My Words

There are days when I feel feelings I can not understand, or simply choose not to… things I feel and think which cause me to doubt and hide within the words I create… there are times when I am so tired I wish the world would slow so I could catch up… there are moments in which I feel the weight and fall to my knees…

I write these words with no purpose…

I look not for reason, for reason has led me to hide within these words, hide within my mind…

Tears can not flow tonight… the well is empty, yet shallow enough to be full

I sit now and wait… for the words I create to bring a filling breath to my lungs…


the breath I long for. the breath I need

Layers

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”


Anais Nin

I have always been fascinated with layers. Full skirts of secrets, delicate fabrics piled up like soft snow over each other, a soft movement over the skin.

Layers should not come with weight, there should always be plenty of pockets of air, spaces where to hide and discover, a lightness that frees instead of imposing.

That is my type of skirt-the one I want my mind dressed of, with plenty of room for the cells, a nest to my constellations...

When God created woman

When God created woman , He was working late on the 6th day.


An angel came by and said: “why spend too much time on that one?”And the lord answered:

“Have you seen all the specifi-cations i have to meet to shape her?”



“She must be washable, but not made of plastic, have more than 200 moving parts which all must be replaceable and she must function on all kinds of food, she must be able to embrace several kids at the same time, give a hug that can heal anything from a bruised knee to a broken heart and she must do all this with only two hands.”

The angel was impressed.

“Just two hands… impossible!”

And this is the standard model?!

“Too much work for one day… wait until tomorrow and then complete her.”

“I’ll not”, said the Lord. “I am so close to complete this creation which will be the favourite of my heart.”

“She cures herself when sick and she can work 18 hours a day.”

“The angel came nearer and touched the woman.

“But you have made her so soft, Lord”

“She is soft”, said the Lord, “But i have also made her strong. You can’t imagine what she can endure and overcome.

“Can she think?” The angel asked.

The Lord answered:

“Not only can she think, she can reason and negotiate.”

The angel touched the woman’s check…

“Lord, it seems this creation is leaking! You have put too many burdens on her.”

“She is not leaking… It’s a tear” the Lord corrected the angel.

“What’s it for?” asked the angel.

And the Lord said:

“Tears are her way of expressing grief, her doubts, her love, her loneliness, her suffering and her pride.”

This made a big impression on the angel;

“Lord you are genius.

You thought of everything. The woman is indeed marvelous!”

Indeed she is!

Woman has strengths that amaze man.

She can handle trouble and carry heavy burdens.

She holds happiness, love and opinions.

She smiles when feeling like screaming, she sings when feeling like crying, cries when she is happy and Laughs when she is afraid.

She fights for what she believes in.

Stands up against injustice.

She doesn’t take “no” for an answer, when she can see a better solution.

She gives herself so her family can thrive.

She takes her friend to the doctor if she is afraid.

Her love is unconditional.

She cries when her kids are victorious.

She is happy when her friends do well.

She is glad when she hears of a birth or a wedding.

Her heart is broken when a next of kin or friend dies.

But she finds the strenght to get on with life.

She knows that a kiss and a hug can heal a broken heart.

There is only one thing wrong with her:

“SHE FORGETS WHAT SHE IS WORTH…”



N.B: I found that article on the net..& I couldon’t leave it like that without sharing…& I would like to take the chance & Thank the one who wrote that wonderful article…Thank You!!

It Is A Quiet Day

There is a calm on a winter morning, a quiet before the now begins to fall. The gray sky is dark and yet light at the same time, the clouds filled with the soft white flakes that will soon drift over the landscape. Snow has always had a sound of its own. When I was a child I always knew when the snow arrived in the night, the usual stillness replaced by something I still find hard to explain.


This year I am savoring the season, delighting in the lights others have put outside, listening to good music and taking in an energy that seems to surround me. That energy fills me and reminds me to listen only to myself and to what I feel deep within. My words flow this morning but there are too many and so they collide in their efforts to be heard. I think today I will sit with them, jotting them down here and there and then perhaps I will be able to organize them enough to put some of them here. It will be a quiet day for such things, the gentle quiet of snow, the whisper of the earth as it drifts to sleep under a blanket of white.

The Wonder of December

Magic dwells within every month, from the ruby red of a February heart to the chromium yellow of a sunrise in August. It drifts like wandlight over the gardens of June and flies along with October leaves. But every month holds something back, keeps a petal of unique enchantment in quiet reserve, for each one desires to contribute just a bit of themselves to the most magical month in the circle, and now that time has come. They have gathered together in celestial towers to bestow their gifts upon December. The cool mystery of an April dawn, the bronze glow of an afternoon in November, the stretched-long hours of a carefree July, the playful winds of March that dance amongst the trees - all can be found here. For we have arrived at the zenith of the visionary year, the very place where all the delights of each and every month now gather as one.

