WAY- WAY... she said
One day at 12 o'clock my grandmother and I got on the bus. There were two other women with us. Since there were no empty seats, both my grandmother and the other two women stood. Not far from us, two female students were sleeping. After three or four stops, the female students "suddenly woke up" and got out at their stops. Grandma and an older woman took the empty seat.
At that moment, one of the women who was sitting with her partner started insulting the female students. The first: "Don't be too hard on them, they are uneducated girls." But the other one said, "She didn't give me a place, my legs hurt."
I wondered why the girls didn't give room to the old women. Could it be that their parents or teachers did not teach them about public transport etiquette? In any case, it affected me deeply.
With our people, there is a proverb that says that manners are learned from you. I drew the necessary conclusion from this incident.
I am Farzona Khoshimova. I am a pupil in the 6th grade in the 18th compulsory school in Fergana. I was a presenter of kids’ programs on Fergana TV station. Since 4th grade, I have been a member of a children`s club which is opened under the Republican children`s library. So far more than 10 of my articles and stories have been published in magazines and newspapers. By participating in several online competitions in telegram I have got many valuable presents, diplomas, and books. My future ambition is to become the best journalist.
“Anything dead coming back to life hurts” Discuss how Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores remembering and forgetting with reference to this statement.
Or Analyze the importance of storytelling in Beloved as a novel that grapples with “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken”. Or Critically examine the portrayal of slavery in Beloved. How does Morrison show Paul D and Sethe as self-defining agents of their own humanity? Or “Slave life; freed life—everyday was a test and a trial. Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.”
Or How does Toni Morrison portray the dehumanizing effects of slavery in Beloved? Or “This is not a story to pass on.” Discuss the relationship between individual and community, remembering and forgetting with references to the conclusion of Beloved. Or “He wasn’t surprised to learn that they had tracked her down in Cincinnati, because when he thought about it now, her price was greater than his; property that reproduced itself without cost.” Critically examine Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of female slavery.
Postmodernist bourgeoise Western tradition satirizes African American historicization of black community through the open-ended perspectives of fragmentations, absence and negation as embodied in the dichotomies and/or antitheses between living and dead, past and present, present and future, freedom and captivity, individual agency and the society. Toni Morrison abstracts as pamphleteer of protest writers epitomizing symbolically oppressive voices within the marginalized narrative framework of subaltern readings. “Negroes”, “underclass” and “slaves” are implicated to be colloquial idioms to burlesque the psychological as well as spiritual deficiencies bereft of internal intricacies and psychic motifs. Paul D’s contemplative outlook of the substantial perceptivity and critical receptivity in the literary mindscapes of Sethe succinctly explains freedom as accessibility towards desires by the autonomy of the self-empowered will and/or wishes. This fiction chronicles the prosaic challenges of the slave narrative encountered by Margaret Garner whose paradoxical motherly love traumatized by the enslavement of political institutions, “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Stamp Paid’s body might be enslaved but his mind was elsewhere alludes to the ex-slave character that uses debt based images. Babby Suggs deconstructs history by disremembering of the bodies that result in the acrimony of one’s flesh: “here”, she said, “in this place, we flesh, flesh that weeps, laughs, flesh that stands on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” Babby Suggs’s conviction blooming springfield of racial prejudice that personal empowerment cannot completely transcend the power of unjust societal laws and customs. Sethe’s butchering of Beloved or “crawling already” emanates the analogies embedded in the striking extermination of sexual perversities and metaphorical resistance to the perpetuating effectuation of slavery through captive breeding. “Nobody had her milk but me […] The milk would be there and I would be there with it.” Morrison personifies the milk of Sethe’s motherhood as the apropria of monetary worth that resonates slave owners proprietorship of disremembered body appendages. “Beloved was making her [Sethe] pay for the hand-saw […] Sethe was trying to make up for the hand-saw.” Beloved is the embodiment of rememory on the repository of African American cultural heritage as diasporic amnesia—–spirits of the phantom horror genre with realistic skin and eyes resembling naivete and innocence in the exultation of sweet honey in the rock, the trees and the water. Thus, the act of feeding the dead and pouring the libations are meant as symbols of communion, fellowship and renewal. Thus, continuity of genes cannot be dissociated from sustenance of memorabilia of the “living dead” and tragic wrenching of being and/ or non-being as anticipated in the epilogue, “although she has claim, she is not claimed […] it was not a story to pass on.”
