next paragraphs, I conclude that this difference in feeling, this paradox of the human soul, disappears when we realize what is really going on.

Not so rarely, I find myself engulfed in some specific emotional landscape. It can be the set of emotions found in a specific book, the strings pulled by a certain album, or even the emotions brought forth by the nature around me. While in this landscape, the similar emotions within me stand out more clearly and are easier to access. I all but settle down in the surroundings and become a part of the experience.

Like all works of art, emotional landscapes have an array of emotions, some more present than others, and put together in a unique way. So while no landscape relates to one single emotion, different landscapes can take up wholly different sections of the great continent of emotions. Also, just as a musical piece can be complete in and of itself, so can a landscape feel complete and un-lacking. In effect, two completely seperate landscapes can both feel like the “most real” one.

But, as human beings, we answer to the continent as a whole. That doesn’t mean that the “most real” emotional landscape is the one you see when you strap onto a rocket and hitch a ride into space. Even if this, too, is an emotional landscape. No, the continent cannot be felt, and so all the different variations of scenery are equally real. Such a conclusion might not be true for scientific perspectives, but human emotions are different.

What’s more, we have somewhat of an obligation to know ourselves. And here comes the last piece of the metaphor, too: the continent is an individual thing. There are variations between us: some mountain peaks are taller or shorter, some lakes shift, forests come and go and lands vary in size. We need to traverse it all to truly know who we are. How we travel and how long we stay in each place, will determine the colors of our lifespan, the richness of our lives.

There will be landscapes in life that we prefer over others and in which we spend much time. Then times might change, and emotions become different. Is it growing up, is it being led further into the truth? No. It is travelling. Not into truth, nor from truth, just elsewhere. I will not pretend otherwise; some things (perhaps all things) in life will change the face of the continent, and you might travel back to find forests gone and mountains moved. But this is just the more reason to travel — so you will always know what you are become. If a land suffers, it can make alliances with friendly lands on the same continent, and many things can be rebuilt.

When travelling from a landscape to another, do not think you are leaving something behind or denying one truth to replace it with another. You are simply travelling, because all the lands need attention and acknowledgement. The human soul is many-faceted, and any face can grow lonely. Don’t just know yourself. Come visit yourself, too.

In the year that was, I succeeded in getting better acquainted with my soul. I shall uphold that bond, but this year, I will try to access my heart, too. Too long have I hidden it, shrouded it and unsuccessfully tried to shield it from the outside world. This year, I shall muster up courage and faith and face my fears and anxieties. Somehow I believe those come from the heart, whom I have so mistreated.

It is also time for me to shake off some more apathy. These past years by myself have faced me with many challenges and new situations, many of whom I have avoided altogether. Now I am more experienced, and I can apply my abilities of problem solving to set things right. I’ll build, I’ll fix, and I’ll create my own life. I will take responsibility for myself. I’d be a joke for a man if I could never muster the wits to see this necessity.

And in the midst of all this, I want to do creative works. I have already begun to brainstorm, with snippets of music, writings and photography. The idiocy of my neglecting side would have me sit and whine while these abilities rust.

In short, I will recover all the lost and more.

I have one emotion that I hold in high regard as the one I bring with me into this new year. It is an emotion I have not felt in a long time, which I now feel in a rather peculiar and, you might say, imaginary fashion. It is a feeling of being in love, but it stems from music and from a most fictitious story. I am merely observing this emotion.

So. A track for the newborn year: Rebecca Kneubuhl – Guide You Home

So now, I take the time to reflect upon a year-long walk.

The year 2008 has been a year of learning. A year of change. A year of humility, of compassion, of slumber, rest and harmony. It has also been a year of neglect, of panic and exhaustion and of intense self-searching. I have cried more this year than I have all previous years combined.

Well. Let me break it down chronologically.

January, I was a mess. I was spinning round in the treadmill, spending all my energy but not getting anywhere. Several times I changed back and forth between hopeless love and just pure hopelessness. However, though I can be an idiot and even a jackass, I am not a fool, so I had my recovery planned. All the time until Spring, I spent preparing myself, mentally, for a change to the better.

Like a blessing came April. Inspired by newly added wisdom and spiritual ideas I related to, I sought and found all-new experiences in nature. I heard birdsong like I had never heard it before. I saw deer several times. Half of the photos I took this month were of birds. The other half were of clouds. Spring was showing to be exactly that rescuing angel I had hoped it would be.

