We can only look at ourselves openly when our addictive behavior has become more painful than the reality it suppresses.

I grow out of the injuries, the failure, the incapacity.

They adhere to me. The trunk in which they are cut is my integrity. I can sustain. I can persist.

It means not to flourish, but it means to survive. And no tree blooms all year.

Humankind is a people blessed with miracles. Miracles are part of the nature of their existence.

Because all that troubles us are people. We are hurt and violated constantly. But the miracles also come to us – every day.

Who was seen by their parents? I do not know these people.

We were not seen by our parents, in our childhood, in adult life. We are unseen, unrecognized beings.

Now when we choose sexual partners, love partners, life partners, we touch that realm.

Our sexual partners can see us. We hope to be seen by them. That’s what love and sexuality are about: being seen, being recognized, and being exegated.

Now, if we have been unseen all our lives, we look for partners who can’t see us. There are different expressions of this.

These are people who have not been seen themselves, and who continue this not seeing towards themselves and towards others.

I call them self-distant people.

Love sleeps in these people. We want it to come to us.

We step into self-distant appreciation schemes, and try to satisfy them. We try to please a person, to live up to them, to be loved by them.

But we want, importantly, to be loved not as ourselves, but as self-distant versions of ourselves. We want to be appreciated as something we want to be, but are not.

Because being rejected in a self-distant manner promises to be less hurtful to us than being rejected for who we really are.

For me, it’s about accepting life. And to accept that its “facti” will never change. That one always remains bound to the limitations of one’s own starting conditions. And that one is beautiful in it. That it is not about drafting something, being something, getting somewhere. But as one is, as what one is, shines and is sufficient. Is enough. Is the end point. The equilibrium of existence.

Because in this failure, the opposite side always shone. In this path of failure, in this catastrophic sequence, there has always been life. There was always a shining. That which shone there, the moments of shining, were not only an overcoming, drafting or surmounting. That which shone there was also the magic of survival itself. Of pure being-alive, as one rarely allows oneself to feel.

Self-closeness for me means confronting one’s own fatality. We lie in failure with every fiber. Everything of us is fractured and broken. We are nothing. Not a piece, not a whole, not a sovereign. The best we can do is to gather the shards of what was.

And in this gathering activity there is hope, this gathering activity is hope. The shards of a broken vase that never was. We see our image in the association of the fragments of our failure

Hope is not a step to be taken, it is something in us.

As long as our existence is bearable, our being-alive is already welling up. We do not have to do anything. We are machines of hope. Originality flows insatiably from us. Every gait, every strike, every doing and thinking, is a beacon of our resistance.

To that come the impossibilities for which we have to do nothing but to persevere and show ourselves.

People fall in love with us all the time, we can’t do anything about it. On the street, we are beset by love-congratulations. We don’t have to do anything, and people love us.

The only criterion is the degree to which we show ourselves. We have to give people the opportunity to love us. We have to let people love us.

There is also the criticism, the looking away and the denial. Alienating human experiences. It is about enduring them like rain. We must have a bark and stand in the weathers. This is existence. We stand and outlast time. In it, we are the most beautiful thing. And people and things fall in love with us.

The blossoming and fertilization, the treats of life we enjoy, they are not the normal – they are the impossible. The normal is the persevering, the waiting, the outlasting. The bethinking of our agony. Keeping us warm, caring for us, protecting us. Life is not a fall of red wine. We stand in the wind and endure. Until the moments come when we blossom, when we fly, when we leave our form, change places, and ethuse the world.