Denver is the character of the third generation of the trinity that explores the African American cosmological trajectory of the future and Morrion’s insurmountable thesis of freedom and ownership. Denver will venture out of the yard and encounter the community in the reconstruction era as transvalued by the proclamation of Paul D in cognizance of Sethe: “We had more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” In her final soliloquy in the celebrated “She’s mine” section of the novel Denver reminds us of the perilous effects of disremembering : “I’m afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again I don’t know who it is, but there is something terrible enough to make her do it again. Whatever it is, it comes from outside the house, outside the yard and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to.” Satya Mohanty’s aphorism in “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity” , “The cognitive task of rememory is dependent on emotional achievement, on the labor of trusting oneself, one’s judgements and one’s companions” revives Valerie Smith’s critique redressal of the “inability of the text to convey the experience of what can no longer be spoken.”
Present epoch unspeakable racism of blackness is equivalent to a usable, marketable body politic as collectivized by narratological and dialogical positioning of Baby Suggs’s language that reveal the metaphor behind “We Flesh” associated with the return of dead bodies. These black bodies are euphemistically emphases of scarred, beaten, burning, pregnant, aged and growing as insidious symbols of commodities and machineries of reproduction in nineteenth century America that effulgently reviews reclaiming of dead bodies by Valerie Smith. Morrison’s politicization of corporeality and spirituality interweave body and spirit to be emphatically integrated by the visceral identity of the flesh sermon in the self-love dialectics of Baby Suggs. “And O my people they do not love your hand. They only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave out.” Critic David Lawerence describes the way in which this gesture of musicality, theatricality and linguistic reclamation put forth through the call of Baby Suggs underpins the connection of the seemingly alienated Sethe to the rest of her community: “This striving to claim self-ownership links Sethe’s own horrifying story to the story of the community. Central to the pursuit of self-ownership is the articulation of a self-defining language that springs from the flesh and blood of physical experience and that gives shape to the desire so long suppressed under slavery.” Baby Suggs’s sermon functions as the open and clear metaphor to relink flesh, desire and narrative. Sethe’s denial of death seems commensurate with the world that Morrison invents. There is a world of difference between Morrison’s insistence on remembering and acknowledging and even temporarily resurrecting the dead. Sethe’s desperate claim that nothing ever dies. In other words, the memoirs of the blackish holocaust must never be overlooked or disremembered. However, Seethe initially denies that anything passes on whether a memory, a feeling or a dead laughter. For Sethe, the static figure of her past is a picture or space into which anyone might offer her a temporary loophole out of loss and mourning and privileges for a denial both of personal responsibility and the inevitability of time itself. As Beloved consumes Sethe, Sethe loses herself to the embodied memory of Beloved until the community’s “sounds that broke the back of words”, snaps this cycle of repetition and returns Sethe to the history and Beloved to the oblivion of her death, in which she is literally dismembered—–”disappeared, some say, exploded right before their eyes.”
Toni Morrison’s depiction of the resurrectionist Beloved spotlights both state of remembering and disremembering through crisis and opportunity, that posits contours profoundly public and communal. Sethe literally becomes the superimposed dark face in Beloved’s self-reflecting gaze: “I see the dark horror that is going to smile at me […]It is the dark horror that is going to smile at me.” The unpunctuated language reinforces the profound desire to merge; the language itself resists separation and differentiation. Amy Denver’s scar as metaphor of Sethe’s back is associated with the chokecherry tree passage: “A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the bark———–it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder.” In this context, Denver’s tree image is not relegated to her own racial imperative since Sethe’s assertion to Paul D: “I got a tree on my back” vindicates the narrative cultural impasse. Claiming her body and claiming her history become tantamount to Sethe’s learning that she is her “own best thing” linked both to community and to the forces of history.