Yes, this is the month of true wizardry, when the hillsides dress in silver and fairies wear feathers and sleep in bare trees. Chimerical worlds are sheathed inside a single drop of ice, and an auroral star glitters high in the eastern sky.

The animals speak at midnight.

Goodwill cracks the hardest soul.

All of the wonder of the long wondrous year can be found in the month of December. It fills us up, floods through our spirits until every room is full and we must share our felicity with others. We give gifts, we share smiles, we ring bells. We are beguiled by the blessed beauty of life.

It is all astonishing goodness in thirty one days.

It is now December.



Huzzah!

Random Questions

I'm feeling awesomely perky this morning - I have no idea exactly why...but I think i'm just going to roll with it *winks*.

I thought I would answer a few randmon questions below. If you like you can answer the same questions and leave a comment. I look forward to reading them.

1. Today I feel...that so much is possible

2. Song of the moment: "The Lucky One" by Alison Krauss

3. Currently I spend too much time...on a computer

4. Quote for week: "We are what we believe we are"-C.S. Lewis

5. Favourite symbol or shape? Heart and bird shapes

6. Do you think the Loch Ness monster exists? of course

7. Currently reading... blogs

8. Some of the best advice I ever got was... strive to live in the "now", stay away from gossip, drink alot of water, never fall asleep with make-up on and to keep writing (even if no one reads)

Talk to Me

Talk to me

say the things you would say

If I wasn't here

that you didn't say

to her.

In the wild wet waste

Of a Whitby shore

under freezing stars;

Sit with me

and roll your words out

over the salt sea.

Talk to me

Of the girl in blue

and answer all the questions

All the questions I have ever asked

of you.

Talk to me

say the things you would say

If I wasn't here

That you didn't say

to her.

Sometimes she thinks about running away. Then she remembers summer sunrises seen from the top of the gorge, and she stays right where she is. Where on this good green earth could she go and have such coinage to tuck in the pockets of her old photographer's vest?


It is October, and she is far from her lofty granite perch, but she is there in her thoughts. She sits with her legs dangling over the edge and watches the clouds drift by - sometimes she feels like a cloud herself.

Women Who Dare - Colette (1873-1954) - in full Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

French novelist, belonging, in time, to the generation of such authors as Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Paul Claudel. Colette's career spanned from her early 20s to her mid-70s. Her main themes were joys and pains of love, and female sexuality in the male-dominated world. All her works are more or less autobiographical but Colette intentionally blurred the boundaries between fiction and fact. She wrote over 50 novels and scores of short stories.

"By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet." (Mes Apprentissages, 1936)

Sidonie-Cabrielle Colette was born in the Burgundian village of Saint-Sauveur-en Puisaye. She was the daughter of a retired army captain, Jules-Joseph Colette. He had lost a leg in the Italian campaign and worked as a taxcollector with local political aspirations. Colette's mother, Adele Eugenie Sidonie Landoy, known as 'Sidonie' or 'Sido', was an unconventional character, a down-to-earth personality, devoted to her pets, books, and garden. Colette spent a happy childhood in rural surrounding, the scene of her many novels. At the age of 20 Colette married the writer and music critic Henri Gauthier-Villars, ('Monsieur Willy'); he was 15 years her senior. Colette's biographers' have labelled her first husband as a literary charlatan and degenerate.

Encouraged to start a career as a writer Colette published in short period four CLAUDINE novels (1900-03) under her husband's pen name Willy. According to a famous story, he locked Colette in her room until she had written enough pages. The series of four novels depicted improper adventures of a teenage girl. The series was a huge success and inspired all kinds of side products - a musical stage play, Claudine uniform, Claudine soap, cigars, and perfume. However, Colette's own cosmetics shop went bankrupt. Tired of her husbands unfaithfulness, Colette broke free of him in 1905. After divorce in 1906 Colette became a music-hall performer at such places as La Chatte Amoureuse and L'Oiseau de Nuit. On stage she bared one breast. A talk of the town, Colette once mimed copulation in a sketch, which a riot at the Moulin Rouge. Colette's protector and manager, a woman known as 'Missy', was the niece of Napoleon III, the Marquise de Belboeuf. Missy committed suicide in 1944 - ruined and desperate. Among Colette's other friends and probably lovers were Natalie Clifford Barney, an American lesbian woman, and the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzzio.

