Some people have it naturally, some need to work at it. But you don’t get anywhere unless you work at it.

Never surrender, but do let go.

I come from the marshes, the swamplands,
Fish swam around my webbed feet,
Swans sang hymns of the world below;
Storks nourished my tender mind
and whispered
The darkest secrets of water and motherhood,
Tales of the deluge, of air
condensed
With silence.

In the belly of our maker
I found refuge through
Deception and makeshift wit –
The will of lizards, the patience
of the spider’s snare;
Finding spaces where the darkness
can be filled with lightning.
Ancient curses on my lips,
My eyes full of honey;
The tears of the Earth
and all its ministries.

We are the fallen armies
redeeming Nature
From the wicked grasp
of our precognition and fickle
desires of men;
Our snakeskin is a mark
Of the beast and the angel
Entwined as DNA, our fingers
Sunken in the origins of matter;
the primordial mud.

And when we rise,
We must fall again, as it is written,
Into the Netherland Empire
of our brethren;
And only sound will be our witness
As the Word made us.
It will slay us.
Amen.

© Milana Vujkov, Netherland Empire, 2014

Sometimes surviving a catastrophe was what the catastrophe was for.

Tap into your own rebellion.

Be more interested in what you create than in what you consume.

Unless we are willing to go to the cold dark heart of our own desire for specialness, we will never be free of the need to please.