Literary archaeology excavates the memories from the site of memorabilia and antiquaries, depositories, souvenirs and collectibles, which generate an archive of mental images and metaphors. Memories within are the multiaccentuated psychic space of Morrison’s soil embedded in the unconscious realm as the interior recollections of the unspeakable and repressed. Sethe memorializes the surface imageries that mystifies the language in Beloved: “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms.” That historically and culturally inscribed metaphoricity of articulation subsequently described or divested within postcolonial discourse into the amplification and/ or exemplification of Sethe’s mystery and Morrison’s text. Chokecherry tree the performative metaphor suggests and/or implicates historically and politically matrices of narrative modes of identity-formation as embodied by the textual field to be undergoing binaries in the polarization of African American history, race, gender, slavery, and white dominance/ white supremacy/ white ethnicity and black communal practices.Poisonous and astringent chokecherry mainly indigenous as flora in the landscapes biodiversities of Virginia and Carolinas associate the textual field/ etymological field/lexical field and semantic connotations fostering Beloved’s endeavor to liberate towards a vindictive stance through desperate and possessive longing for love and expiation. Sethe’s altruistic maternal affinity and Paul D’s retellings of slavery when his tongue was held down by an iron but. Morrison extrapolates the metaphor so that fragmentation and dissolution are reciprocated by literalization and performativity within postcolonial space avenues/vistas . Homi Bhava critiques this social and “interpersonal reality … that appears within poetic images as if it were in parenthesis” furthering Judith Butler’s gender identity that argues, “performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent […] This productive capacity of discourse, a form of cultural reiterability or rearticulation, a practice of resignification but not creation ex-nihilo.”
Chokecherry Tree symbolically signifies the disintegrated identity of a regressive past that anticipates the violent consequences slavery but also denotes the ambivalent locus for the production and reproduction of colonial desire, fantasy and fetishism. In other words, both mutilation and dispossession of the black bodies have become Morrison’s unspeakable historicity. Sethe’s own mutilation repeats her mother’s disfiguration through slavery. Sethe’s pregnancy becomes the site of dispossession by the brutality and inhumanness of the schoolteacher allegorically symbolic of the loss of subjectivity, and, therefore, in narrative terms, the absence of metaphor as identity incidental to Sethe’s dehumanization and breast milk thievery. The underworld and the heavens furthermore mythologized as chokecherry tree connects Sethe to the spirit of Beloved and hints at the possessive and desperate relationship between them. Neither Sethe entirely associates nor entirely dissociates herself from the past[ness] and detachment and estrangement becomes existential crises.
Amy is like the Ariel creature in the context of being half slave, half human, half master, mediator or traitor and full of tales and songs and lackadaisical temperament, full of songs and tales and possessed by her lucrative aspirations —-the struggle for independence. Both Sethe and Amy Denver chronicler of their own story of survival and healing—-the latter points the verbal image of chokecherry tree after being conscious of dehumanization and mutability by the atrocities and ferocities of slavery underwent by the former’s enslavement and/or captivehood. Historical and psychological fragmentation of feminine subjectivity encapsulated in the doubling and divesting processes of metaphor that simultaneously Amy Denver’ aestheticizes performative narrative in so far as the connotations of birth; proselytizes the literal birth of Denver for which Amy Denver acts as a midwife.
