for all my fellow word-lovers out there:
– MoorishGirl
– Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature
– Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America
and for those of you who prefer pictures instead:
– Bendib Cartoon: Independent, uncensored, free-speech political cartoons
All links via Dove’s Eye View, another weblog you should read. Because I said so. So get to it.
my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach
I decided that letting three weeks of fall quarter pass by without buying any of the books I need for my classes was long enough. So today I walked into the university bookstore and bought twelve books for $173.80. (Which is really not bad, when I recall that, as a pre-med neurobiology major, I used to pay close to $400 for textbooks during each quarter.) I also spent way too much time I didn’t have lurking around the English and Comparative Literature aisles, browsing through books for classes I’m not even enrolled in. Which means I ended up buying one book I don’t need: Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds. Way too cool to resist though.
edit: Forgot – two books I really, really wanted but decided to resist for now:
– Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande (I read the introduction while just standing there in the bookstore, and it was absolutely fascinating.)
– Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories, by Ghassan Kanafani
Read ’em for me and let me know how it goes, okay?
But still, the highlight of my last week, in contrast, was ducking into a used bookstore close to my hometown and coming back out with thirteen books for $25. Not bad at all, eh? A few short story collections by Ray Bradbury; a few novels I loved, growing up; and this gem by Susan G. Woolridge: poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words – I’m reading it less for the poem-writing advice and more for the author’s delightful stories interspersed throughout the book. Also, two poetry collections by Seamus Heaney (Station Island and The Haw Lantern), among other things. I was so tempted to buy this book – Ray Bradbury! One hundred short stories! Brand-new! Only $9.99! (All those exclamation points were my hyperactive bookworm brain trying to convince me I need to invest in books I really have no space for.) But I abstained, even though my fingers were all twitching. Clearly, I am such a nerd, what can I say.
Thank you, karrvakarela, for the Seamus Heaney recommendations; I trust your judgement, and I’ll definitely be checking out the ones you mentioned.
Anjum, I still owe you a book list. Gimme a couple days to go through my archives, buddy. I know, I said that a week ago. Sorry, dude.
Oh yeah, and I have absolutely no idea where all these books are going to go. I need to invest in a couple more bookcases. For now, the floor’s just gonna have to do.
On Monday I start working in downtown Sacramento, and I’m already missing my lazy slow-motion life of the past couple of weeks. Much of it has been spent drinking endless glasses of cranberry juice, reading stacks of books from the public library, and eating tomato-cucumber-extra cheese sandwiched between slices of whole wheat bread. Clearly, I am not a firm believer in the strenuous lifestyle.
In the daytime and afternoon, when the heat of the outdoors keeps me closeted inside and the heat of my room makes me flee to air-conditioned areas of the house, I contort myself into the confines of the living room armchair – head on one armrest, knees curving over the other, legs sprawled over the side so that my toes touch the shiny black end table hugging the side of the chair – and read.
I’m very fidgety when it comes to sitting like a normal human being, seeing as how I must always have my feet up. I sit cross-legged at the dining room table, and stretch out my legs when I’m sitting on the floor. I prop up my feet on any available surface – a friend’s coffee table, the dashboard of Somayya’s car, even the model sofas and glass tables in Macy*s furniture department. Even now, typing this entry, my feet are resting up on the seat of my chair, my knees bumping against my chin, my fingers spelling out typos galore as I try to maneuver my hands around my legs in order to reach the keyboard. I need to invest in a footstool.
Lying across the living room armchair like that, is it any wonder that sleep is constantly on my mind? And, just think, I don’t even have to feel guilty. Oftentimes, I turn my face into the back of the armchair and nap, the book resting on my stomach. Once awake, minutes or hours later, I continue reading from wherever I left off.
In between the guilt-free naps and guzzling of cranberry juice, I’ve found it is a bit unsettling to pick up Ray Bradbury’s novels and come across dog-eared pages, marked when I last checked out the book from the public library at least five years ago.
Bardbury’s Fahrenheit 451, especially, is filled with corners folded up from the bottom of the page to form little triangles now so smooth that, with the book tightly closed in my hand, I would barely have even been able to tell that the pages were marked had I not known to look for them. Either the book hasn’t been touched in the past five years, or the reader(s) after me appreciated the same passages and decided to indulge my need to mark them.