The weather this summer was glorious, and thus, so was my mood. I walked in the nearby forests time upon time, paying close attention to the developing life and taking hundreds of photos. I did good in the external life, finishing exams and getting a summer job. I also went interrailing through Europe. The amount of new experiences was astounding, and I kept them all in a detailed log.

Eventually, I could see and feel nature starting to wane, to lean towards a new slumber. But with all that’d been this warm season, I welcomed Autumn with open hands. Summer had become plain, and it was time to rustle up other parts of myself and enter a new phase. All Summer had been spent looking outside, and now came the time to look inside, and digest all the new stuff.

I now found a renewed liking for New Age music. In my preparation for Spring I had taught myself meditation, and now I could combine these two to explore deeper part of myself. I make no claims and I hold no belief, but I react rather positively to this stuff. Meditation has proven to be a very effective way for me to clear my mind of stress and reactivate my creativity. This has been a goal of mine since. I even bought a guitar and managed to learn its ways and its theories pretty well.

Since Winter crept over the lands, I have longed back to the green of Spring, but I have tried to discipline myself and be glad for what is now. That’s something I’ve had to do, because this year has been lacking compared to earlier years. It’s my energy that has lessened. I’ve become economical and I make do with what I have.

I am steadily becoming a better human. But I am not forsaking my other sides.

A track for the year that’s been: Wim – Serenity Falls.

Still, I have often contemplated on having missed out on several years of my life. Years I could’ve learned what all the others did, years I could’ve understood them and the world better. Instead of being alone in my room, I could’ve been in the company of good friends, doing something we all liked doing together. And in the presence of these good friends, I could’ve grown more as a human being.

But no. Since humans were so clearly different from what I knew in myself, I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to be other things. Like a dragon, or a unicorn. That was what I dreamed of growing up and becoming: a being of integrity, purity, and great ideals. Something I could not see in humans.

A misplaced child, hidden from the variety that is human nature. With my dragons and my dreams, I survived — no, I flourished. Imagination was my realm, seperate from reality.

As time passed, the very ideals I believed in made me certain that I shouldn’t keep on believing most in what is removed from the world. They also made me believe that the world of humans can contain things that might challenge even my love for this pure imagination. So a transition began.

Things have since changed. I have faced challenges, and hinders. Delving into the uncertainty of life can taint you, mislead you, and it can even kill you. Sometimes you want to give up, and believe that what you thought to be true, really wasn’t.

There are many ways to imagine the world. Cynicism is the lousiest of them all.

Now, I take a minute to look back. Where was I heading before, where am I heading now, and what is really the wisest? Some time ago, I wanted to become a dragon. Lately, I have tried becoming more human.

Do the two really conflict?

I used to think humans were limited and weak. Now, I have come to see what potential really lies in us. All we can see and feel is a part of us. If we feel great things, then great things can be in our life.

The way I see it, I have three choices. Either I can live with the happiness of imagination and the anguish of its lack in the physical world; or I can forget and suppress the imagination and try and see the physical world as more bright; or… I can see the imagination as my palette and the physical world as my canvas, transporting the inspiration of imagination, and letting magic into the mundane realm.

That is my dream. That, and the ability to fly, of course.

And I would stop all I do wrong: all I am expected to do, but that I deep down know I shouldn’t. All for the sake of comfort, I risk resignation, I risk forgetting, I risk dying in life. I would stop it, and I would travel. To rediscover the forsaken, remember the forgotten. I would travel to visit my soul.

Not to find a path. Just to walk.

This post tells about the need to have a safe home to come home to, the insecurity of not having one, and what you need to make one.

I’m not content right now. I’ve got this vague feeling like something needs fixing, something that’s gone wrong somewhere but that nobody’s noticed. It’s like the world used to be run properly, but then we all started neglecting it to stress over less important matters instead, and now we’ve all forgotten how it was and how it used to be run. I feel I should do something, I feel I should take control and make things work again, show people that the happiness of the past can return not only in our minds.

But things seem so different now, so much more complicated. Complication has tainted my mind, and ignorance has become a habit. I can see it happening and I work against it, but I cannot help but be carried away by the huge current. I knew once that there were refuges on top of the water, many of them. Refuges built on happiness, joy and friendship, built by those who share it, who know it and who can give it. Those refuges still exist, in new forms, for others, but I shy away from them. I do not feel at home in them. I visit sometimes and it inspires me greatly, for a while, but overall I’ve become an outsider.

I constantly try to build my own refuges. But they are mere shadows of those I remember. Though I wish to build them for others as well, they are made by and for myself, and I alone support them. And that’s not how it works at all.

However, I’m well aware that I’m not the only outsider. And you don’t need to be an outsider either to be troubled by this. The problem is independence. Before, I used to have little to no control over my own life. My family and my friends’ families controlled everything that happened in my life. They’d lived long lives already and they’d built several refuges between them; a network of houses on the water. In due time, we will also have built such for the next generation, and they will, hopefully, live happily in this safe haven. But what about those of us, here, now, who’ve left the nest of our childhood?

We’re in the cold of the river, swimming to find our own path. But we also need to find together. We need those refuges, and we can’t build them alone. Many of us aren’t good at building, or at cooperating, but letting that hinder you will never lead you to happiness. This is not the time to lay still in the water. Good friends are the most important thing of all when you’ve become independent.

Lastly, who says you can’t return home from time to time? We’re humans, and not birds. Leaving the nest does not mean you never go back, not at all. Of course, not all of us have the luxury of a safe home, but for those of us who do, it’s a great source of inspiration.

Drastic events and changes have befallen me since I last put some work into making an entry. But all in all I am still the same, possibly even more so, and I am now of a better and more purposeful design.

On my adventure I saw things that I thought could lie ahead of me. I sought and longed for these things, these myriads of premonitions and daydreams. But I was mistaken as to where the paths to them lay, and who they involved. What I saw exists further on through time, but I still do not know in which direction.

Actually, the dreams did not start alongside this adventure. For they were and are just that; dreams. Like all people have, like we all strive for. For years and years they’ve whispered to me hope and promises of especially happy days and moments, and for years I’ve never known how to reach them. I haven’t even always believed I ever could reach them. Tired of this state of being out of reach of my own dreams and desires, I jumped on a passing train that felt very right. Here, the dreams thrived and multiplied, and I felt my path was set. But the train brought me into unknown lands, lands where my power waned, where the columns supporting me — columns I have built and maintained — would erode and leave me helpless. And they did, for a while, and I let them. I wanted to see where the train went.

And not until then did I start noticing that the train was racing dangerously fast. I spoke up and enquired as to what was going on. Turns out things were not at all as I’d have hoped for. The train wasn’t planning to go anywhere at all, it couldn’t stop because its machinery was broken beyond my repair, and as for its heading, it was going straight through lands where my powers are useless.

But I was not shocked, because I had come to foresee it. I had just been naive and blind so far, and these lands were no lands of naivety and childplay. Though lingering a short moment in hope that things would magically work out, this proved dangerous for both my soul and my heart, and I eventually realized I had never had any business on that train. Determination dawning on me, I soared out and toward the sky with all my forgotten might. Only to find out that by staying so long I had become attached to the vehicle with an elastic string. The bond was not strong enough to bring me back, but it snapped and rebound on me. The impact threatened to break me, to the point that I found myself having to form an alliance within myself.

For years now I’ve been divided. When I observed my own being and saw it, I further defined myself that way. Many of my sides, characteristics and ideals I’ve centered on mythological beings. Officially it’s because it makes me able to aspire and set goals higher than if I were to have human role models. Humans are always good and evil in one, whereas a dragon and a unicorn can be pure, unmoveable, undefeatable, per definition! — they will never falter. Personally, it’s because I just feel there’s more than just this world we know. If not, then why can we imagine more, and why do we contain feelings that this world never will or can satisfy in itself?
So in short, I have the soul of a dragon, and the heart of a unicorn, in the body of a human. That’s the way it’s been. But the dragon has ruled, and the unicorn has been suppressed. That way I stayed happy and serene, though my feelings were limited and hard to keep. However, since the dragon isn’t all of me, that isn’t the right way of things. Trusting literature and passed-on knowledge, I’ve tried to ease my reign over my own heart, letting it breathe now and then. But I never trusted it.

I’ll do the symbolical version. During this recent adventure of mine, the dragon was badly injured. He flew into unknown lands and hit an invisible wall. In that weakened state, he could not endure the impact upon leaving the train. And after a series of small, curious revelations, the dragon acknowledged the unicorn, who gave his heart to the dragon, joining them in one being with a common will.

So there it is. I’ve made peace with myself. Furthermore, some of my attitudes have changed. Before jumping on that train, I never thought such an act was possible for me to do successfully. But during the ride I spent a lot of time thinking, and learning from it. I now feel more confident about my dealings in this world, and I feel more human.

And the journey continues.