Further Reading Barbara Christian’s Beloved, She’s Ours, Narrative January 1997, Volume 5, No. 1, pp. 36-49, Ohio State University Press Cynthia Dobb’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited, African American Review, Winter 1998, Volume. 32, No. 4, pp.. 563-578, Indiana State University Press Heiker Harting’s “Chokecherry Tree[s]”: Operative Modes of Metaphor in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 29:4, October 1998. University of Calgary Press.
the humans come out
& so do a few loud crows
after the snowstorm
—
tail end of winter
pretty warm in the sunlight
too cold in the shade
—
green buds have appeared
on Mom’s lilac hedge out front
first full day of spring
—
two deer & then three
in someone’s yard on Iris
missed the bus again
—
slept all day & night
I wake up past eleven
disoriented
—
bio/graf
J. D. Nelson’s poems have appeared in many publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of eleven print chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including *purgatorio* (wlovolw, 2024). Nelson’s first full-length collection is *in ghostly onehead* (Post-Asemic Press, 2022). Visit his website, MadVerse.com, for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
War is hell. We all know that. We are living in a time where, with social media, television and the internet, we cannot ignore the thousands of people suffering in many parts of the world; people fleeing from their country’s enemy, explosions occurring daily, houses and infrastructure destroyed, famine, families separated, outright chaos and an unimaginable degree of civilian death.
This historical fiction novel, SALT to the SEA by Ruta Sepetys, takes us back to 1945 World War II Germany, in East Prussia; to a time and scenario where thousands of civilians are subject to immediate evacuation or be killed. The scenario depicted in 1945 Prussia is equal to a page out of current day (2024) news in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Haiti as well as in other parts of the world, people desperate to escape war zones.
For me, the underlying themes of this novel were wrapped around: hope, trust, instinct and the strength of strangers in a group who bond together to face a “life or death” crisis. Each of the main and secondary characters in this book has a unique perspective based on his/her cultural background, nationality and personal experiences before and during the war.
The ages of the characters in this story range from 6 years old to 70+ years old. The small group meet for the first time when holed up in a cabin in the German forest in the middle of a snowy winter; most of them traveling alone, starved, hoping to get to a coastal port, and then board a ship to take them to safety. The hope for each of them is to somehow eventually make it back to their respective family in their home country, and not be murdered by Russians or Germans along the road. At first, the small group agree to stick together. They set out from the cabin in the woods on the treacherous journey, determined to reach the Baltic port of Gotenhafen, hoping to board the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship re-purposed by the German military to evacuate the thousands of displaced citizens.
The characters crafted by Ruta Sepetys are both colorful and complicated. And this is what I love most about this book. Characters include: an old man the group refers to as the ‘Shoemaker Poet,’ (the sage of the group), a pretty 21-year-old Lithuanian nurse (Joana), a 6-year-old lost boy (Klaus), a blind teenage German refugee (Ingrid), a 19-year-old museum apprentice from Prussia (Florian), a sometimes abrasive woman from Norway (Eva) and a 15-year-old Polish girl likely targeted for elimination by Nazis. Their collective mission is to reach the East Prussian port uninjured and ‘alive.’
Of course, there is internal conflict for several of the characters, as well as disagreements between group members. This heightens the tension as we move along in the story. For me, an author myself, I feel that there is no doubt that a story without conflict can lack believability and authenticity. Ruta Sepetys is a master at showing readers both internal and external conflicts without going overboard or appearing contrived.
There is another key character in the story, a young German soldier named Alfred (Frick) who is not traveling with this small group of evacuees. Alfred has low self-esteem and also a passionate dedication to Adolf Hitler. Greatly flawed, Alfred is determined to prove to his family back home in Heidelberg and to the girl he loves and writes letters to, that he is becoming a hero in the German army, and is critical to the success of the massive evacuation. He is situated on the ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, and in reality, assigned to menial tasks.
There are secrets about each of the key characters which are artfully revealed one by one by Sepetys. This writing technique kept me riveted as reader. SALT to the SEA is a book that I couldn’t put down, just a 2-day read for me. There were times when I thought I couldn’t take any more of the horror embedded in these pages but I cared so greatly for many of the characters and was anxious find out their next steps and see how they would navigate the scary obstacles and challenges anticipated.