In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel des Ursins, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin, for which she wrote theatre chronicles and short stories. Their daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, later told that she was neglected by her parents - her mother never wanted a child. Colette's relationship with her young stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, was a source of gossips. In the novel CHÉRI (1920) she returned to the affair but depicted it from a point of view of a sexually unexperienced young man.

In 1910 Colette published LA VAGABONDE, a story about an actress who rejects a man she loves in order to live in an independent way. During World War I Colette converted her husband's St. Malo estate into a hospital for the wounded. After the war she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (1920).

The 1920s brought Colette enormous fame. She entered the world of modern poetry and paintings, which centered around Jean Cocteau, later her neighbor in Palais Royale. By 1927 Colette was frequently acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. Especially Colette's insights into the behavior of women in love gained a sympathetic response from the reading public.

"'The great hat principle is that when you meet a woman on the street and her hat allows you to see whether she's a brunette, a blonde, or a redhead, the woman in question is not wearing a chic hat. There! ... Notice I'm not saying anything, I'll let you make up your own mind. Well?'" (from 'The Saleswoman' in Collected Stories)

Two central themes can be identified in Colette's mature works: the nature and the mother-daughter bond. LA MAISON DE CLAUDINE (1922) mythologized her childhood, LA NAISSANCE DU JOUR (1928) and SIDO (1929) celebrated Colette's carefree rural childhood, and the strength of her mother, whom the author rarely saw but wrote her many letters. The letters were destroyed by her brother after Sidonie died. In novels such as LA VAGABONDE (1911), LE BLÉ EN HERBE (1923), LA SECONDE (1929) and LA CHATTE Colette explored the struggle between independent identity and passionate love. Most of Colette's heroes and heroines, cocottes, bisexuals and gigolos, came from the margins of society. Chéri, which is one of her most famous book, tells the story of the end of a six year affair between an aging retired courtesan, Léa, and a pampered young man, Chéri. Turning conventions upside-down it is Chéri who wears silk pyjamas and Léa's pearls, he is the object of gaze. And in the end Léa demonstrates all the survival skills which Colette associated with femininity. The story continued in The Last of Chéri (1951), which contrasts Léa's strength and Chéri's fragility, leading to his suicide.

In the 1940s Colette portrayed her later years in L'ÉTOILE VESPER (1946) and LE FANAL BLEU (1949),which constantly questioned the relationship between autobiography and fiction. GIGI (1945) was published when the author was 72; the novel was made into a film in 1948. Vincente Minnelli directed a musicalized version of the story in 1958.

In the 1930s Colette was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. She was the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy. In 1953 she became a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. She won also many awards for her work. During the last 20 years of her life Colette suffered from a crippling form of arthritis, which had been set off by the fracture of a fibula in 1931. Her marriage with Henry de Jouvenal ended in 1924. From 1935 she was married to Maurice Goudaket, whose pearl business had been ruined during the Depression. Colette supported him because as a Jew he did not find work and had to hide when the Germans occupied France. Colette died on August 3, 1954 in Paris, where her fame was no less legandary than that of the writer Gertrude Stein(1874-1946) or the singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963). Colette was accorded a state funeral despite the refusal of Catholic rites on the grounds that she had been divorced. Her funeral was attended by thousands of mourners.

Women Who Dare - Anais Nin

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection."Anais Nin

Anais was born in Neuilly, just outside Paris. She spent her childhood in various parts of Europe until, when she was eleven, her father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, abandoned his family. In the same year, her French-Danish mother, Rosa Culmell, took Anais and her two sons to New York. On the boat that brought Anais away from Europe and from her father she began to write her journals. In 1923 she married Hugo Guiler, who had studied literature and economics and had acquired a good position in an international bank, allowing them to live comfortably.


The couple moved to Paris in 1924. There they lived in various appartments, among them a beautiful house in Louveciennes, but Anais also often had a studio for herself and lived in a houseboat on the Seine for a while. In Paris she and Hugo supported various avant-garde artists, among them Henry Miller with whom Anais started an affair and exchanged hundreds of letters. The book A literary passion includes a great number of the letters these two artists exchanged over the years and provide an interesting documentary of their struggle for recognition as writers as well as their relationship.


Anais moved back to New York just before the outbreak of World War II. After a turbulent time in New York she divided her life between New York and Los Angeles, between Hugo and Rupert, a much younger lover and friend. From being a cult figure of the early feminist movement, Anais later rose to international prominence with her writing. She is best known for her diaries but also produced a number of novels and a prose poem in surrealistic style as well as wonderful erotic short stories, published posthumously. Characterized by the use of powerful and, at times, disquieting imagery, her work reveals great sensitivity and perception.

In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.