The thing is, I dislike jotting down notes in the margins of books, or highlighting passages, or underlining sentences that jump out to me. But, for as long as I can remember, every time I’ve come across a passage that strikes a chord with me, I absently fold up the bottom corner of the page and continue reading without pause. Rereading the same book much later, even if it has been years, the first thing I always do is check for dog-eared pages and, finding one, skim the page until I recognize why I had marked it so.
Rereading Fahrenheit 451 a couple of weeks ago, I came across a page I hadn’t marked back during high school, containing a passage I must have glossed over then with no more than a cursory reading, but which holds so much more significance now, especially in light of today’s date:
“Someday the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And someday we’ll remember so much that we’ll dig the biggest steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”
What do you see in your mirrors?
like a good book, i can’t put this day back
The last term paper is due Monday afternoon and the last final exam is scheduled for sometime Tuesday (I really should figure out the exact time, shouldn’t I?), and then I’m free for a week. One week during which I’m going to do nothing but lie in the sunshine and read books. And sleep a lot. And have reunions with old high school people – but only the rockstars though. The ones who thought it was highly entertaining to repeatedly ask me where Aladdin was will just have to wait a few more decades to see me again, by which time I’ll have hopefully come up with some witty retorts.
And have I mentioned sleep?
Not that any of y’all even care, but here’s my planned reading list for the week of spring break:
– The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
– An American Brat, by Bapsi Sidhwa
– The Mango Season, by Amulya Malladi
– A Breath of Fresh Air, by Amulya Malladi
– A Prayer for Children, by Ina Hughes
– The Storyteller’s Daughter, by Saira Shah
– Dreaming Water, by Gail Tsukiyama
– Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh
– Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
– I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops, by Hanan al-Shaykh
– A Man to Match His Mountains: Badshah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, by Eknath Easwaran
– Women of Sufism, A Hidden Treasure: Writings and Stories of Mystic Poets, Scholars, & Saints, selected by Camille Adams Helminski
This list is more for my recollection purposes than for your edification anyway, so stop rolling your eyes. And who says I can’t get through this entire list in one week? Actually, even I probably can’t, but that’s not the point. Not that I even remember what the point was anymore. And, in reference to the above list, I’m not quite sure how to explain my newfound interest in what I laughingly call “ethnic” novels, but I suppose it’s related to the over-abundance of English and American literature I already possess. Change is a good thing, sometimes.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go calculate exactly how much money I owe in public library fines.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t do book recommendations. Read at your own risk.
i don’t buy everything i read/i haven’t even read everything i’ve bought
Speaking of books and reading, I went to the University bookstore the other day to return three textbooks and buy two more instead. I walked out of there with not only the two textbooks, but also four books from the Comparative Literature and English aisles. No, I’m not enrolled in any English or Comparative Literature courses this quarter, but I couldn’t resist wandering through those aisles anyway. This is becoming a bad habit. Actually, it has been a bad habit for years. Is there a twelve-step program for bookworms? The first step is admitting one has a problem, or so they say.
Hi, my name is Yasmine, and I have a problem.
So where do I go from here?
Anyway, my collection of books, though seemingly overwhelming, is actually quite carefully selected. For years, I’ve made it a general rule to buy only those books which I’ve already read and enjoyed enough to warrant my own copy. That day at the University bookstore, I bought:
– Selected Poems, Unabridged, by Paul Laurence Dunbar
– Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, by Esmé Raji Codell
– Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl
– Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
I actually broke my usual rule here, because Bird by Bird was a book I’d neither read nor heard of ’til that day. But I stood there flipping through the pages for so long that I decided I might as well buy my own copy. It’s a beautiful book, well-written and thought-provoking, amusing and poignant all at once. I haven’t even been reading it in my usual fashion: So far, I’ve read the last chapter, and parts of the thirty-page introduction, but only bits and pieces and random sentences in between. Somehow, it seems more fitting that way.
Only very rarely do I recommend books to people – not only because I don’t personally know anyone else who shares my love of reading, but also because I simply can’t be bothered to give book recommendations. Those who truly love books will always find books that interest and inspire them. Those who don’t – well, to be honest, I couldn’t care less. I’m impatient and selfish like that.
But if you deeply enjoy writing, or if you want to enjoy writing but don’t know what the hell you’re doing, or if you detest writing but are willing to change your stance, then I recommend you read Bird by Bird.