The scene at the East Prussian port is chaotic; harrowing for each member of the small group, a few of them pretending they are alternative nationalities, so they would successfully be granted permission to board. It’s ‘touch and go’ for everyone at the port, and the tension the author creates is sizzling.
Readers may know ahead of picking up this book, that the ship, the “Wilhelm Gustloff” was in fact, ill-fated, and resulted in a much more catastrophic disaster than the well-known ‘Titanic,’ in terms of numbers of human casualties. The ship was, as mentioned earlier in this review, originally designed as a cruise ship. It was built to hold a maximum of 1400 souls. Yet, the German military loaded the ship with nearly 10,000 evacuees.
I won’t say more. The nuggets I shared here in this review in terms of plot and characters are often included in many previews of this well-written book.
Although this story is heart-wrenching, there are some bright lights all the way through, including plenty of romance, friendship and inspiring family scenarios. My belief is that readers will be fully invested in finding out who, in this unlikely group, endure the journey and who unfortunately fail to make it. I believe that the ending to SALT to the SEA, although painful, will leave readers hopeful and inspired.
Reading historical fiction has been a great portal for me to continue to learn about the world that ‘was’ before I was born. But it also helps me see more clearly the repeated and disastrous mistakes in judgment made by at least a handful of selfish leaders across our planet.
Thank you Ruta Sepetys for your incredible story.
Everyone has read at least 10 books, because books have their place in life. I have read many books so far, including secular, religious, business, psychological and leadership books. Each book has its own knowledge to give to a person, and I can easily say that through the information in the book, people gain experience in their lives. Personally, from the book I read about business and leadership, I learned skills that can be used in life and can easily get out of problems.
Sometimes a person doesn’t understand himself. For example, this happens to me a lot. You want to pour out your heart to someone, but you can’t find the words to say, only the right words. But you’re full of pain, pain… You think how to get rid of it, but you can’t find a way. You want to cry, it’s hard in your throat something is stuck. Wait for tears to flow from your eyes. But unfortunately, you will not shed tears. You will suffer a lot. Right now you are looking for a close friend – a confidant. Unfortunately, everyone is busy with their own pain; and they take your words superficially. They even forget after a few minutes. Because when someone tells you about the pain of a date, your heart won’t break. Unfortunately, in a few minutes, you will forget the pain that overturned his whole world. Of course, pain and feelings are not interesting and important to anyone. You realize that you don’t understand and put your head on the pillow with pain. Your soft pillow seems to harden with the pain. You get up and open your phone. You try not to get distracted. Unfortunately, none of this helps…
Basically, these pains accumulate during the day and give you excruciating pain in the evening. Sometimes these pains accumulate for years. At worst, I don’t feel or understand what is causing this pain. Your conscience, your heart knows, but the date cannot be expressed in words.
But don’t be afraid! It doesn’t hurt every day. Some are every 2 days, some are once a week, some are once a month, and some are even once a year. That’s when you fall asleep. When you wake up in the morning, you will find that everything is fine and everything is better…
Laylo Bakhtiyorova was born on 11.10.2000 in the Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. Currently, she is a graduate student of Tashkent State Pedagogical University. Currently, she is a member of the organizations of Argentina, Russia, and India. She has been helping many young people to enter the international arena.
Napkin Notes (Dawn’s Daylight Discourse and Osho) for Raquel
The Old Timer
Loud, but grew on me. Osho said the belly laugh is disappearing from the world and once it is gone the world is basically done. He has the belly laugh. People pause and look. I offer my seat to an elderly couple and he notices. He stands up. What does he want? He approaches. He announces that, ‘I can see there is one last gentleman in the world, and you are it,’ and he points at me. I tell him thanks. He goes and sits back down and continues reading his paper, while I notice not many people read a newspaper anymore.
