Kjerne

My name is Melvin, my year is 1984. So strange that I do really love that series of four numbers, because I don’t know about anything else that happened in that year other than my birth. In the years following my birth two sisters would follow me into the world and one brother. And until the year 2000 we live together as a family of six people, bound by blood, and love, although that was not so clearly felt in those days. What I will offer you here is a window through which you can look into my life, my mind and my heart. I do not hold back, I try to be as honest and straight forward as I can. All are invited to join me here, to read and contemplate, but mostly to enjoy. And if you would like to be part of my journey, please share your thoughts, feelings, questions and interpretations. Challenge me to improve in any way, to broaden my mind and to keep discovering more about life and living it to the fullest.

The Old Works,

I have been writing for about fourteen years now I think, although I cannot remember the first time that I wrote something about myself, it has been important to me all that time. Writing has been and still is one of my most loved and precious ways to communicate with my inner self, the people I love and cherish, family and friends. And adding to that the last three years and into the future, my way to communicate with the world as a whole, for all who share the love for the written word.

Writing, for me, did not start suddenly in such a broad sense as I just described. I have no clear memory of the first time my pencil touched paper to convey my feelings into the real world. But I am very sure that it started like that. When I was in the middle of puberty I found it profoundly difficult to express my feelings to others, I could not find the words, nor did I really understand when and what I was feeling at all. Of course we all get hurt along the way in life, just as we experience joy and love. Fortunately, to me it was all a very narrow experience because I could not really understand what I felt, let alone put a name to it and deal with the storms and infernos in my heart.

Love is what has guided and molded my life, if I look back on all that has shaped my inner world and if I evaluate the choices I have made in life. From the first day of falling in love I guess, my journey started. The drive to put those amazing feelings and sensations turned into colors, words, sentences which dances within my soul. And thus the writing started with simple loving words, rhyming them together for my new found love. Every little conflict within my youngest relationships demanded from me that I learned to find my inner voice and somehow, when I was about sixteen years old, I made a promise to myself.

“I promised myself that I would strive to learn to understand myself, my history and my present, so I could walk into the future with my hear open. To find my inner voice, learn to know my heart of hearts, to remember what I have forgotten and reconnect with my inner child, my present self and my higher self. So I could build a foundation deep within, grow my roots and from that foundation, my roots, shape my future.”

The path was chosen from the day that it came into my mind and I am walking that path through life now. My old works tell the stories of the girls and women I fell in love with, how we loved and how my heart broke eventually. Because my memory does not tell me all that I would like to know about my life I am still busy reorganizing my older works, trying to get them in chronological order. Hopefully you will all be able to read the story of my path the way it flowed through time.

Awakenings,

Throughout the past fourteen years I have experienced periods of profound change within myself and my life. Love found and lost, lessons learned. I have been hurt in many ways and I have hurt people, sometimes through ignorance and also out of fear to be vulnerable. Using my verbal strength to push people away from me and keep the demons at bay. I guess this is the same for all of us, we just deal with circumstances differently individually. I am proud of myself for never really giving up on anything, continuing to try, learn, open my heart again, challenging myself to understand myself and others better. At the same time I realize that I am still ignorant of so much more that binds this world together and so the journey continues.

All these events, which I hope to put to words some day as short stories, shaped me in ways I could not have imagined since I made that promise to myself. It has been and still is the most profoundly gratifying experience and I thank life for teaching me all it has and all it will teach me. The reason I am trying so hard to put into context what effect life has had on me as a person is that it has awakened my creative talents, which I did not really realized I had before.

My style of writing has beautifully evolved over the last five to eight years and I hope that I will improve more in the future. Whereas I used to ponder for hours sometimes to find the right word to rhyme some sentences together, now, usually a verse comes to me in it’s whole. The sensation drives my adrenaline up through the roof sometimes. Having the sensation and experience of inspiration welling up from deep within your core and then having that sensation transform into words or sentences within your mind, it can be a mental orgasm to me. (I do not mean that literally of course!)

Beside my verses it seems that another promise I made to myself, which is to expand my knowledge about cultures, religion, politics, geography and many other subjects, has improved my story telling. A few times I have been able to combine common knowledge about our world with personal views, experiences and deep questions as well, with as a result some quite interesting columns and articles. For the English readers, these are often in Dutch – I am thinking of trying to write proper translations – and not easy to translate in a way that honors the intentions.

So this is where life is now, we have arrived to the present. There is much more to discover, learn, investigate, question and to experience. I will share as much as I can with all of you and hope that you will join me in this. Question me, criticize me, talk to me and most of all, enjoy every aspect of life and our journeys.

Namasté.