Illustration for The Conference of Birds by Attar of Nishapur

 

Habiballah of Sava for The Conference of Birds 

by Attar of Nishapur aka Farid ad-Din Attar.

Desire

“Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness.... It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.” — D. H Lawrence

Barber's Adagio: Students and supporters play to protest closure of musi...

Romantic Love

 

🎨 Richard Borrmeister

If there is one thing I have learned in life, is that love is grand. Desire. Love is pretty much everything. All kinds of love. Romantic love is beautiful, even if it doesn't last. Remember, nothing last. All things end. I often live on the memories of the romantic loves that I have experienced, all of them, but mostly my marriage. I want to say that 'we fall in love many times in our lives if we are lucky.'

Love is a bit of a mystery to many people, but it possesses certain ingredients. 

It takes meeting someone, noticing them, feeling an interest, and then it takes two, both people expressing that same interest and attraction. Desire again. Sometimes curiosity helps. Love does not thrive properly if proximity does not feed it, and for that matter, some good experiences too. Desire leads to touching. Intimacy is critical.

Somewhere along the way, if love is thriving right and if attraction wins over ego, a firm commitment happens. Each person wants the other person's happiness. Desire grows. Love manifest itself in a visible form. This is best if the two people are independent and emotionally mature. 

But what makes Love and Passion last? Years and years and years of desire. That's compatibility. If two people are not compatible in most issues, love can die. This is why I tell people, if you value a good conversation with your lover, that's a big plus for the relationship. Good communication feeds love, because life is not just about falling in love. There is a reality of pain and stress and suffering outside the realm of love and desire. Also, people change over time. They may discover new loves and desires which alter a relationship. Some relationships survive. Some do not. But nothing negates what people once felt for one another when they first fell in love. While love fades with disappointments and absence, love is really stronger than one can understand.

I'll end this little post on love by adding that one of the gifts that modern people possess is the ability to experience what we now call Romantic Love. It was not always so. As cultures have evolved over time, fairness and love and passions have developed into an ideal Romantic Love, even for many very ordinary couples. But it not so for all people in this world. Some cultures have not evolved enough. For some of these people, love and desire leads to unhappiness and even tragedy.

If you can love, do so. Be happy in the doing of it. 

What I am Reading Next

 Reading this for the pleasure of language and a wildly new take on a situation. Longlisted for the Booker.

3.6 rating leaning up as it was sad, and not as good as Maugham. Smiling. Beautiful language. It did not move me emotionally though. Reading books is so subjective and even shadowed by moods. I could pick this book up and reread it next year and feel completely different. That's why books are forever. That every read is a new experience.

TRUTH

"Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them." 

  

                         — Angela Carter

Beowulf, Basilisks, Dragons and Serpents

 Not much time for writing here as I have offline writing to do, but these are some of the books I am reading for research. I wanted to post them while I did my brief social media this morning. I slept in and now I need to catch up. Laughing. I have four editions of Beowulf, but I really like Swinton's version as it has side by side translation and I needed that. I wanted to read Tolkien's version just because it's Tolkien and the other work is on monsters and dragons and basilisks and serpents of the Classical and Early medieval eras. 

Junip - Line of Fire

Howl fan art

It's strange what a novel can do sometimes, or where it might lead. For example, lots of fan art. This one is from Howl's Moving Castle. I am a big fan of Howl's Moving Castle and of Howl and Sophie. I also like bird people, which is a very old fantasy of mine.

          art by Dani López

Re-enchantment

“The essential ingredient in a temenos is the perimeter that marks out the space, whether by a wall, a fence, a hedge of flowers and bushes, or some rocks that only imply the full perimeter. Having crossed the border, we find ourselves in a special place where certain things happen, and other things do not.” 

 — Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

SYML - "Wildfire" [Official Music Video]

Of Monsters And Men - Wolves Without Teeth (Official Lyric Video)

Open my chest and colour my spine
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all
Swallow my breath
And take what is mine
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all

I'll be the blood
If you'll be the bones
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all
So lift up my body
And lose all control
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all

You hover like a hummingbird
Haunt me in my sleep
You'll sailing from another world
Sinking in my sea, oh
You're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it
She wants it

And I run from wolves, ooh
Breathing heavily
At my feet
And I run from wolves, ooh
Tearing into me
Without teeth

I can see through you
We are the same
It's perfectly strange
You run in my veins
How can I keep you
Inside my lungs
I breathe what is yours
You breathe what is mine

You hover like a hummingbird
Haunt me in my sleep
You'll sailing from another world
Sinking in my sea, oh
You're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it
He wants it

And I run from wolves, ooh
Breathing heavily
At my feet
And I run from wolves, ooh
Tearing into me
Without teeth

And you can follow
You can follow me
You can follow
You can follow me

You hover like a hummingbird
Haunt me in my sleep
You're sailing from another world
Sinking in my sea, oh
"You're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it" she once said

And I run from wolves, ooh
Breathing heavily
At my feet
And I run from wolves, ooh
Tearing into me
Without teeth

And you can follow
You can follow me and
You can follow
You can follow me and
And you can follow
You can follow me
You can follow
You can follow me

Juvenilia

(Something I wrote as a teenager, a very young teenager, around thirteen or fourteen years old.)