The Sleeping One
She is dressed well, from shoes to all else,- business attire. And she sleeps every time. Then suddenly wakes up, takes a look around, uses the washroom, comes back, and leaves. She never orders anything or talks to another soul. Maybe she works night shift and day shift,- or has a sleeping disorder, or likes to rest. It’s okay. For instance, Osho told his university teachers that he napped every afternoon at a certain time and would be sleeping in class, and not to disturb him during that time.
The Crossing Guard
Upbeat. Happy. Aged. Looks a bit like Henry Miller with his bald head. walks far he tells the others. Still, a solitary sort. Kind. Good hearted. Much energy. Reads. Writes. Is focused. Seems healthy. Balanced. Miller lauds Gurdjieff, who is Osho’s favourite. These things I think while staring out windows at the new sun.
The Reader
A bag of books. He is a veteran of a war. Pauses to stare in the air I suppose to think about a passage he just read. Subjectively and personal experience must be valid or there would be no book or writer or just one book and that’s it. Or, maybe he is reading history or about architecture or something. Osho in real life arrived at the library every morning before the librarian and waited to be let in. He was dedicated to reading.
The Missionaries
These ones pretend to be your best friend right away. But they are not that different than telemarketers as they follow a basic script. First they introduce themselves. Then they talk and go in steps trying to get you to go to their church. They are allowed some leeway to meet again if necessary with two more of their ilk present. That is, if they think you are worthwhile mark, meaning they can get you to church. once you state disinterest,- they will not speak w/you again. why not? Because they never liked you in any way to begin with, therefore why would they? God’s people it seems, don’t believe in internet, music, reading, friendship, movies, or much else. there is a dress code, and they can only be separate while using a bathroom and at other time. Their God is a micro manger, a strict task master. Cults are interesting. But only for a few minutes. Osho said if that particular group that they kind, but had strange beliefs.
The Vacant
Three and they do nothing and talk about nothing. If one has had a mini-crisis- the one will cry briefly and the other two will console her. They arrive in high end Mercedes and other. There is not a scuff on their shoes and they are over accessorized. They look a bit like clowns. What they add to the world is beyond me. Osho used the word, ‘somnambulist’ a lot. May I get struck by lightning but, c’mon…
The Proletariat
Van. Boots. Coffee. Shift. No nonsense. That’s about it. A city worker. Smart though. Osho says that it is a mistake to think that there are only hands and heads,- because heads have hands and hands have heads. This is the impression I get also.
The Asshole
He buds, cuts in front of other people. I wonder if it’s me being too analytical but the two he budded in front of sit beside me. One leans over and mentions to the other, ‘That guy is plain mean.’ And the other nods. The asshole is so self involved I don’t think he even cares on any level. He’s not ‘being’ an asshole. He ‘is’ an asshole. Probably all the time,- like a way of life. He is probably also a person who throws his garbage in the street. Osho said don’t treat the earth as your garbage can.
The Hockey Captain
He wants to talk to me because i am wearing a New York Rangers wool winter hat. But I tell him it’s really just because the hat is comfortable and I do whatever I want that way. He thought for a second I might have played for them, as he did, because why would a Toronto resident wear that? He is nice. A bruiser. He was the captain. A long time ago. He wears a hockey ring. I don’t like hockey anymore. I played too much. It’s all I did when everyone else was at the movies or working part time jobs or studying. And the ring. I guess to each his own. But Osho says even winning a beauty pageant can be a curse, because you were once Miss Wherever and might never get over it, might keep that idea in your self your whole life and not be present. Osho says he used to jog every morning and then stopped. That the people said he had lost it. But he didn’t need it anymore. Had found a better ‘it.’
The Super Rich
These two are from another planet. Totally silent. They don’t even say a word to one another. Unlike the faux world though,- they don’t flaunt, but ARE. There is nothing wrong in their aura and atmosphere it is their path. But how boring. They must have no story to tell at all. I don’t know why they go there, and not somewhere else,- but there must be something they like there. Just looking at them makes you want to fall asleep. Osho says the truth can wait a long time because it is the truth. Maybe they are good. Who knows?
