Monday, December 24, 2012

Circles.

going back and forth between familiar places realizing they have become unfamiliar.
going back and forth between comfortable cities realizing they have become uncomfortable.
going back and forth between the same people over and over again realizing they have become strangers.

round and round ourselves in circles, are we really back at this place again? perhaps that's why the earth is round and relationships are circular and everything that begins must come to an end.

escapism doesn't work, hopping on the next plane train automobile wont work, and ignoring you definitely isn't working either.

and suddenly you realize you were born alone in this world, with nothing but your screams at the injustice of natural oxygen, and you will leave this world surely alone, with nothing but your silence at the injustice of inhumane humans.

it's not a fair world, yet we expect stories to make sense, places to stay the same, and people to be kind. we expect linearity of ourselves, yet we change every day. we hold others up on pedestals they never asked for, we want relationships to stay on a straight path with no bumps and potholes, even though there is no such thing in reality as a purely straight line from A to B, a theoretical dream only.

reality will surprise you with people you did not expect, situations you can not understand, and places you couldn't even imagine.

open your hands, receive in anticipation. perhaps the unfamiliar will become familiar again, the uncomfortable comfortable again, and the strangers friends again.

give love graciously; receive love humbly.

Anywhere but here.

It feels like a good night for some quotes.

“Listen a hundred times; ponder a thousand times; speak once.”
—  Turkish Proverb

“Beware of backbiting, for backbiting is more serious than adultery. A man may commit adultery, and drink [wine], and then repent, and Allah will forgive him. But, the backbiter will not be forgiven by Allah until his [backbiten] companion forgives him.”
—  Prophet Muhammad saws صلى الله عليه وسلم‎

“Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.”
—  An excerpt from a lecture by Sheikh Abdel Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) given to a conference of British converts on September 17 1997

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’”
—  Aldous Huxley

When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.
—Barbara Bloom, on Kintsugi

“Don’t give up on those you love. Give them time, give them space, give them love, but don’t give them up.”
— Shaykh Waleed Basyouni”

“The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying ‘anywhere but here’.”
—  E.E. Cummings