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Jan 2019
I still feel the pain
For those who sailed
Through ships towards the unseen.
I ache for their courage
And for their unjust fate.

The world was never the same:
A new order,
A new richness,
New types of suffering,
An unthinkable set
Of both greatness and meanness.

It was not a discovery for a new world,
But for different ideas,
Possibilities that defied
Everything once believed.
Eventually, it somehow turned
Into a new power game.

Those who died
Died for themselves:
The world they were building
They never knew it,
They could not foresee it,
It was not their battle.
They struggled for life,
They flew away from a harsh place
To another harsh place
For they were harsh themselves.

The world would never be the same
For the simple man would never be the same.
They now knew more,
But knew also so little.
As we know little
And think we know everything.
Magellan stood still
While the Earth revolved around him.
We are still,
We are the same,
Great and mean,
The same.
Colonized and colonizers.
The same.
The clock turns around twice every day,
Rivers turn to ocean that turn to cloud that turn to rivers.
Life dies to feed new life,
We get on top to be the base to something else get on top.
We aim so high we reach the base.
We heat everything up so much things freeze.
We imagine a space so big it can only exist within our tiny heads.

The courage is to extend yourself,
But for that we need to diminish us.
We can't be big in order to be big.
We must be tiny persons,
Limited, short-sighted, blindfolded,
So we can see what can't be seen.
The courage is not
To fight storms or drift with no tools.
The courage is not to bet life in your ideas,
But to have no ideas at all
And still bet your life.

What we call discovery
Is not an act, is a way of living.
We call discovery
To arrive at a party
Everybody else was,
But we didn't know about it.
That's ignorance.

The real discovery
Was never a continent,
Or the conquer of vast rich lands.
The only thing discovered
Was the new limits to our imagination.

Something we are really lacking these days:
New boundaries for our thoughts.
We are cloistered by what we see
And still asking
What is it suffocating us
When it is just
We are forgetting to breathe all the time.
Danilo Brito Steckelberg
Written by
Danilo Brito Steckelberg  29/M/São Paulo
(29/M/São Paulo)   
119
   Em MacKenzie
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