The Homeless
He keeps his cans outside. In bags. Talks to everyone. He’s okay overall. He only goes in there in the summer months. Has a bike. Healthier looking than anyone and more tanned. Older now. Where he goes is a mystery. Very awake, perceptive. His eyes look absolutely everywhere all the time. On alert. Has developed almost a sixth sense for survival and life. I’ve seen this before. Probably a better judge of character than any psychologist or councillor in the entire world. through hard fought experience
and actual living. Osho says what you want if you can get it is the look in the eyes of that person you saw that for whatever reason has become disengaged from society.
The Europeans
They gather and talk. It used to be like that in the malls, moreso when there was smoking. Nice enough. Sometimes one paws a rosary or other prayer bead on a string. I like their sweaters. Sweaters only for warmth. Olden days. Before me even. Kind of hermetic that group,- but all groups are I suppose. They understand one another deeply on all levels more than they even know. Osho says to enjoy the group if it is there and also solitude if it is there.
The Nigerians
These are the hardest workers and the smartest or tied in smarts and work ethic with others. I like them very much. There is a toughness and a kind hearted way that live somehow meshed together. I don’t know them anymore but used to work alongside them. Strong in body and spirit and mind. Osho talks of Zorba the Buddha, a phrase he coined to express the marriage of opposite temperaments into one wholistic unified consciousness. Earth and sky.
The Narcissist
There is nothing you can say to that one. They will just relate it to themselves. Impossibly narrow, more narrow than narrow,- more like a child than even children in their outlook. And the narcissist is Selfish. Dark. Materialistic. Manipulative. It’s best to stay away. Even small brief interactions are bad. They only see others for what they can provide for them. They are actors. They are not communicating out of any sense of genuine self,- but from a false self. They are ugly. They have such a bad atmosphere. Like poison. Or garbage left out somewhere on a hot summer day. I suppose Osho would call the person unconscious.
The Empath
Their plight is difficult. They can sense the others and hardly turn the perception down or off. Oh well. Hopefully the whole or source or god will heal and/or guide them. But it’s good to remain in the light as much as possible while navigating a dark world. Osho says he can be silent for four years so that those who truly know him will stilll know him in the heart.
The Narc
He tells people he parks there to get away from his wife. But he asks people strange questions. He is a cop all the way. I knew by looking at him from twenty feet away. There is a set of people he is following, keeping tabs on. Three people actually. Two close together and a third more loosely affiliated. It’s interesting. When they disappeared, he disappeared. They always pull the narc from an area really fast if there is no use for them. Osho is not for marriage. Perhaps the narc knows most people also aren’t, even if secretly against it.
The Techie
Quiet. To himself. Kind of a hipster. A strap that keeps the glasses on. Thirties but fully grey hair. Happy. Regular. Just living. Many computers and phones. No drama. Could probably fix any problem like that in minutes. Osho says to plant a rose garden and the world will be for you. Such is methinks finding a passion.
The Drug Dealer Wannabe
He’s dumb. He reads all the labels of the bottles he stole or bought but thinks nobody is watching. Someone comes close and he scrambles to shove them in a bag again. He is not sure what some of the pills even are. Darting eyes. Osho says the problem with stealing something is only half you might get caught. The other half is that a cloud comes over the thief, a certain sense-aura- atmosphere-, and settles around him. This one is like that. His energy is completely messed up. Osho says many are stumbling around.
The Bible Group
These ones are different than the other missionaries. Same religion but they just study to themselves. They are actually deep. In love and with and dedication to the meaning of scripture. And they have each other. The Good Book, the church wherever it is, and yes,- their larger community and smaller group. They have their mind and heart on more profound things than most others. Good for them, I think, though am no one to say. Jesus comes to a devotee of Osho and says to leave. The devotee tells Osho and Osho agrees right away, that the devotee should leave. Osho gives his greatest discorse on his favourite gospel, the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas, and provides esoteric and deeply textured insights into Jesus and his followers.
