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@rapaciouscurls
I'm erasing you
I never thought a day would arrive when I wouldn't want you. I can't say I wouldn't go a little weak in the knees if you showed up at my door, but baby steps. I'm falling at such a slow luxurious pace for this guy and I can't tell anyone. I can't tell them why it might not work and how telling him could obliterate what little happiness I'm holding from him. We are friends. It slammed me so suddenly in the heart I couldn't stop being upset about losing him before I even ever truly have him. I might not. He makes me so happy. I want to talk to him everyday. I want to know I'm making him smile because I appeared in his day. I want to hold his hand and know it is more than friendship. I want to kiss him astonished. I want to fill the nights with all our thoughts because I have never felt so free to express and to be and to listen and to learn as I do with him. I can't tell him. It makes me desperate and cautious. It makes me want to wait this out because that would mean it is different than you, better, bigger, everything more than you. You are leaving. I hope he is arriving.
9AM West Light My new place has such great lighting. The only thing I'm missing is a mister to cuddle me and drink tea as we watch the day descend. I'm feeling all the Hygge vibes. I'm thinking of naming my 'home' WestLight Way.
Still trying to decide...
should I make a 2017 list of goals or "wing-it" like last year? There are definite things I want to accomplish, but I can quickly throw myself into despair (further) with the disappointment of not. Decisions, decisions.
Sylvia Plath. 1932-1963
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
“So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me, because I, too, am fluent in silence.” ~R. Arnold ▪▪▪ This week began with a heavy and heart hell bang. This week didn’t stop there. It worked it’s way into my days and say fat and sassy on my evenings poking me with a big insomnia stick while it laughed at me. Life changed, life threw some unexpected decisions my way, life decided to not be easy, and best of all (I use best lightly here and heavy on sarcasm) it went on. Even after shower meditation this morning, which was my “child tantrum” way of saying, ‘Oi! Anxiety you have had far too much to devour this week, bugger off!’, I still muddled through my day with a tension headache from hell working to quickly take my day from me. BUT I realize more and more the small blessings in life on days like this and I learn how necessary it is for me to take time to calm my mind…you hear me Maddie?!? I am reminded that my silence is not compliance. I am reminded that my justification is not for anyone to demand of me. I am reminded (begrudgingly so) that God’s timing is perfect.
And I think I’ll start cross-pollinating more over here from IG. If FB can’t have me, whose to say IG should get all the love 😉? In case you want stuff previously only on IG check me out @LitDrivenGirl on Instagram.
Ezgi Polat
the first-generation lover
I am the only woman in my family who learned how to love herself.
My grandmother came from brick buildings walled in by cornfields
with tougher husks than her own skin. Shared cigarettes with strangers
just to touch someone else’s hand when they passed the lighter.
Whenever her breath froze in the air during winter,
it formed the words I’m sorry even before evaporation.
Every exhale was an apology to the world for letting her into it.
Seven children but the doctor wouldn’t prescribe birth control;
most never knew their father’s last name, let alone middle or first.
Each time I look at her stained photograph in the old family abum,
I see seven different synonyms for regret instead of her wrinkled face.
My mother grew up with a stomach like a broken vacuum that puked up
everything that was sucked into it. She kissed the toilet bowl
more times than my forehead at night. After I moved out of the house,
I finally learned that she’d been proofreading her genes for typos
in the DNA and found so many that turning her body inside out
was the only way to erase them all. I hope to God I don’t ever fall
in love with spellcheck too, because some drafts just can’t be rewritten.
I grew up as a rusty bicycle without training wheels,
a piano perched on the edge of an eight-story building.
I was just following the paths of the women before me.
But when every heartbeat started feeling like an excuse,
I decided it was time to stop taking the blame for my own genetics.
So I started looking in mirrors like I was crossing a street:
left and then right and then left again, because I’d spent far too long
crashing in the oncoming headlights of my own reflection.
Surf - Snow - Skate
Daniel Pennac, The Rights of the Reader
This is an English translation of the 1992 French bestseller, Comme Un Roman, or, Like A Novel, with illustrations by Quentin Blake. It’s a book about reading and the power of books by a celebrated author, parent, and former teacher, and much of it is about how parents and teachers screw up children’s natural enthusiasm for stories. (In that way, it’s very much an unschooling book.)
I first found out about the book when I googled the list of rights:
I actually bought the Ardizzone translation and a previous translation by David Homel called Better Than Life (terrible title) — the titles were so different, I wasn’t even sure if they were the same book at first. It’s a draw as to which translation I like best, but I lean towards recommending the Ardizzone translation, especially when you add in the Quentin Blake illustrations, and the fact that it’s still in print.
