Say, you or I have vines and fields and houses and land.
Shit, you have. No one owns the land. It is the land that owns us and plays tricks on us, never mind that we occasionally bother it, like fleas on a chicken.
Power? Bullshit. You sweat to build a block with 46 apartments and an earthquake can flatten it in one instant.
You get the applause of the audience and then there comes some microbe and you fall dying in your bed before you know what’s going on.
You earned big money and you commanded people “Do this or that you worms!” and there comes that pain in your belly and you rush ridiculously to the toilet, as everybody else does.
You arrogantly enjoy your power and there comes a frost and you start trembling like a beaten dog while over there a geranium, some insignificant plant, sits there all night beaten by the wind and the snow and in the morning it’s fresh and nothing is wrong with it.
Where’s your power, mister prince, here in this universe that squashes us with its weight?
Where are your majesty and your vanity?
If something happens to overturn everything, money, politics, health, every thing on which you base yourself, it’s all over, you have been written off in an instant and the others don’t even want to remember anything of you.
You die and fifty years later no one even knows if you lived or if you were ever feared or taken seriously.
Nikos Tsiforos: In [The guys in the square]. Greece, Athens: Ermis. Retrieved from http://pisostapalia.blogspot. gr/2011/11/blog-post_7611.html
**NOTE: The translation in English of this text was from the book in Greek, by Andy & Philip Wilcox, who translated in English my book “Shadow: the silent companion through our life’s journey”.
This text is one of the Quotations that I include in my book, and its translation is used EXCLUSIVELY for the edition of my book and for my website.