The following words delighted me so much when I read them yesterday that I shared them at the beginning of each dreamwhispering conversation in the day.

The poem The Table is by Edip Cansever who sold carpets in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar and wrote poetry:

The Table
A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life,
He put that there.
Those he loved, those he didn’t love,
The man put them on the table too.
Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;
He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.
So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!
He put on the table the pouring of that beer.
He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;
His hunger and his fullness he placed there.
Now that’s what I call a table!
It didn’t complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.*

Later in the day I heard Lauren Greenfield being interviewed about her documentary about the time-share billionaires David and Jackie Siegel’s dream to build the American Versailles, a 90,000 square foot mega-mansion which would make it the largest home in the States.**

The housing collapse then happened, and they lost and then regained the mansion which remains unfinished, but listening to David in a clip from the documentary, one could only come away with the impression that he was a deeply dissatisfied and unhappy man.

Cansever’s poem is an example of a gain mindset – look how far I’ve come, see what I have, while Siegel’s is a gap mindset – there is so much missing.

*Edip Cansever’s The Table, quoted in Kate Clanchy’s How to Grow Your Own Poem;
**Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles.