I have just completed a selection of tales from the One Thousand and One Nights collection, in the Penguin Classic, Arabian Nights.
I think you can tell a lot about a people by their folklore and the messages they carry and lessons they teach. As a man thinketh, so is he. Suffice it to say that there seems to be an obsession with the latent infidelity of women and jinnees.
I do feel some loose link with Jamaican/West Indian folklore with the stories of Anancy, who is the character to whom cunning has become a second nature and who skillfully applies it to get ahead... but all folklore exist to pass on the wisdom of the forebears to the newer generations.
While reading Arabian Nights, I was more than slightly shocked at the sexual references-especially since the culture has become so conservative. Believe you me, one of the more frequent verbs is "to Mount" and all the conjugations thereof.
I am reading the classics because they are a lot cheaper than the newer hyped up books, the last of which my book mark is still stuck on page 40. It seems many of these newer books are better seen as loose movie treatments than becoming classics in their own right. I can buy four classics for the price of one new book so if you are going to be all hyped up, you better be good because the classics are worth every penny!
The Next Book: Mansfield Park by Jane Austin. I think it relevant especially in the light of my post about my own experience of poverty and class.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The reason why I write
Writing has always been my therapy... and much more effective that the child psychologist my father took me to see at 13 and the clinical psychologist I saw when I was depressed in the Island Behind God's Back.
This blog was created to help me find my voice back in 2006. I always knew I had something to say, I just didn't know what it was or how it would come out. As I grew, my writing grew more open. I wrote less in parables and turned down the volume on self editing. I realized that there was a correlation between key stroke and heart that the mind had no place in interfering especially one like mine that was so hung up on appearances and appropriateness and all those things we are taught that make people dignified.
I just started to write. I stopped thinking and I just let the words pour out of my heart and I shared them here.
I haven't advertised this blog. It is semi-anonymous. I write with a pseudonym so that the mind doesn't get too threatened in all this open heart conversation.
I know that it may come across as a little out there sometimes... and sometimes I hide behind what appears to be a flair for the dramatic, but essentially, this is me. This is the me that I am revealing to myself and I am letting you in on it as it happens. When you read my blog, you are witnessing my life, and consciousness as it unfolds.
This blog is my stream of consciousness. My posts are not pre-planned... they just flow. I start a post not really knowing how it is going to end. This is indeed my loose interior monologue This is why my writing has been so therapeutic. I write not only to share, but to reveal to myself.
Over the past year, as I came to terms with being a newlywed, I found that I had very little to say. My writing was more expository than exploratory. I wrote to keep you up to date, to tell you I was alive, but few were the moments when I would just lit my heart rip. Funny enough, the same thing that seemingly silenced me, is the very thing that is giving me back my voice.
Marriage for me has been a journey into self. I thought it was the journey of two people trying to walk together but it is way more than that. It is about getting into you and then walking together with souls bare towards the light.
I have never been more myself in any relationship and I don't think I have been more myself even when I wasn't in a relationship. It's like I am finding out more about who I really am as i find out about my life partner. It is a blessing... he seems to hold up a mirror to me and I to him. We help each other see ourselves.
We have spent more conversation hours in this one year than I may have for all of my previous relationships combined and of course, we almost never talk about the weather.
As I continue to grow and my voice continues to gain strength, no doubt my writing will reflect this. I will not write for shock value, but I will write as my heart wishes to express. For me, it isn't what comes out of my mouth that reveals my heart, it is what comes from my pen.
This blog was created to help me find my voice back in 2006. I always knew I had something to say, I just didn't know what it was or how it would come out. As I grew, my writing grew more open. I wrote less in parables and turned down the volume on self editing. I realized that there was a correlation between key stroke and heart that the mind had no place in interfering especially one like mine that was so hung up on appearances and appropriateness and all those things we are taught that make people dignified.
I just started to write. I stopped thinking and I just let the words pour out of my heart and I shared them here.
I haven't advertised this blog. It is semi-anonymous. I write with a pseudonym so that the mind doesn't get too threatened in all this open heart conversation.
I know that it may come across as a little out there sometimes... and sometimes I hide behind what appears to be a flair for the dramatic, but essentially, this is me. This is the me that I am revealing to myself and I am letting you in on it as it happens. When you read my blog, you are witnessing my life, and consciousness as it unfolds.
This blog is my stream of consciousness. My posts are not pre-planned... they just flow. I start a post not really knowing how it is going to end. This is indeed my loose interior monologue This is why my writing has been so therapeutic. I write not only to share, but to reveal to myself.
Over the past year, as I came to terms with being a newlywed, I found that I had very little to say. My writing was more expository than exploratory. I wrote to keep you up to date, to tell you I was alive, but few were the moments when I would just lit my heart rip. Funny enough, the same thing that seemingly silenced me, is the very thing that is giving me back my voice.
Marriage for me has been a journey into self. I thought it was the journey of two people trying to walk together but it is way more than that. It is about getting into you and then walking together with souls bare towards the light.
I have never been more myself in any relationship and I don't think I have been more myself even when I wasn't in a relationship. It's like I am finding out more about who I really am as i find out about my life partner. It is a blessing... he seems to hold up a mirror to me and I to him. We help each other see ourselves.
We have spent more conversation hours in this one year than I may have for all of my previous relationships combined and of course, we almost never talk about the weather.
As I continue to grow and my voice continues to gain strength, no doubt my writing will reflect this. I will not write for shock value, but I will write as my heart wishes to express. For me, it isn't what comes out of my mouth that reveals my heart, it is what comes from my pen.
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