*My Book Of Days*

Here´s another beautiful poem by Jorge Luis Borges. Enjoy it.




Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.


And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Jorge Luis Borges

This morning I was reading a post by Leonard (avl_wamp) who was given a very old guitar, a beauty that is more than a century old and which he is restoring, and several thoughts came to my mind. That guitar was from an old lady who had won a contest with it being a teenager. And knowing how much avl_wamp liked music, she gave it to him as a present. A gift, to put it better.
And then I told him how these kind of things go through generation from generation joining the lives of people in an endless string along the centuries or even the milleniums. Feelings, emotions, thoughts, gather in an unique object, which is then enriched by the dreams and illusions of the new owner. It´s the positive power of human soul, seeking for a path to survive along the uncertainty of time.
And I remember a movie I saw long time ago, "The family", by the Italian director Ettore Scola and an excellent performance of the French actress Fanny Ardant. It´s the story of a family through the years and generations and how some things and objects are regarded as family treasures and icons along the decades, as symbols of the family´s history and values. And there you can realize how certain things in our own lives keep also a part of ourselves, in a way that when we give it as it happened with this guitar, we´re giving a litlle bit of our own soul with it. Fortunately, I´d say.


We are the time. We are the famous


We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.

We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.

We are the river and we are that greek
that looks himself into the river. His reflection
changes into the waters of the changing mirror,
into the crystal that changes like the fire.

We are the vain predetermined river,
in his travel to his sea.

The shadows have surrounded him.
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.

Memory does not stamp his own coin.

However, there is something that stays
however, there is something that bemoans.

Jorge Luis Borges

This is not another post about poetry or stolen photographs as I usually do.
This one is about Opera and me.

A few days ago I checked up my messages and I found a new one from an Opera user I didn´t know.
Soon I realized that message was not a common one. It was different, and was coming from the past, my own past.

It was from an old secondary school friend of mine. We were very close friends, sharing dreams and working very hard to achieve them. We shared tears and laughs, and walked together along many, many roads. So close we were that my daughter used to call him "uncle".
But one day we had a difference. What was it about? I don´t want to remember, believe me. Pride spoke and our lives took different roads. That was the last time I saw him, ten years ago.

Many times I walked along the roads of this city thinking I was going to meet him at any corner. That never happened.

Till I got this message.

Long ago, I had left a link to my MyOpera blog in a photography forum and my friend casually saw it.
He got in touch with me through MyOpera and left me the message.

I was astonished when I read it. During all these years he had felt the same as me, thinking that friendship is much more important than anything that could have separated us.

The next surprise was that he´s now living in Canada, thousands and thousands of kilometres far from me.
And here we are, a little bit older, carrying a lot of different experiences on our backs, separated by distance, but not for feelings or emotions. "Yeah", I said to myself, "life has its own secret ways, but we have to help her." Opera had helped me to re-connect myself to my own lost past. Suddenly the software became strongly meaningful for me, in a way I had never thought it could have been.

So, my friends, this is what Opera is for. This is specially for you, my dear DarkWorm. when you made this question in one of the threads in MyOpera main page. It is all about communicating (EspenAO dixit), about opening posibilities to the unexpected, and finding new ways to walk along old paths.

No words to say how happy I am

Simply let me say Thanks Opera, thanks life.

This post is for all of my dear friends. I wish you all THE BEST for this new year. This year has been a great one for me since I got your friendship, and that is a true treasure I will always keep in my heart. THANK YOU ALL, AND LET THE LIGHT OF LOVE AND HOPE SHINE IN YOUR HEART. A BIG BIG KISS

La guerra
Seré curioso. A mediados del año pasado, mientras esta guerra se estaba incubando, George W. Bush declaró que «debemos estar listos para atacar en cualquier oscuro rincón del mundo». Irak es, pues, un oscuro rincón del mundo. ¿Creerá Bush que la civilización nació en Texas y que sus compatriotas inventaron la escritura? ¿Nunca escuchó hablar de la biblioteca de Nínive, ni de la torre de Babel, ni de los jardines colgantes de Babilonia? ¿No escuchó ni uno solo de los cuentos de las mil y una noches de Bagdad?



Mano de obra

Mohamed Ashraf no va a la escuela.
Desde que sale el sol hasta que asoma la luna, él corta, recorta, perfora, arma y cose pelotas de futbol, que salen rodando de la aldea paquistaní de Umar Kot hacia los estadios del mundo.
Mohammed tiene once años. Hace esto desde los cinco.

Si supiera leer, y leer en inglés, podría entender la inscripción que él pega en cada una de sus obras: Esta pelota no ha sido fabricada por niños.

You know I'm devoted of film cameras and I've just bought this beauty, a Minolta X300. Quite old but beautiful, in excellent conditions and incredibly cheap.

Well, here's my RO tatoo, thanks to Opera crew and specially to Espen for his kind card. I've put the tatoo on the inox steel flask with which I drink "mate", a tipycal hot beberage here in Uruguay. How long will it last? I don't know! but everybody at the teacher's room is asking about it!
What do I say then? "Oh, that's because I'm a proud member of the My Opera Community", ha ha
Doesn't it look beautiful?

Here I selected two poems I like, and hope you líke them too:

NATURE, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wished to go or stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

NATURE, THE GENTLEST MOTHER, by Emily Dickinson.

Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest,
Her admonition mild
In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.
How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon,
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down
Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.
When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky
With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.

Enjoy them.
Ah, the rose is a gift from my garden.

Support the people and monks of Burma in their fight for freedom and against the opression of the military junta.

http://www.free-burma.com

(Thomas S. Jones, Jr., English, born 1882)



Sometimes

ACROSS the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play—
The lad I used to be.

And yet he smiles so wistfully
Once he has crept within,
I wonder if he hopes to see
The man I might have been.