Saturday, July 18, 2009

Kirsten Dewar

Peel me like a grape.
Expose my flesh, split me in two.
Take me in your mouth.
Tongue and taste
my sticky sweetness.
Find the seed,
that precious knot at the heart of me . . .

This week's selections

  1. The Forget-Me-Not Sonata - Santa Montefiore
  2. The Sum of our Days - Isabel Allende
  3. Resurrection Men - Ian Rankin
  4. Anathem - Neal Stephenson
  5. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Friday, July 17, 2009

Aldous Huxley

"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."

Aldous Huxley

Margaret Lee Runbeck

"Silence make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying, but the never needing to say that counts."

Margaret Lee Runbeck

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

On relationships ....

"As grand and glorious as love is, it is not without its perils. Anyone who has felt the cruel pangs of rejection knows that love is best approached cautiously, as one would approach an angry, cornered brush-tailed possum. Yes, before throwing yourself into a relationship, it's wise to buy a sturdy pair of leather gloves, and to be extra careful of love's front claws and rows of needle-sharp teeth."

Michael J. Nelson

"Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms. Experience that never disappoints or saddens or stirs up feeling is a bland experience with little challenge or variation of color. Perhaps it's when we experience confidence and faith and hope that we see materialize before our eyes this builds up within us a feeling of inner strength, courage, and security. We are all personalities that grow and develop as a result of our experiences, relationships, thoughts, and emotions. We are the sum total of all the parts that go into the making of a life."

Virginia M. Axline

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. "

Murray Gell-Mann

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains,, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."

James Kavanaugh


"It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive."

Rilke

"An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wounds. He remains free: free to think, to learn from his experiences, to look elsewhere for human relationships; he remains free to start afresh and to pursue his happiness."

Leonard Peikoff

"Happy will the house be in which the relationships are formed from character."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Living with integrity means: Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships. Asking for what you want and need from others. Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension. Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe."

Barbara De Angelis

"Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."

Nick Hornby

"Relationships - of all kinds - are like sand held in your hand. Held loosely, with an open hand, the sand remains where it is.The minute you close your hand and squeeze tightly to hold on, the sand trickles through your fingers. You may hold onto it, but most will be spilled. A relationship is like that. Held loosely, with respect and freedom for the other person, it is likely to remain intact. But hold too tightly, too possessively, and the relationship slips away and is lost."

Kaleel Jamison

"He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died,
they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another."

Hermann Hesse

AA Milne

"If ever there is a tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. I'll always be with you."

AA Milne

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Terry Pratchett

"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life."

Terry Pratchett

Kirsten Dewar

Words. Roll them on your tongue. Swirl them around your mouth. Breathe them in. Taste them: the rich vibrant golds and greens, the colours of jealousy and fealty; the yellows, friendship distilled, bottled sunshine; the seething, vengeful reds; passionate plum; the shy and retiring grays. Pause. Close your eyes. Study the pictures on the inside of your lids. Look at them closely. Do they whisper, and nudge and call out to be spoken? Consider their sound. Tease out each each syllable. Do the nerves grate? Can you feel the muscles in your back tense? Check your hands. Are they cold and clammy? Hot and sudoriferous? Are your palms open wide, or fisted balls? Would these words tease, tempt, tantalise, sending a frisson of what could only be sheer delight down the receiver’s spine? Or are they sharp, jagged, meant to hurt and harm? Are they royal orchid, or common garden variety? Were they nurtured in love, or deceit? Can they, should they live an existence independent of their speaker? Remember: words once spoken, cannot be recalled. Finally, having considered all these things, exhale: breath them into life. Speak. Give them voice.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Kirsten Dewar

When you think of love, what comes to mind? A feather? Butterfly kisses? A colour? A scent? A particular person or place? A particular time, or season? A particular song?

To me love is a composite of all of these things, and more, an ever shifting, multi-faceted kaleidoscope, of light, and sound, and taste and feel. The smell of the earth after the spring rains. The blue of the sky on a cold Highveld morning. The sun reflecting off of an azure blue sea. A fiery sunset. A baby’s gurgle. A nightingale’s song. Puppy’s breath. Baking bread. A field of wild flowers. A daisy chain. The crisp, freshly minted smell trapped between the pages of a new book. The silences between the tick and the tock of the clock. The spaces between words. Jasmine in bloom. The green of water hyacinth. Snow. The way a genuine heartfelt smile reflects not only on the mouth, but in the eyes. Ice. Chilli. Feeling full, like there’s a ribbon, a river, a rainbow of colour and light waiting to escape from inside you. Happiness so vast, it’s more than your heart can hold. The sound of children laughing. The way your heart skips a beat when he says your name. How soft it sounds in his mouth. The heat and glow from a banked fire. Humility. Respect. Camaraderie. Rose petals scattered by a summer breeze. Crosses carried, burdens shared. A kitten’s purr. The whisper and sigh of the wind. The rasp of his stubble on your cheek. Cocoa beans. Marshmallows roasted on an open log fire. Kisses stolen. Kisses freely given. Ballet shoes. How, when he laces his fingers through yours, you can’t tell where he ends, and you begin. The lace trimming on a wedding dress. Old sepia photographs, taken long ago. Loyalty. The clamour of passion, the roar of blood through the veins, hunger, release. Friendship. The tremulous sparrow beat of his heart against your chest. Seeing a man’s eyes fill with tears on his granddaughter’s wedding day, because she reminds him of the bride he married fifty years before. A scattering of stars, nestled in velvet. Devotion, unceasing, unrelenting. Unconditional acceptance. Old love letters, carefully preserved, tied with a scarlet satin bow. Secret places. The knowledge that here, you belong. The smell of his scent on your skin. The oh so familiar contours left by his head, on your pillow. Comfortable silences. The whispered refrains of love.

There’s so much more to love than just a red heart.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Kirsten Dewar

Farthing Wood

Quilled hirsuteness,
hard, spiky, brown.
Solitary, nocturnal, pin cushion
barbed, bristling ball at sudden sound.

Hedge-grown, caliginous rodent,
bashful, and bowed.
Soft, silken centre,
Nature’s mohawk, avowed.

Kirsten Dewar

The grapes of wrath [bitter, acrimonious]
do a poisoned chalice infuse.
Malicious magenta orbs, crushed and whole-heartedly consumed:
zealous testimony: our foe’s destruction, assumed.

Kirsten Dewar

Augusten Burroughs

"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. "

Augusten Burroughs

Helen Keller

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart"

Helen Keller

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Jodi Picoult

"Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where you thought you were headed."

"There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started."

"I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same."

"Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side."

"Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink."

"Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom."

"You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake."

"There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth."

" Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on when we see one is only a trail of debris."

"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."

"You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"

"If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?"

"The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to. "

"I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice....sure it does...but only if you're too dumb to move.""

"… true love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart. "

"You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future."

"In the space between yes and now, there’s a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you’ll tell yourself in the future."

"Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey."

Jodi Picoult