NELLY FURTADO: "I'm Like A Bird"

"The path of the enlightened one leaves no track. It is like the path of birds in the sky." (Buddha)

DAN FOGELBERG: "Lonely In Love"

There shall be no loneliness in love, or love shall not be.

GLENN MILLER: "Moonlight Serenade"

Her words were crisp, sweet like melon, and he sipped from her lips with thirsty gulps as if he had been roaming vast deserts for long days and cold nights. He craved for some intellectual arousal and indulged in the soothing wisdom of her voice. She talked slowly and steadily, yet still too fast for him to capture it all. He was mesmerised by her look, and felt overwhelmed by her abundant presence, as if he was that shy kid again who entered the candy store not knowing what to ask for. A little flame hops from the candle to a pair of mysterious eyes. A big white moon eavesdrops on their conversation, while casting its silvery light on her beaming face. When you hear the truth, your soul recognises it to be so. He breathes toxic dreams; he’s not going anywhere.

U2: "Sometimes You Can't Make It Own Your Own"

I vividly remember the happiness I felt on that sultry summer day, when you finally bought me a strawberry ice-cream after I had been nagging for it for hours. Or the rebellion we shared, when I was sitting at the back seat of our car, then you opened the side window while casting me a cheeky glance, and turned the music loud for all to hear. Sometimes, you would put me on the saddle of your lap and shake me up and down on your knee. For a while, you would find peace with yourself, simply by looking at me through your own encouraging eyes. A mere glimpse of your sincere attention, and I truly believed that I was a famous jockey on the way to victory, biting my tongue amidst the deafening cheers of an imaginary crowd on the stands surrounding the racetrack. I disarmed you with my giggles of innocent excitement. At the age of a child, we are still young and unafraid, and our laughs are uninhibited and contagious. In those rare but precious moments with you, I inhaled the confidence that only a dad can give, for no form of love is more pure, reliable and unconditional than that of a parent for his child. Unnoticeably, you became the standard I set for myself, when I seek to love and be loved in return. I miss the umbilical cord we never really had, but felt we had. We silently promised each other to never cut it loose. You guided me without uttering all too many words, by simply being who you were, and by accepting me for who I truly was.

Nobody is perfect. We were each other’s mirror. I would forgive you all, if only I could see you one more time. In fact, I had forgiven you all long time ago already, once my understanding of life in general ripened as the season changed from spring to summer in my own. I just regret that I never used the chance to tell you. There’s no day I don’t think of you, wondering where you’d be now. I look up at the clouds; they cast their shadows over me. In their stubborn silence, they refuse to give me any clue. Are you watching me, or at least watching over me? You gave me the sense of freedom and the belief that everything was possible, and took it away from me when you passed away and left me behind. Yet now I am afraid to find it back, as if I doubt my ability to make it on my own. I want a new you. You had the gift to inspire me, the power to guide me without using reins, to give me confidence and understanding for the choices I made, even though some must have caused you sleepless nights without me even knowing it. But you lived life yourself so you knew how it often has other plans in store for us than what we expect it to bring. Sometimes only when we find it, do we finally know what we have been searching for. You must have known this long time ago already, maybe even before I was riding horse on your lap.

PRINCE: "When Doves Cry"

Love is not about finding someone who you can live with, but finding someone who you can not live without.

BARRY WHITE: "Practice What You Preach"

己所不欲，勿施於人。(jǐ suǒ bù yù, wù shī yú rén)

"Do not do to others what you don't want to be done to you." (Confucius)

FAITHLESS: "God Is A DJ"

“Choose Your God”. It’s a mysterious advertisement that sneaked in without invitation; a not so random combination of coloured pixels that spreads onto my laptop screen with the pretention of an ostentatious artwork of a never-to-be-discovered genius. It’s endless and tiring, how numerous commercial messages fight for our attention these days. No matter where we surf to or browse through, no matter what we listen to or look at, there are countless virtual crooks hiding in cyberspace, setting up an ambush and patiently waiting to spoil our online broth with their verbal and visual harassment.

It’s frightening also, at times, when the nature of those advertisements as if by miracle seems to match with the contents of the e-mail you just received, or the blog you are reading… ;-)

That always reminds me of a popular picture frame that left a lasting impression on me when I was a little boy. It hang at my grandma’s house, where it was strategically positioned on the living room wall: a triangle that contained a stern, human eye squeezed in between its three sides, and then the chilly sentence: “God is watching you – don’t curse here”. No doubt that scared the hell out of me back then. I hardly dared to utter a word when my grandma asked me if I wanted a glass of lemonade. I didn't trust him, that god of hers, and even when I did not nervously peek at that hollow eye from the corner of my own eye, I felt it was staring at me all the time, ever-present.  I sincerely believed that there was a tiny camera hidden in there, oblivious that such cameras would only  be invented two decades later. At that innocent age, our fantasy toys with us as if it’s a playful dog and we are a softball; we tend to get carried away easily by our imagination, and all scary things risk being magnified and totally blown out of proportion. Shadows become monsters; the cracking of the stairs is the sound of a thief on his way to your bedroom. Utter horror, sheer terror, a child’s demons crawl over incomprehensible paths.

But there it is, brightly lit on my screen: an ingenious sentence that teases me to click through. “Choose Your God”. As if religion is something you can pick like a dish from a restaurant menu, depending on your mood, your craving, your whim of the day. Regrettably many consider it to be this way, a product on the supermarket shelf for them to use as they please and dispose of it when it no longer serves them. They pray to their god only when they are in need, thereby asking him a favour when they are faced with an earthly problem. Then when that issue gets resolved, at most some will have the courtesy to thank him still, before going on with their lives again, as if their spiritual appetite has subsided. It’s remarkable how most religions have created different gods for different purposes, even those religions that claim there is one god only. They creatively circumvented their conceptual limitations by creating saints, for instance, mortals with exceptional qualities, almost divine, who became the symbol of certain human aspirations: a saint to protect the farmers, a saint for fertility, a saint to worship if you lost something and who’s supposed to bring that item back to you…

Clever marketing guys, those religious people, trying to increase their market share by designing custom-made saints or gods. And now they discovered the world wide web even.

“Choose Your God”. I can’t resist. After all, I am very much interested in all things spiritual; I am a searching soul wandering the worldly paths to find some truth and enlightenment. “Curiosity is the source of all knowledge”, I ponder, and I click on the banner, not worrying about the viruses I may invite into my computer by doing so, or the spam mail I will probably have to endure for some time to come. I sit up straight, focused, in upper concentration, expecting some interesting, new spiritual insight to appear on the screen. A blink, some flickering, a window pops up. “GAME LOADING”…

I sigh. Amen.

TEARS FOR FEARS: "Shout"

"Timendi causa est nescire."

(The cause of fear is ignorance - Seneca)

JASON MRAZ: "Unfold"

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.

(Ranier Maria Rilke)

CLAWFINGER: "When Everything Crumbles"

I’d wish my words had wings. They’d fly to you and whirl around your head, like a butterfly on a sun-soaked afternoon. They’d make you dizzy and knock you down, spinning stories that would both awaken you and make you slumber. Then after a while, you’d slowly open your eyes, and embalmed in a scent of honey and freshly-cut grass, you’d bring your finger to your eyes and would wipe the crumbles of rapidly-forgotten dreams away. You’d gently come back tiptoeing into this world, and you’d gain clarity with the growing confidence of a painter’s brush.