[p.s. Someday, I will own all the Norton Anthologies ever published. I will, I will, oh yes, I will. Just you wait.]
i don’t cry every time i bleed/my eyes are dry, but they’re bloodshot
When it comes to saying “I told you so,” my parents have ample reason to patronize me with their variations of that phrase. This I freely admit. My mother mournfully shakes her head and says, “Didn’t I tell you so?” whenever I neglect my laundry and then race around frenziedly bemoaning my lack of clean clothes, whenever I oversleep and leave home late for school, and whenever I unconcernedly wave off her entreaties to clear the messy dining room table, only to have unexpected guests show up at our home soon afterward. My father stares sternly and says, “How many times do I have to tell you?” whenever I’ve missed a deadline despite his nagging, whenever I forget to pay my bills and my cell phone service gets cut off, and whenever I ignore his reminders to take my car to the mechanic for a tune-up.
Don’t you hate it when people are right all the time? Very maddening, not to mention embarrassing.
My father also says, “I told you reading in the dark would ruin your eyesight. You should have listened to me.” This refers to all my years of growing up, during which basically all I did was read books, except for minimal breaks for meals and sleep. No matter which house we were living in during any given time, I was always easy to find: Sitting on the floor of my bedroom, leaning back against my bed, poring over one novel or another. I read very fast, and, back then, I used to read about one book a day. My dad would wander by my room, knock on the open door, and peer into the gloomy recess, scowling at the dimness I was so unaware of, then snap the light switch on for me. I’d jump in surprise, startled by both his presence and the sudden flash of light, and look up, squinting, to see him frowning in the doorway. “Yasminay,” he’d say with ill-contained exasperation, “how can you even see? Turn some lights on! You’re going to ruin your eyesight this way, reading in the dark.” Looks like the daddy-o was right. Once again.
I got my first pair of eyeglasses in fifth grade. The frames were turquoise and purple, and I hated them, even though they were solely my own choice. I don’t even remember wearing my glasses, except for the first day. My classmates were duly interested, then just as quickly unconcerned. But I still hated my glasses, and rarely wore them, if ever.
Two years later, I was on my way to Pakistan, where I lived for the next eighteen months. I didn’t wear my glasses there. I never once thought of them, much less needed them. I find that interesting, considering the fact that, once back in the U.S., I sat in the front of the classroom and still had to squint at the board every day during my eighth-grade German lecture. How did I manage to progress from almost normal vision to blurriness just in the short time it took me to fly from Islamabad to Sacramento? My theory is that Pakistan, with its vibrant colors and no-nonsense people, has a solid, steady visual clarity all its own. You don’t really need glasses there, so long as all your other senses are working.
Once back in the U.S. though, my vision seemed to go downhill. My German teacher noticed me squinting at the blackboard, and suggested I get my eyes checked. “No, no, I’m fine,” I assured her, and switched tactics – I’d stand right in front of the blackboard and copy down her notes before class began. She gently but firmly kept nagging me to go in for an eye exam. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being nagged, so I stubbornly stood my ground for a few months. Finally, I went home one day and announced glumly, “I need new glasses.” So off we went. Gold-rimmed frames this time. First, turquoise and purple; now, gold. What was I even thinking? I don’t know; don’t even ask me. Another new pair a few years later – brown frames this time.
For the past two years, though, I’ve been wearing contact lenses, and couldn’t be happier. I can walk around in pouring rain instead of having to remove my glasses or constantly wipe at them. I make wudhu without, again, removing my glasses. I can wear regular sunglasses instead of having to order a separate pair of prescriptive ones. Best of all, I can see clearly out of the corner of my eyes, instead of having to turn my whole head. Sidelong glances are much easier with contact lenses. This, you see, is imperative for those of us who spend quite a bit of time driving. When you’re on the road and your vision sucks, there is a significant difference between checking your blind spots while wearing contacts, and doing the same while wearing glasses. With contacts, you signal, quickly glance over your shoulder, and switch lanes. So smooth. With glasses, you signal, glance over your shoulder and realize your glasses don’t cover your entire field of vision, especially that corner-of-the-eye area. So you squint to bring things into sharper focus, then finally switch lanes when it seems safe. It doesn’t require perhaps more than an extra second. But one second is a huge span of time when you’re on the freeway, traveling at about 75 mph.
