heart
you just made me think of how we share our food how you always try to give me love from your plate how when I say a piece is yours you always break it into two pieces the smallest of which is for you you have the most gorgeous heart and it always feels like the best of the Arab and African world has made it into you, that you know that the largest love is pure simplicity and goodness […]
It was the richest, most avant-garde, secular country of the entire Middle East. One of the smallest nations of the world held the hearts of people from the region and beyond. Its cosmopolitan heyday lasted roughly from the mid-50s to 1975. It was the emblem of liberalism, of how – at least on the surface – differences can unite a coexisting variegated population: Muslims Sunni and Muslim Shi’ite, Christians. All together in that tiny land of mountains and Mediterranean Sea, […]
it’s not about me, said the wind, the leaf the branch, the tree it’s not about me, said the moon, the tide, the shoals, the sea no, it’s not about me, said the root, the bloom, the honey, the bee you are mistaken, said the morning, the body warm, the cup, the tea you see, it’s not about me we simply be part of forever the veritas, the hajj, the ver-a-city oh, you sweet dear, it’s not about us, it’s […]
Loving service is the natural position of the soul. Sanatana dharma He skipped lunch to rush home for half an hour as she was engulfed in fever waves; returned to the office, was late for the meeting of the year. Promotion went to someone else for five years in a row. He did not care. The barycenter, his wife. The same morning a teacher put her own money in front of a yawning museum employee to buy entrance […]
though your dress conforms, your manners comport, though the offences you give, may be measured at naught, though in society’s net, you are inevitably caught, may your garlic wild heart, question all that it’s taught though your surface be steady, placid and still, may your lungs stretch to bursting, may you feel your own fill, and when dubious duties beset and make fraught, may your star-burst heart drive waves of sharp thought may your days be full of […]
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. – Raymond Carver On our journey, we visit so many places, live so many lives. We each set out to find, that place that lays inside. All the world plays through us, this electric hectic mind. Til we become us, find arrival, upon own our arriving tide. A […]
At around 3:00pm each day, 5 year old Thomasina gathered her dolls, a small blanket, her tea set and laid them down, among the daisies, in the increasingly overgrown garden. Her small hands moved with a large confidence. Each of her treasures had their precise place, which she innately knew. Thomasina poured the tea – ‘just how he likes it’ – tucked ‘Handsome’, her large stuffed cat, under her arm, and waited. Thomasina waited. She waited. And waited. It […]
They had emerged from their past non-lives, certain of one thing. They were meant. Two in 7 billion. They were always meant to be together, to be one. And they had no doubt. The velvet petals, the skipping hearts, the whispered words, the eternal dance – all of the promise of all the world, moved and grew, inside them. But they had to be real. On any measure, money was tight. ‘Aye, well – there’s the old McGlynn place. It’s […]
We are no longer countries, no longer villages, no longer tribes. All of our fates, are running into one. We are disfigured by a pandemic that has lasted a millennia – of believing ourselves entitled to desecrate our only home, of insulting our common human soul. We are one village now. All of our futures hang together on a few fine threads. We are all this desert woman, apprehending unspeakable dangers ahead. But we have wisdoms. We have strengths. […]
