Happy Independence Day!

Normally, this date incites reflections on the topic, but today there is something rather personal that comes to my mind.

It seems that everything is rather ambiguous today – even the date itself bears some duality – but still... As a matter of fact, everything in life somehow comes down to simple things. Say the truth, not because you are surely right, but because this truth is yours. Listen to the reply, because your truth is not the only one. Forgive children, because even the wisest of them remain children. Accept forgiveness, because even the oldest of us remain children. Look into the eyes, because otherwise your talk only to yourself. Look into the eyes, to talk to the soul, not the body. Do your work, if it is really yours, and enjoy it. Dream, because not by plan alone does a human live. And thus, I have no wish to claim the teacher's role, but rather prefer to be a pupil. And yet another thing that has occurred to me:

there's nobody here
just love and fear
we three drink from one – it is almost a canon
and it's rather easy to tell what I see
but you will only know if
you manage to stay silent
it's almost a koan

birch root
you stepped from a dream outside
and all those men and women and we as them
but more often than not you enter the silver chime
you thought this chime is from there
but it is from within

as a good boy who reads from here to there
who loves as one must and believes and maybe that is the way
and you would be like that if you had not been so alive
but this is your truth: there's nobody here
only love and fear
and one of you three
finally has to leave

Why all this lyrics? We live in quite an interesting time, almost like in the famous Chinese saying. Ukraine is at the crossroads, it is obvious. But a country is not an abstraction at all. A country is each of us. Its face is our face. Every day. That's something, probably, worth remembering.

Anton Yozhyk Leyba (Hedgehog)

And another thing:
Almost by tradition now, on the occasion of the Independence Day, UMKA has a SPECIAL OFFER. For more information, click here: http://umka.com/eng/news/