A Thought About Pain

No matter how short our lives can be, pain is always there.

It's not a negative-vibe-post I am trying to conceive here, it's a projection of what's inside my head right now: an infuriating pain of knowing that I am most of the time helpless facing all the pain I see around, whether it inflicts me or not.

There's the physical pain, the moral pain, the psychological pain, the plain pain, the sexy pain, the made-up pain, etc...

You think the ultimate pain is hitting your left thumb with a hammer only to discover that breaking it is much more painful.

You think breaking-up with "the one" is painful only to find that losing a loved one in a silly accident a million times harder.

Then you think that witnessing the death of millions of people for food shortage is painful and makes you feel helpless, until you know that thousands of tons of food are being destroyed in order to maintain a proper market price...

-------

It's been a while now I've been observing people around me:
we've become a self-centered-ego-maniac-driven humanity.

What Hesperides said might be true:
"No pains, no gains.
If little labor, little are our gains:
Man's fortunes are according to his pains."

However, my dear Hesperides, if you were living in our world today, I can only imagine what you might have said about gain & pain...

What future awaits us, I do not know, what I know is that the worst pain is inflicted by humans -to any other living creature- when they lose their humanity, no matter how insignificant they think the act/word/thought/idea is.

Drink water.

"Rage" |  © Samah El Hakim 2011

Mother Earth

Last Saturday I planted a tree.
A pine tree it was, around 12 years old.
As I was preparing the piece where it would be planted,
I felt a strong connection with Mother Earth.

This small act of 20 minutes while thinking about how this tree would grow in its new place and finally "breathe", when it's been imprisoned for 12 years in a small flowerpot, gave me so much satisfaction.

Once finished, images of destruction came to my mind.

-------

Nature is a beast sometimes, it's true,
but Man is even more savage:

How easy it is to cut down an 80-year-old tree
"because its falling leaves are littering our backyard".

How simple it is to raid a forest using a bulldozer
"to clear the view".

How fast we can pollute a nearby river
"to keep our house/factory clean".

How can we ever regain what we destroyed?
We can't...

All the beautiful mountains that we transformed into ugly buildings.
All the water that we polluted.
All the forests "evaporated".
All the extinct species.
Then...
All of us.


This is far from being an alarm, it's more of a cry
during my "semi-mourning" for our dear Mother Earth.

We are slowly dying with Her.
For any possible resurrection, believing is not enough.
Start acting.