Those of you who wear glasses regularly are probably raising your eyebrows and muttering, “What is this girl talking about? Glasses are fine. I’m fine with glasses.” Well, good for you. You’re a rockstar. I, on the other hand, have been commuting 120 miles a day, 5 days a week, for the past 3 years and 4 months, and trust me, I know the difference between checking my blind spots with contact lenses and with eyeglasses. I’m going with the contacts for this one.
Nonetheless, I ordered a new pair of frames a while back, and finally got them picked up last week. My sister wryly observed that the level of excitement I’ve displayed since then is usually reserved for the arrival of contact lenses by other (more normal) people. But I can’t help it – I’ve finally found a pair of frames I’m in love with: thin, black, and rectangular. They suit me as no other frames have in the past. Plus, they match everything – after all, 3/4 of my wardrobe is black.
But the reason I currently love my new glasses so much is due to a bit of verse by Dorothy Parker, that sardonically witty American author and critic. The lines made me laugh when I first came across them, almost a decade ago. These days, I’m just hoping she knew what the hell she was talking about:
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Good riddance, is what I say.
I was still eleven years old when we moved away from the Bay Area, and I promised myself that when I grew up and had children of my own, we’d always live in one place. I promised myself that they wouldn’t have to deal with the self-consciousness, the uncertainties, the resentment that constant moving presented, all those things that I struggled with during those years away.
I remember that, for my twelfth birthday, three weeks later and in our new house, I received a copy of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! from Somayya, a comic book from her brother, and a dollar bill from a younger cousin. A whole entire dollar seemed so much back in those days, when we siblings used to pool all our change together to buy Snickers bars and acidly sour, mouth burning Goosebump gumballs from the little market on the corner. Even a mere dollar was enough to make us feel wealthy.
But what I remember most about that first year away from the Bay Area is how bitter and resentful I was. It’s not that I appreciated the Bay Area and my hometown for what they were. The “big picture†was of no concern to me. I was far too busy being heartbroken over the fact that I was leaving behind my childhood home, the half-acre yard and winding brick walkways, the prickly rosebushes and a fig tree with comforting branches that enveloped, the lines of silvery smooth eucalyptus trees soaring to huge heights. My brother and sister and I used to roll down the lawn, hold mock sword-fights, push one another along the walkways in a wheelbarrow, and preside over picnics consisting of chunks of cheese and unripe fruit. We built tree houses, foot-raced across the lawn, ran away from home more times than we can recall, and between us went through more broken bones, concussions, and bruises than an entire football team. And this was long before my father’s geranium madness started; back then, he focused mainly on the roses.
I hated leaving my home, and I hated my new house, too. But just when I learned to reconcile myself, to accept the new place as “home,†to at first grudgingly and then more readily appreciate the sparks of beauty I found even there, we moved again. And again. And a couple times more.
Five moves in five years, and we ultimately came full circle, back to my childhood home and the memories it cradled. And once I was back, I recalled all those years of fervent late-night prayers to God, all those years of pleas that seemed to fall on deaf ears, if God has ears, that is. And I promised myself that I wouldn’t take this place for granted again. In the past five years I’ve been back, though, I’ve taken it for granted time and again. You’d think I would know better by now. Sometimes I think of those old “MY-children-will-never-EVER-have-to-move†promises and smile indulgently, because the truth is that all those moves were good for me. I like the person I’ve become since then, and so I refuse to think of them as lost years. Change is good. So is progress. But the thing is, I can afford to be philosophical about it now. After all, I moved back, didn’t I? If I hadn’t, some part of me would have remained bitter and resentful.
Which is why it still surprises me that I can so easily take all this for granted.
Last Friday, I drove around town and asked for boxes from various stores and shops. My dad picked up some more on his way home from work. I stared at those piles of boxes stacked in the entryway, and felt the familiar sense of panic. One of those oh my God, here we go again feelings. And on Saturday, the packing started all over again.
The books were the first to go. I packed them slowly, carefully, gently, like fragile objects that merit special treatment. There were the five shelves worth of books from the bookcase itself, then the piles of more books along the floor and underneath my bed and even inside the dresser drawers. Down came the artwork, the posters, the paintings, the framed photographs. The garbage bag kept growing. You’d think that, after so many experiences with moving, I’d have toned down my possessions to only those which are the most important. But no, I’m still a pack-rat. A sentimental and nostalgic fool, that’s me. I found empty moving boxes, stashed away in some storage space, labeled Yasmine’s box in my fourteen-year-old handwriting, and more labeled the same from the year I was seventeen. I used them again, and the feeling of déjà vu increased steadily. I discovered the identification tags at the bottom of my hearing aid containers are still labeled with my address from eight years ago. Mind boggling, indeed.
