In this way or that way,
as it may happen or not happen,
sometimes succeeding in saying what I think
and at other times saying it badly and with things mixed in,
I keep writing my poems, inadvertently,
as if writing were not something requiring action,
as if writing were something that happens to me
in the same way that the sun reaches me from outside.

I try to say what I feel
without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
so that I won’t need a corridor
of thought leading to words.

I don’t always manage to feel what I know I should feel.
Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river, weighed down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.

I try to shed what I’ve learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember,
to scrape off the paint that was painted on my senses,
to uncrate my true emotions,
to step out of all my wrapping and be myself – not Alberto Caeiro
but a human animal created by Nature.

That’s how I write, wanting to feel Nature not even as a man but merely as someone who feels Nature.
That’s how I write, sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes saying just what I want to say,
sometimes getting it wrong,
falling down one moment and getting up the next,
but always continuing on my way like a stubborn blind man.

Even so, I’m somebody.
I’m the Discoverer of Nature.
I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring to the Universe a new Universe,
because I bring to the Universe its own self.

This is what I feel and write,
perfectly aware and clearly seeing
that it’s five o’clock in the morning
and that the sun, although it still hasn’t raised its face
over the wall of the horizon,
is already showing the tips of its fingers
gripping the top of the wall
of the horizon sprinkled with low hills.

* From “The Keeper of Sheep, XLVI” by Fernando Pessoa writing as Alberto Caeiro.

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The saddest thing in the world is for a human being to have lived … once, this once … and not to have known what Life was all about.

Not to have consciously known the primordial forces shaping our lives … the call of the nerves, and the blood, and the heart … powering us and giving us structure, and character, and intuition, and the urge to move on. Nor to have understood the primal instincts physically taking us throughout the labyrinths of passion, and love, and hate, and fear, and happiness.

Not to have known the immense power and fragility of our complex and advanced Mind … so vulnerable it can be horribly bent and controlled, so intelligent and limitless it can be set free to discern the Universe from which It comes into being … to reflect, to be aware of itself.

Not to have looked at the immensity of a starry night and have felt the ancient particles of Light streaming into our eyes … to caress the mind and challenge us to wonder.

Not to have recognized the wisdom of the Human Body, born knowing how to self-reflect and build itself up into an utterly unique organization of myriad elements … not another one like me, ever … while obeying the common design of Homo Sapiens: Two legs, two arms, and two demanding and provoking forces; one up in the head trying to make sense, the other down in the sex stirring up the instincts.

Not to have known that we belong to a Natural Order that connects us all under a Universal Need: The need to consume and release energy sources in order to fuel the unfolding of our constantly changing Existence, while we maintain a fundamental configuration.

Not to have truly comprehended the Fact that when an Ovum fused with a Sperm to unleash the creation of what we are today, each one of them had the Blueprint to build and develop … amidst total uncertainty and all kinds of possibilities … a temporary structure endowed with a degree of Freedom to manipulate and be manipulated by the movement of Evolution.

Not to have known the Primal Universal Process that brings us into existence and drives us towards transient physical and mental summits, then towards physical dissolution, while we create Fields of Energy with our interactions (positive, negative, weak, strong, transformative). Nor to have owned the trails we construct with our lives, nor the doors we open or close as we transform ourselves and our world. Nor to have comprehended the Fact that according to the significance of our actions … what we did do or did not do, what we destroyed, what we generated … we might be transformed into a new form of existence, a new player in the unfolding of the Primal Universal Process. Think of an Einstein, or a Beethoven, or a Socrates, or the ancient lineage of motherhood: The energy they generated and continue to generate is now a part of how we are, and how we think, and how we know, and how we feel. This is the true meaning of Transcendence: To continue on after we have dissipated; albeit in another form.

Under a Paradigm that aims to obliterate Self-reflection in the Human Mind by enforcing destructive, demeaning, and absurd economic and religious dogmas, most of us never have a chance to ponder about the Fact that we are highly evolved catalysts for transformation in a highly creative Universal Process.

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The most fundamental function of our bodies, although we are mostly unconscious of it, is the constant transformation of energy into mass and mass into energy. We cease to exist when we can no longer do this. We cannot unfold without this constant process; we cannot move, we cannot destroy, we cannot create, we cannot hate, we cannot love without it. We require a steady supply of energy sources … oxygen from the air, nutrients from food … and are therefore totally dependent on the environment that supplies those sources.

We transform energy in order to re-generate and evolve and live.

It is the same with the species as a whole.

The most fundamental function of the human species, although we are mostly unconscious of it, is the constant transformation of energy into mass and mass into energy … we cannot evolve, we cannot grow, we cannot survive without this constant process. We will cease to exist without a steady supply of energy sources and are therefore totally dependent on the environment that provides those sources.

Humanity transforms energy in order to re-generate and evolve and live.

But although these Facts are incontrovertible, they are not yet commonly accepted in the way we understand Reality: We mostly think we are independent from and the ‘lords’ of Nature.

We are stuck in a Paradigm that discourages the capacity of the human mind to introspect and encourages instead the destructiveness, cruelty, divisiveness and irrationality of our economic and religious doctrines … my ‘god’ is the true god, the measure of my success is how much more than others I can consume. These doctrines are obviously leading us into wars, and hate, and genocide, and incredible levels of cruelty, and the negation of the devastating impact of our unprecedented and rapacious growth on the environment that allows us to exist.

It took us eons of time to evolve the skeletal structure to stand erect, and millions of years to become aware of our own self-awareness, and millennia to start making tentative conjectures about Reality, and centuries to accept the fact that it is our planet that circles around the sun.

It is absolutely undeniable that we possess the capacity to learn to regulate our bodies and change the way we perceive Reality.

Intellectually we have grown out of the mistaken concept that the earth was the center of the Universe, but emotionally we still think that we are the embodiment of Life’s highest manifestation, and thus we continue to believe that the world we ‘walk upon’ is our entitlement.

Yet Life is something much much greater, and pervasive, and smarter than us; It is primeval, and creative, and self-perpetuating; It has the power to destroy when one of its creations is not propitious or is weak; It is the Force that in a symbiotic coupling with environments experiments with myriad manifestations of existence, of which we are one, to implant in us the capacity to learn to adapt while obeying a Universal Mandate to self-generate and evolve.

Unlike any other creature we know of, we can purposefully fashion our neural connections with every sense perception we receive from our internal and external environments: This is how we have developed the highest known capacity for Introspection and Rational Thinking; it is how we can conceptualize the possibilities of the human potential; it is how we are capable to comprehend the clear signs of a species in crisis; it is how we can foresee the impending and life threatening changes we are bringing about. But we are not encouraged to reflect on these Facts because they threaten the indoctrination of irrational beliefs and the ruthless ambition of an unsustainable economic doctrine.

As we incorporate and transform substances from the environment to substantiate our development, we are dramatically changing the chemical composition of the planet.

Thus we are facing a Crisis as Humanity has never faced before: Like a human being overwhelmed by its own excesses, we have reached a point where we are tipping the natural equilibrium between our growth and the resources of the narrow planetary band in which we can exist.

If we are unable to overthrow the domination of our dark, irrational, and self-destructive Paradigm, we will lose the most amazing opportunity we ever had of delving onto the knowledge that we are the creation, and co-creators, of a Primeval Order which not only builds our bodies out of two microscopic cells … step by step, deftly, thoughtfully … but which also endows us with a Mind that can discern that Order, and affect it.

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