Category: misc/personal

Parents and children

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did – that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that – a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest. (Debra Ginsberg)

memories of belgium

with mrs zoeter in belgium. that’s me on the left, along with my sister and mom. the zoeters had this wonderful lake house where we spent many wonderfully languorous days. mr zoeter was the consul general for pakistan in ghent. his daughter karin now holds that post.

summer in belgium
summer in belgium

mother’s day 2015

“Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother’s Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war.” [Democracy Now, May 8, 2009]
…

to the most beautiful mom ever. i owe u everything.

my mother
my mother

From the Portable Kerouac

Jack Kerouac in a letter to his first wife, Edie Kerouac Parker, in late January of 1957:

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

Grace and Hope Found Amid the Destruction of Nepal Quake

DONATELLA LORCH: In the evening, Lucas and I walked down our street and into a village, the oldest community of ethnic Newars in the Katmandu Valley, a place where goats often live on the ground floor of homes and women wash their pots and their hair on the stoops. Making our way along the town’s narrow, medieval paths, we passed building after building that had collapsed. Residents, police officers and Nepal Scouts were digging through the debris with their hands, trying to rescue those who had been buried. Others were setting up temporary shelters in any open space. Blankets and cushions were laid out in the middle of roads. Neighbors were helping neighbors. Those with motorcycles were ferrying cheap plastic canvas for tents from the shops that remained open. Many people stopped us and asked if we needed food or water. Several invited us to spend the night with them. This is why I love Nepal. People here help one another because they know the government often cannot. They reach out to one another, and they persevere. They open their shops, because what else can one do when the world is upside down? More here.

a tribute to aunty iffie

remembering my aunt, my dad’s sister, who passed away on january 13, 2015. aunty iffie, as we used to call her, was one of the loveliest people in our family. she had this smile – warm, constant, irrepressible – it defined the contours of her personality. that’s the only way i can picture her: beaming smile, infinite kindness, not a harsh word to anyone. although my aunt had her share of challenges in life, nothing could put a dampener on her joie de vivre. she was loving, resilient, light-hearted. she tread gently on this earth. it’s not a quality that’s appreciated enough in modern times. the loud and aggressive get more attention. yet it’s exactly what we need most. i will miss her sweet sunniness. “surely we belong to god and to god shall we return.” may you rest in peace dear aunty iffie and may heaven smile on you forever.

aunty iffie

Colonialism is a form of vampirism

Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor: Colonialism is a form of vampirism that empowers and bloats the self image of the colonizing empire by draining the life energies of the colonized people; just enough blood is left to allow the colonial subject to perform a day’s work for the objective empire. And these drained energies are not only of the present and future, but of the past, of memory itself: the continuity of identity of a people, and of each individual who is colonized. No one should recognize this process better than women; for the female sex has functioned as a colony of organized patriarchal power for several thousand years now. Our brains have been emptied out of all memory of our own cultural history, and the colonizing power systematically denies such a history ever existed. The colonizing power mocks our attempts to rediscover and celebrate our ancient matriarchies as realities. In the past women have had to accept this enforced female amnesia as “normal”; and many contemporary women continue to believe the female sex has existed always and ab aeterno as an auxiliary to the male-dominated world order. But we continue to dig in the ruins, seeking the energy of memory; believing that the reconstruction of women’s ancient history has a revolutionary potential equal to that of any political movement today.