Poe In Allegory

Amid the cool dark of endless space
A single crimsom flame does race.
Behind it across an ocean of blue
A haunting shape does pursue.
This shape gains speed with the light of day.
In the cool of night it loses its way.
While it moves across the sky,
The shape falters and asks itself why
It pursues a thing it will never possess,
And why it does not pause forever to rest;
Yet, always in the light of day
The shadow moves faster along its way!

Alas! Night is a time for stars and dreams.
Life is not what it is or what it seems.
There is no shadow, only the glow of the moon,
And the warmth that it brings never too soon.

                                     Copyright © 2024  Madly Jane

Kissing

"...Praise the deep lustrous kiss that lasts minutes, blossoms into what feels like days, fields of tulips glossy with dew, low purple clouds piling in beneath the distant arch of a bridge.... Let the tongue, in its wisdom, release its stores, let the mouth,tired of talking, relax into its shapes of give and receive, its plush swelling, its slick round reveling, its primal reminiscence that knows only the one robust world."

Kissing Again Dorianne Laux

A reminder

I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said is: "Life is short, art is long." 

Ursula K. Le Guin

Iona by John Duncan

 

Iona by John Duncan. Symbolism and one of the pieces of art that always inspires me. Especially Duncan's use of color and expression. In a certain story I've read, Iona is the protagonist in a myth about a young girl who fell in love with a god. When I heard her story I thought I'd like to fall in love with a god. Of course the more I read and understood, this was a perilous path to choose. What would it be like to be human in presence of the divine. Any divine. Despite Iona's tragic circumstances, this was a topic that I love. It haunts me. 

Backstory: Around the age of 10, I started writing little notes about another girl who has had various names over the years. A young girl, ordinary in all ways but very clever who falls in love with a god, who finds her annoying most of the time. This was my fantasy. My dream.  Part of my paracosm. While my friends wanted to be Cinderella or Snow White or some heroine of a TV show, I wanted to struggle with a god and make a life. Some of this might have been my early, much too early, understanding and knowledge of death and how it shadowed my early life.

I was only seven years old when I realized that all  gods, whatever, were probably the fantasized needs of human beings. I was crushed at the time to know this. By age eight I had relaxed into this philosophy, but it wasn't like I could have a conversation about it with my friends or my parents, although I tried to explain it to my mother several times. I did explain it to my third grade teacher, which led to some unintentional consequences for me and yes, a new understanding of myself. I was never the same. This teacher influenced me greatly and was a wonderful mentor in early life. I always thought of her when I thought of gods and mortals. I still think of her.

Love is forbidden between gods and mortals. This theme is told over and over in literature. Why? That is one of the things I wanted to know, too.

Fall Notebooks

 

Writing is lots of hard work. Reading and Studying is too. I bought these and 3 dozen Traveler's notebooks for organization. Everyone knows I love flowers.

Wildflower Explosion.

 

 Images © Lucia Leyfield 

This is something I want to do. Nature journaling and doing watercolors of my flowers from my garden. I started one a few years back but got distracted by life. This time I have planned better. I have already purchased lots of watercolors, etc. But I just love how Lucia Leyfield designed her pages. She has a website, and is on IG if anyone is interested. I first saw this image on Twitter. No one knew who the artist was and then they made a search. I had too, but I did not see all of Leyfield's page due to time and circumstances, so I missed this entry on her workshop. One can buy it to learn and paint along.

Roman History Notes

 Written by Titus Ursus, Primus pilus of Legiō IX Hispana, in the third year of Hadrian's reign (*120 AD). 

"This will probably be the last papyrus and my last note. Our legion was ambushed in the wild realm called Caledonian Forest and was almost completely annihilated. Half of my first cohort is all that was left of the IX legiō. We were pushed into the marsh and we will probably die here, fighting bravely to the end in the name of Rome and the Emperor. We were attacked by a demonic pack of the barbaric Picts. They looked more like wild beasts than humans. Some of them were dressed in animal furs, painted with strange runic signs... others seemed to be two-legged wild beasts. They tore us apart as if we were made of paper! I saw our legatus and my brothers in arms being eaten alive, I will never forget their screams. The barbarians attacked us unnoticed, quickly and with wild fury, then disappeared in the fog. Mainly at night. Our shields, swords and armor were no use here. The enemy we face seems to be the ancient wrath of some dark gods we have awakened. We should never invade these lands. I hear demonic howls, they're coming! They're coming!" ⠀

Beautiful writing is...

“Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers’ minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader’s mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.”
           ― Donald Maass