What We Desire is Well-being...(from The Rebel, Albert Camus)
With John Brennick, Ioney Smallhorne, Joseph Adeiye, Gemma Weekes, Vanessa Walters, Isaiah Weekes, Dennis Da-ala Mirilla - May 11th, 2021
What we desire is well-being…
What we go after is too often provided by others, by our immediate environment, that is, our culture, our society, our surroundings.
So we spend our precious time pursuing goals we don’t truly want or which provide more than we need or are actively bad for our well-being.
And if it’s bad for OUR own well-being, then it’s bad for our family, friends, co-workers.
For example, our culture pushes sugar- and fat-“enhanced” foods and beverages. For our well-being, we would choose nutritious, beneficial foods.
Stop and think! Meditate! Immerse in nature! Move! Do what you can to escape the pressures of society.
By John Brennick
What we desire is well-being…
The scent of cardamom lingering
fresh sheets and lay-ins midweek
argan oil absorbed into skin
following the unfurling river
to apple and blueberry pancakes
Letting shoulders drop
ideas swell like
clouds brewed in teapots
smiles as warm and sweet as mango flesh
stretching into the curves of incense
exhaling like creeping ivy
realizing some leaves are furry
recognizing myself in bird song.
By Ioney Smallhorne
What we desire is well-being…
Where I come from, we are laborers. We labor for life —labor to maintain life. In our quest to live, we are lost in our mad rush to the death on a daily basis. A rush to survive. 5 to 9 is 4 to 10 in my city. Everyone who wishes to live here must die, however slowly. The heat is invigorating, but our skin is searing after staying out in the sun too long. The light is beautiful, but our eyes are going blind after staring at the sun too long. What keeps us kills us. What we desire is wellbeing, and we have no other way to get it but to lose it.
By Joseph Adeiye
What we desire is well-being…
Nothing at all we really need but freedom. Freedom of body and spirit.
The warmth of another’s skin. A smile crossing impossible distances.
A purpose.
Despite everything that’s available to us: all the noisy choices; all the stuff, the likes, the slogans; the politics like an almighty game show.
All we need is true connection – with ourselves, with others, nature, the silence and majesty of everything we cannot know.
Who are we? When we say that word, who do we include? How big is the tribe?
Can we circle our hearts around everybody?
Can our minds bear such an obliterative level of empathy?
When we move through these cities, through the tunnels of our thoughts and the daily fight for survival; do we all sometimes go outside and wish to go further outside?
Do we lock our doors behind us and venture into the narrowness of our homes and still wish to go home?
Are we all one ray of light refracted through a rainbow of experiences?
A chaos of perspectives circling one truth?
by Gemma Weekes
What we desire is well-being…
“It’s not. It’s harm really that we desire. It’s pain. It’s not easy to explain,” he said. I didn’t know what to think. He was so odd, with his books on stoicism and the way he denied himself so many things, like new clothes. His sagged or were threadbare, little peepholes in the crotch or under the arm. Like fun - a letting go. I never once saw him take a breath like a tide going out. His idea of resting was to sit alert like a meerkat, waiting for ideas. Then he jumped into action. There was no downtime. Not with me. It ddin’t feel personal, but I took it personally anyway.
By Vanessa Walters
What we desire is well-being…
Crackle! Pop! I hear as I stoke the blood-red fire. What did I expect from wood I harvested from something nicknamed the blood tree?
I hear a frightened whimper from the bushes.
“Can you come out of there, please?”
Another whimper.
“Fine, I’ll tell you why I`m here, and then you can trust me.”
Plus, I have no one else to talk to, I say internally.
“When I was two, I heard my mother and father talking about my lack of druidic power. My family is known as the dragon-born. Druids neither were rhetorical as you can see.”
A calm but still cautious noise ripples across the dead silent forest.
“My father screamed, ‘He is a weakling without a drop of magic to his name!!’ I should have expected him to try and get rid of me, especially when he lead me to the forbidden forest and left me there. But the blood-red vine wrapping around my scaly arm - filled with every cure, sickness, and pathogen in the most dangerous hellhole on this planet - proved him wrong. ‘All anyone wants is a home,’ I said, crying. ‘You can’t leave me here! Mom said she would never leave me,’ I shouted at him as he left. Too fast for my little legs to follow. Ha, that idea died when I was forced to kill my first demon. Now my only goal is to shove this spiked vine through his greedy, cold heart.”
And as this baby hellhound curled up beside me, a feeling I have never experienced before washed over me. I finally had a friend.
By Isaiah Weekes, 14
What we desire is well-being…
He wasn’t sure if he should apply for the MFA at the University of Boston. The introduction page said, '“People with flowery prose need not apply” and he wasn’t sure if he fell into that bracket. He thought it cheeky and wasn’t convinced the tutors would be kind. The most important thing for him was his well-being. He had to protect it.
If he had learnt anything working in publishing for a decade, it was that being jobless is better than being in a toxic environment. Choosing to be a writer is a gamble, one he had chosen to roll his dice on, but this, this he would not fly blindly.
He closed the tab and pulled up the Google page, and searched MFA programs in Boston.
By Dennis Da-ala Mirilla