What made it all bearable was the presence of the relatives who came to help out. Especially the cousins. Not only did these three crazy teenage boys strip the walls bare, shove the furniture around, and affably carry boxes at my brusque command, they also gobbled down endless platefuls of pasta, platters of sourdough bread, hunks of chocolate fudge cake, and cans of Pepsi as if there were no tomorrow. And they made me laugh. When I asked one of them to carry a box for me, he leaned close into my face and crowed, “How ‘bout noo, you dirty Dutch bastard?†in perfect Austin Powers imitation. I couldn’t help but crack up. Needless to say, he took advantage of my amusement to repeat the same line about a bajillion more times at random intervals throughout the day. And like the easily amused crackhead that I am, I laughed every time. Later, I asked them to move my mattress and bed frame, and returned to find them wrestling across the mattress, pummeling the bejesus out of each other with taunts of “What now? What now, huh?†Craziness galore.
And I guess it’s telling that I’ve been sleeping on bare mattresses for the past four nights, yet my books were the first things unpacked. I walked into this unfamiliar new room and saw all the boxes stacked haphazardly, and my heart did this nervous little trippy dance, you know the kind I mean? But then my gaze zoomed in on the boxes of books, and I thought, Okay, I can do this after all. Because, more than anything, it’s the books that have always remained familiar to me, wherever I moved. Therein lies my stability. As long as I have those, I’m all set. After all, I was the eleven-year-old kid who showed up at her new school lugging around a one-thousand-page hard-cover copy of David Copperfield, still on loan from my Bay Area library. My new sixth-grade teacher was so intrigued that she piled on the books, mainly the classics, but others as well. George Orwell’s Animal Farm was one of ‘em, I recall.
So I sat there on the ground, facing an empty bookcase, and tried to make sense of all my books. There’s so damn many of them, especially since I went through so many different phases in terms of reading. There’s the novels and poetry anthologies and short story collections, all in Urdu and German, from back in the day when I read those languages as fluently and voraciously as I read English. There’s at least a dozen more anthologies and poetry collections in English. There’s authors I have multiple books of: Robert Fulghum, Daphne du Maurier, M.M. Kaye, J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, Anne Rivers Siddons, Nathaniel Hawthorne and more. Tennesee Williams’s plays and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories lumped right in there with Anne of Green Gables and the Bronte sisters. Kipling next to Jane Austen, Rainer Maria Rilke (in German and English) next to various Norton Anthologies, Emily Dickinson next to Homer’s The Odyssey. Shakespeare and Nancy Drew, Hemingway and Melville, Sinclair Lewis and Oscar Wilde, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea. Chicken Soup books, Maya Angelou, and books that were required reading for various university classes, on multiculturalism and gender and selfhood, which I found too interesting to sell back. And biographies and autobiographies, and books underscoring my long-ago fascination with the Jewish Holocaust, Anne Boleyn, and the American Civil War. And dozens more, probably, but I really should stop cataloguing.
Such an insane mix, which is why I sat there the first day and blankly stared at all the books, not sure where to start. Help came in the form of Shereen, who advised me to shelve all the books alphabetically (alphabetically! good Lord), and laughed, “You know what, your dream house is going to have a library.†“No,†I corrected, “my dream house is going to BE a library.†“With an internet connection,†she added. Of course, of course. But seriously, I’m so attached to all these books that I almost protested when Shereen made off with my German dictionary and determinedly shelved it into the reference bookcase. I did follow her orders though and shelved the rest of ‘em alphabetically, but it looks all wrong. It’s impossible to fit them all in one bookcase anyway, which is why they’re currently stacked not only vertically, but also horizontally along the shelves. As soon as I get another bookcase, I’m dumping them all out and starting all over.
