The world seems unable to accommodate your innocent movements
You are holding flowers, jumping and swaying
The cannon covers you with ferocity
You touch the graffiti and turn around the windowsill
Sharp blade blasting threatens your chest
Stripping away your unformed cognition of love
Do you remember the vines planted in your childhood
Do you imagine the expected blooming of flowers
Do you know that your mother also once
Gradually deepening the wait
Waiting for your heart to be opened by love
Share the colors you bring to the world
The cannon fodder will alter the crow painting
Leave behind the gray and white of sorrow and hatred
Filled with sadness that cannot be buried
Remember that the vines are connected deeper into one vein
Continue to hold onto your love
You stand up and try to search for it
Understand that the enemy is the most unworthy existence
You stand up and learn to take steps
Bring true color to the land
Su Yun, 17 years old, is a member of the Chinese Poetry Society and a young poet. His works have been published in more than ten countries. He has published two poetry collections in China, namely Inspiration from All Things and Wisdom and Philosophy, and one in India titled WITH ECSTASY OF MUSINGS IN TRANQUILITY. He has won the Guido Gozzano Orchard Award in Italy, the Special Award for Foreign Writers in the City of Pomezia, and was praised by the organizing committee as the “Craftsman of Chinese Lyric Poetry”. He has also received the “Cuttlefish Bone” Best International Writer Award for those under 25.
Quintessenceway: Before the World Awakens, the Heart Must
(A essay I wrote for my spiritual friend Carmen’s service, yes — but one rooted in bodily transformation, artistic revelation, and the hard honesty of seeing oneself clearly.
There was a day when I came to my mentor with my manuscript, carrying it like something alive, something I had been nursing in the dark. He read it, sighed, and told me my writing was a mess.
Not a novel, he seemed to mean. Too dense. Too essayistic. Too buried beneath itself.
At first, I could not understand him. My book was never meant to be an essay. It was a living world. Everything was already there: the sadness of a man, the rebellion of a woman, the children no longer naïve, the animals returning during lockdown, nature regrowing while the human world retreated indoors.
The core was there.
So why had it not surfaced?
Why was the wholeness hidden beneath so many layers? Why did the novel feel like an essay when what I had written was, in truth, a cry?
Something was blocking me.
I wanted to reclaim my authorship, but I did not yet know how. I could feel the book breathing beneath the prose, but I could not clear enough space for it to speak.
This is where Carmen’s Quintessenceway entered my life — not as a slogan, not as a shallow self-help phrase, but as a mirror.
Through her service, a person offers their name, date of birth, and email address, and receives in return a quintessence message tailored to them: a message rooted in the architecture of feeling, thought, action, and connection. It is a way of seeing the self not as a fixed object, but as a living pattern. A movement. A balance. A truth waiting to be recognised.
Then, under the guidance of my friend Carmen, the architecture of quintessence began to take form.
Feelings.
Thoughts.
Actions.
Connections.
Four elements. Four movements. Four gates.
When they fall out of balance, the self fractures. When they return to harmony, wholeness returns too.
And is this not what has happened to our world?
What else is the present crisis, if not the consequence of a great imbalance?
Feelings have been left undealt with for too long. Men, unable to face their fear, grief, and loss of power, turn toward the manosphere, toward fantasies of dominance, toward the worship of strongman politicians. Day after day, the politicians become giant babies, and the people follow them into infancy.
Thought has been misdirected. It is constantly steered away from the true core of life, from the force that holds everyone together: love, humanity, tenderness, language. Bloggers speak of optimisation. Teachers are pushed to prioritise maths and technology over the first miracle in a child’s eyes when they discover a snail on a spring leaf. The first knife thrust by education departments is often aimed at the humanities, at language, at the very arts that protect us from being eaten alive.
Actions drift too far from kindness. Too many are left unexplained, unexamined, detached from empathy at the core. The cold eyes of vegan yogis toward colleagues who refuse to give up meat. Educated blue-collar young men who carry essentialist ideas about gender, only to be laughed at until they turn toward Jordan Peterson or Charlie Kirk. A once pro-feminist Black Christian girl, the tenth child in her family, speaks of the pressure of childbearing, of “deep” philosophies she does not understand, and is sneered at by her white teacher. The cry she never speaks aloud hardens. In the end, she turns toward Christian fundamentalism.
Again and again, one side looks at the other as if they are beneath them.
Each contempt creates a counterforce. Each sneer pushes away someone who might have become an ally. Each unexamined wound becomes a doctrine. Each private insecurity dresses itself in religion, politics, purity, intellect, or moral superiority, until one branch begins to hate another.
And now we have arrived at a stage where the the light given the Morning Star, the fire stolen by Prometheus — threatens to leave the world.
Once connection is lost, we stand at the apex of civilisation and at the bottom of the animal order. The fire is still here, yes. But without love, without thought, without feeling, without connection, it turns into pure evil’s communion wine.
What can we do, then?
What can we do?
This has been a long rhetorical question for me as a writer. There was a time when I asked it and found no answer.
In my own book, during the first draft, when my mentor sighed and said it was “too essayistic,” I could not understand him. I thought: But it is not an essay. It was never meant to be an essay.
Only later, after I received the wisdom scrolls, each one distilled from theosophical canons, did I begin to see the cracks between the lines.
The big names I tried so hard to place in a chapter? That was my unchecked ego, the ego of someone who had graduated from a Russell Group university and still feared being dismissed.
The over-the-top intensity? That was the ghost of an ugly duckling — the girl bullied for eighteen years in China — still haunting my mind.
The five metaphors in a row that made my prose unbearably purple? That was my fear of being seen as empty inside, of being thought intellectually lesser.
The layers began to fall as the onion unfurled.
Had I not come to understand quintessence — that pulsing dot, invisible as air, fluctuating as water, warm as fire, and virile as earth; the power that keeps the inner universe breathing — I would never have heard my characters’ voices so clearly.
Once the masks fell, they began to speak.
The man whispered years of victimhood inside a coercive marriage, and years of being made a mule beneath an imperial machine.
The Cossacks were no longer cultural mascots or horse-riders in costume. They became people as simple and alive as someone screaming back at a neighbour’s horse because the horse screamed first — just as an American teenager might meow back at a cat because the cat meowed at them.
And the woman became whole. Brilliant and cruel. Feral and fine. Dirty and decent. Yet through all her virtues and vices, compassion and kindness remained the driving force.
Then came a sudden click in my head, a return to Rumi’s insight:
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
In the name of changing the world, the world has been tipped toward the edge of falling apart.
What have we failed to manage, even for a second?
In pursuing what looks exhilarating, rewarding, illuminating, we overlook the shadow part: the darkness before light is born.
This morning, even my neighbour said that, for spirits, this might be the worst time since the Second World War.
I switched off my iPad. I had just finished the day’s writing. I mulled over his sentence with a smile.
What we see in this reality may indeed be the nadir.
But as long as we are breathing, as long as someone is still able to say such a line, light is still here.
It is just an inch beyond what we can see.
It is waiting at the height where possibility and regrowth begin.
As the thought completed itself, I heard my characters singing at the back of my head. And I knew then that this was a revelation worth sharing: the knowledge of quintessence, the link to Quintessenceway, the place where each person can offer their name, date of birth, and email address, and receive in return a quintessence message tailored by my friend Carmen — and the understanding that the world does not awaken through domination.
It awakens through the heart.
Once the heart is awake, the world will be awake.
And whoever holds their hands over us through fear, hatred, or domination will become as weak as smoke.
Below is a taste of wisdom, and a pledge to the journey of light’s return.
Rumi
“Yesterday I was smart and wanted to change the world. Today I am wise — and I change myself.”
Augustine of Hippo
“Pride is the beginning of all sin.”
Confucius
“A wise man looks for his own faults; a foolish man looks for them in others.”
Socrates
“He who thinks he knows enough already knows nothing.”
The Path of Quintessence
Before you can change the world, you must see who you truly are.
The Mirror of Truth is the first law of transformation.
Pride is a distorted mirror.
Complacency is a silent poison.
The Path of Quintessence is movement, and anyone who stops moving loses the light.
By despising others, you despise a part of the truth within yourself.