It’s fairly easy to compare the translations because the chapters are numbered and short. For example, here’s one of my favorite chapters, which is only one sentence:
Quels pédagogues nous étions, quand nous n’avions pas le souci de la pédagogie! (Pennac)
What teachers we were, when we had no concern with teaching! (Homel)
What great teachers we were, when we didn’t worry about our methods. (Ardizzone)
If my rusty French is correct, the Ardizzone is a little bit more accurate and straightforward, while the Homel is a little bit more poetic.
Another example:
“Ainsi découvrit-il la vertu paradoxale de la lecture qui est de nous abstraire du monde pour lui trouver un sens.” (Pennac)
“The paradoxical virtue of reading: it takes us out of the world so we might find meaning in it.” (Homel)
“The paradoxical virtue of reading, which is to abstract ourselves from the world in order to make sense of it.” (Ardizzone)
In that case, I wish I could merge the two translations:
The paradoxical virtue of reading: it takes us out of the world in order to make sense of it.
Anyways, some of my favorite bits and themes, below, all from the Ardizzone translation, unless otherwise noted.
Bedtime reading is like the ritual of prayer.
A nightly reading ritual frees us from the weight of the day:
A sudden truce after the battle of the day, a reunion lifted us out of the ordinary. We savored the brief moment of silence before the storytelling began, then our voice, sounding like itself again, the liturgy of chapters… Yes, reading a story every evening fulfilled the most beautiful, least selfish, and least speculative function of prayer: that of having our sins forgiven. We didn’t confess, we weren’t looking for a piece of eternity, but it was a moment of communion between us, of textual absolution, a return to the only paradise that matters: intimacy.
Spirit trumps method.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since reading John Holt, who wrote of teaching children, “It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.” (Very punk.)
Turns out Rousseau said something similar about reading in Emile, or On Education:
A great to-do is made of finding the best methods of learning to read. We devise bureaux and cards, we turn the child’s bedroom into a printing press… What a pity! A far surer method, and the one that always gets forgotten, is the desire to read. Give the child that desire, and leave your bureaux right there… any method will work from then on.
To capture his interest; that’s the great motive, and the only one that leads surely and far…
I will just add this word as an important maxim: which is that, ordinarily, we obtain most surely and quickly that which we’re in no hurry to obtain.
Children (and adults) need time to be bored.
Pennac writes of the overscheduling of children, even 24 years ago:
No television, but piano from five to six; guitar from six to seven; ballet on Wednesdays; judo, tennis, and fencing on Saturdays; cross-country skiing from the first flurry of snowflakes; sailing school from the first rays of sunshine; pottery on rainy days; trips abroad; gymnastics…
She won’t have a moment to herself.
No time to dream.
No chance of being bored.
But being bored is great.
A long stretch of boredom… and all kinds of creativity are possible.
“We make sure she’s never bored.”
(Poor her.)
If you can’t find time to do something, you don’t want to do it bad enough.
Homel writes that “Life is a perpetual plot to keep us from reading.” Here’s the whole passage from the Arriz
So if I’ve got to find time to read every day, which part of my life should I take it from? Friends? TV? Going out? Family? Evenings in? Homework?
How am I going to find the time to read?
A big problem.
Or is it?
If you’re wondering how you’ll find time, it means you don’t really want to read. Because nobody’s ever got time. Children certainly haven’t, nor have teenagers or grownups. Life always gets in the way.
…
Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love.)
Stolen from what?
From the tyranny of living.
Reading is a great way to chill out — a kind of meditation.
“Study has always been my sovereign remedy for disappointment, for I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.” —Montesquieu
Books don’t change with age — we do.
Until we reach a certain age, we’re not ready for some books. Unlike fine wine, however, good books don’t need to mature. They wait patiently on our bookshelves while we get old. When we think we’re ready to read them, we have another stab.
A quick, easy read, especially good for parents who want to help their kids love reading. (No advice beats this.) Would pair well with one of my very favorite books about reading, The Pleasures of Reading In An Age of Distraction.
I need my person...
When I feel
the loneliness at night in bed so strongly I cave and find my way back to you, I hope in these bursts of random honesty someone will reach me and stroke my flesh, listen to my heart. Let me know I can still be found and loved, wanted to the extremes of our mortal frailty. Hold my hand, hold me down, let me lose myself around you. Do nothing to extinguish me, but everything to feed my hunger. Write the words, send them free, make me not be the beggar waiting on edges of hope so sharp I may use them to take the pity away. Wait. Wait. Wait. No. No No. Now. Now. Now.