And for godssake, it’s just that I’ve moved into a brand-new room we’ve just added on to our existing home, down the hall and across to the other end of the house, a room almost twice as large as my old one, and the hustle and bustle over the weekend was because we decided to repaint the entire house while we were at it. No big deal, right? It’s not a new house. It’s the same home I grew up in. But every morning I wake up with the panicked oh my God, not again feeling, my eyes straining to trace familiar patterns on the ceiling. Instead of a window that looks out to the sky and the lemon tree, I now have two windows, one looking onto the beautifully-stained red-orange fence, the other with an unobstructed view of the orange tree in the courtyard, the one that grows so quickly and hugely that it must be on steroids.
And the boxes. Good Lord, the boxes are still here and there and everywhere, and seeing them doesn’t help one bit, but I’m just too damn lazy to clear ‘em out, not to mention the fact that all the other rooms are still half empty because most of their corresponding furniture is in my new room. Déjà vu mostly sucks, and you heard it here first. Although my clothes are hung in the closet, for the most part I’m still literally living out of boxes. I still don’t know where most of my things are. Everything is a guessing game, sort of a moving-day version of the annoying cell phone Can you hear me now? repetition, only this version is more like, Is it in this one? or in this one? or this one? or maybe not? dammit, where’s my miracle-bubble bottle? But at least I don’t have to look for my toothbrush.
And everyday brings a repeat of the same gut-wrenching test: Can I make it from here to there without tripping? Can I make it across the whole entire room without falling flat on my face? Is it possible to remove one box without bringing down an avalanche of five more?
The answer, of course, is, No.
If I could, then I would.
But because I can’t make it to my German dictionary without scraping my knuckles and bruising my shins, I shall have to give up that attempt in favor of freetranslation.com, which tells me that the correct way to authoritatively call out, “Release my camel!†auf Deutsch is, Geb mein Kamel frei!
So there you have it.
“You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
“Save yourself from general themes and seek those which your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses — would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.”
::Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Stellaluna
by Janell Cannon
They perched in silence for a long time.
“How can we be so different and feel so much alike?” mused Flitter.
“And how can we feel so different and be so much alike?” wondered Pip.
“I think this is quite a mystery,” Flap chirped.
“I agree,” said Stellaluna. “But we’re friends. And that’s a fact.”
=)
Anyone with access to the children’s section of your local public library…go find and read The Quiltmaker’s Gift by Jeff Brumbeau and Gail de Marcken. GORGEOUS illustrations and a beautiful storyline! Basically, it’s about a generous quiltmaker who sews the most beautiful quilts in the world, and then gives them away to those who are poor or homeless. And there’s a powerful and greedy king whose castle is literally stuffed to the brim with treasures, but who has never been happy enough to feel the joy of smiling. When he hears of the magical quiltmaker, he hurries to her and demands she present him with a quilt, hoping that her gift will finally make him smile. She refuses point-blank, reminding him that her gifts are only for those who are poor and needy. Finally though, she strikes a deal with the king…for every gift he gives away from his castle and storehouses, she will add another piece to a quilt for him. When at last all his posession are gone, his quilt will be finished. The king hems and haws, of course, but finally gives in. Going out into the world, the king finds those who may be in need of his gifts. “Morning, noon, and night…for years and years…the king slowly emptied his wagons, trading his treasures for smiles around the world.” Finally then, the king’s treasures are all gone, and the quiltmaker goes in search of him…
This is the passage i found so beautiful:
After a long search, she finally found him. The king’s royal clothes were now in tatters and his toes poked out of his boots. Yet his eyes glittered with joy and his laugh was wonderful and thunderous.
The quiltmaker unfolded the king’s quilt from her bag. It was so beautiful that hummingbirds and butterflies fluttered about. Standing on tiptoe, she tenderly wrapped it around him.
“What’s this?” cried the king.
“As I promised you long ago,” the woman said, “when the day came that you, yourself, were poor, only then would I give you a quilt.” The king’s great sunny laugh made green apples fall and flowers turn his way.
“But I am not poor,” he said. “I may look poor, but in truth my heart is full to bursting, filled with the memories of all the happiness I’ve given and received. I’m the richest man I know.”
“Nevertheless,” the quiltmaker said, “I made this quilt just for you.”
“Thank you,” replied the king. “I’ll take it, but only if you’ll accept a gift from me. There is one last treasure I have left to give away. All these years, I’ve saved it just for you.” And from his rickety, rundown wagon the king brought out his throne.
“It’s really quite comfortable,” the king said. “And just the thing for long days of sewing.”
Masha’Allah! There’s a couple more pages, but that’s ok. I just wanted y’all to read this part. :)