The earth’s chest is pierced, the sky is weeping, On the grave of peace, the flowers have yellowed. When will this cruel trial end? Where has the duty of humanity vanished?
The earth trembles, the sky’s heart is torn, As if not the sun, but wrath itself is poured. Look—this horizon isn’t a crimson dusk, From the veins of the land, blood has gushed.
The lifeless body of a child embraced, Did you see the tears in a mother’s eyes? When has the bird of happiness flown from here? Have you ever asked yourself once?
See, tiny hands frozen, A shell lies where toys should be. He didn’t yet know the enemy’s words, He only knew the mother’s milk.
Look—innocent tears of the little ones, The soil stained with children’s blood. These cries did not touch the stones, Has the light in their hearts gone out?
We spoke of independence, embraced freedom, Yet the cage of the heart is still the cage of the world. From which path did we lose our way? Why is every step a lesson from death?
Peace on your tongue, dagger in your hand— What kind of hypocritical politics is this? When will this polluted scene be cleansed? In the world, the flowers of compassion have withered.
From Your Longing
The sky has cracked from your longing, Your sigh has reached the gates of heaven. In the night wounded by noise, Your voice now searches for me.
The merciless wind blows without pause, Pouring years of sorrow into my eyes. Yet a lover stands like you, Why speak of Majnun at all in this?
Emotions
My gaze lifts to the heavens, I watch the birds in their bliss. The spirit of freedom strolls through my heart, Sharing your pure, innocent being.
Even the trees, and the flowers, hear My wandering voice like a nightingale’s song. Without making a sound, within the silence, I strum my strange, single-stringed tune.
My soul aches, yet the earth endures— I wipe my tears like pearls at every moment. How serene is this strange nature, Gently caressing my face in the soft night breeze.
Marjona Karshiyeva Zoxidjon qizi (born 2010)
Student at the Abdulla Qodiriy Creative School Poetess International eco-activist Holds a B+ in Mother Tongue and Literature 3rd place winner at the 2025 City Stage of the Mother Tongue and Literature Olympiad 1st place winner in the “F” creative category at the “Kamalak Yulduzlari” Children’s Literature Festival, 2022 3rd place winner at the national stage of the “Kamalak Yulduzlari” Children’s Literature Festival, 2023 Her creative works have been published in the book “A Bouquet from the Garden of Creativity”, released among creative schools.
In the back corner where Thole makes room for used tools, used wire, second-hand nails, even used books, there is a book entitled “Stress Holds for the Neophyte”. Most everyone who makes it to the far wall re-sale table thumbs through it. Picture upon picture, and sometimes drawings, of people, parts bent the wrong way, a road map to control, dominance, punishment. No one reads the smattering of text on the bottoms and sides of pages. But we speculate amongst ourselves who might have bought it new, abandoned it – before or after practice – here. We look for need in faces.
THE WEIGHT OF MARRIAGE
My wife was not abducted – she went willingly with the oboists. For a moment, the notes they were hurling formed the mathematics of music, and she began to dance. I had not known her to dance before. Into their clutch she danced, and, as the music fell snarling into disassociated whines, she continued to dance, the center of their affront. I am going as quickly as I can to salvage from the back of my closet my oboe. If I can catch them before town limits, it will not be a fair fight, but I have matrimony on my side.
TOLERANCE
We founded our town at the end of the earth. Not too close, as no one wants to slip into the abyss – but close enough that tour guides can ferry the curious to the edge, travel time justifying the price of a ticket. Our local economy centers around it, with earth-end hotels, restaurants, and souvenir stands. Visitors are amazed they can stand at the lip, return to town to exchange experiences at an ordinary coffee shop. Occasionally, a crowd believing the earth is round blows in. We don’t argue. They stay in our hotels, we let them be in error.
UNITY
There is an island in the center of the river where the River People plot against us. We cannot guess what evil taunts and challenges they are developing for us. Town Council is always thwarting one plot or another. Citizens have been briefly abducted by River denizens, come back to town with horrid description of the River People’s lack of humanity. We are hard pressed to find a logic to their designs. What we know is that they are in every way counter to ourselves. When out of-towners observe we have no river and no island, we explain our vigilance.
