~L.~ Daily Writing

The story inside my bag

2011-11-10T10:55:00.001-08:00

I have been thinking of doing one of these posts for a very long time. I do find them fascinating, and I know I am not the only one. Now that Angie has posted her thoughts about her bag and its contents, I felt compelled to finally write do this post.

Bags can tell a lot. They are keepers of secret lives and intimate selves. They are an important character in one's story. This is what mine can unveil. You can interpret it any way you want. These are things that come with me, hidden, and when they peek out, they tell tales that might or might not be about me.

~*L.*~

Foremothers

2011-10-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

I was wondering
if you even remember
the beginning,
the end,
when it was revealed
that the holy one was a man,
the child was a boy.

It was the time that wrote me
a prostitute and witch
and left me
outside of the revelation.

Loving and accepting,
eager to be allowed back
into the story
I followed you.
I chose faith,
I lengthened my skirts and hated my body
to please,
I covered my hair,
and walked a few steps behind.

I allowed you to keep me hidden,
in back rooms,
amidst your gold treasures
and our very dark secrets.

I let you take over everything I had
even the unwanted daughters I failed
and were not allowed a chance breathe,
even the daughters they raped
and had to be honorably killed.

Today, this history is writing its own demise
and I rise
to speak,
outside,
under the sun,
loud,
in front of my people.

And I vow
that the story will never be stolen again,
from our daughters.
No more.
They will not be a footnote
like our foremothers.

They will be forging new chapters
new times,
new light
and faith
for themselves
and for all the following others.

Loredana Tiron-Pandit

285 Girls Shed 'Unwanted' Names
Refusing to Kill Daughter, Family Defies Tradition, Draws Anger

Women and spiritual leadership

2011-10-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

Things come up to upset me lately and I have moments when I need to speak against them. I am usually a little coward and prefer to sit in the back, in the dark, in the shadows. Unless I am really outraged and the world starts to look like a gloomy, nightmarish place if I don't light my little candle and hold it up high. Who knows, maybe there will be another lost soul who sees it flickering and feels new hope for a new day.

We live in a deeply religious world. I applaud that. I think spirituality can save humanity. I do. The way we choose to interpret our spirituality and practice it, however, has proven to be so potentially damaging! It makes me cry. As a woman, I have to cry even harder.

Women have been recognized the right to vote only a few short years ago -- not even one hundred years in US. The great world religions of course are thousands of years old. After about one hundred years since women have been legally given the right to be part of political leadership and law making, still no such equality has been achieved inside the multiple religious systems of our world. Most religions only accept men as spiritual leaders. Most (if not all) the women who observe these religions are obviously fine with it. Because their faith is so deeply based on these rules, that doubting the rules looks like lack of faith. Many times, all we have is faith. Faith is the only thing that keeps us alive and we cannot afford to doubt our faith -- for many of us it would feel like a death sentence. I know that.

Religion, the way I view it, is a system that is built around a faith. Faith is essential and beautiful in all its forms. Religions, however, are organizations with laws and politics, meant to govern the faithful. Without this distinction between religion and faith, this discussion cannot go further.

Democracy, widely accepted as the best, most enlightened form of government, is based on the idea that all groups need to be represented at the higher hierarchical level of the governing structure. There cannot be fairness without representation. How can one side know of the struggles of the other? Now, please don't say that women and men are not that different, that men can easily represent women's interests. If we weren't that different, then there wouldn't be a need for rules that keep women away from religious leadership, in the first place. Clearly that rule identifies us as different -- the ones who cannot lead, because ... there would probably be many possible answers here, but the bottom line is that we are viewed as incapable.

But this should not be the end. We can have our faith and still leave space for discussion of the rules. Women should be able to participate in the discussion. All religions should embrace the possibility for women to become priests (gurus, rabbis, imams, pandits, and so on). Maybe many women won't go that route. That's fine. But if they want to, in a non-discriminatory system, they should be able to do it. They should be able to have access to the closed room where religion is being interpreted and turned into rules for the community to practice.

I was raised into a discriminatory religious system, in the Christian Orthodox church, and I will always carry much of that with me, although I have long since taken my spiritual life into my own hands, and into the company of people who believe in tolerance and inclusiveness for all. I am a spiritual being but above that, I am a woman. I say above that, because I cannot change being a woman, while I can any day convert to another religion.

This is from woman to woman. A few years ago many women argued that they were perfectly comfortable with not having the right to vote. Only the crazies, the suffragettes, the dreaded feminists were of a different opinion. And without them, we'd be in the dark ages still. Please keep an open mind. This is not an attack to your faith, your God or your soul.

Can you ask yourselves how would your religion be changed if women were allowed to be spiritual leaders? Would that maybe hold a tiny bit of value for you? Seeing someone who looks like you delivering the word of God from the pulpit? Would a woman interpreting your scriptures bring you maybe a tiny sense of pride? Would it make you feel more valuable to your community? More recognized? Visible? Will it make you feel like maybe after all you're worth something? Will it maybe make your daughter feel like she can really go anywhere, do anything, like you've been telling her? Will your daughter feel like she truly is in this world as precious as you think she is? Like she has a fair chance? One you didn't have? Because unless we are exposed to this sort of equanimity from childhood, from the moment we start being aware of the world, later we are unable to see the injustice. I think that may be one of the reasons why we are not bothered by it. We've never seen any different. We've known our roles as future princesses and future mothers from the age of three. We've known our place to be at the back of the bus from the beginning. Let's hope our daughters will someday have the choice to glimpse at the world's lights through the front windows.

Women ride in back on sex-segregated Brooklyn bus line

UPDATE: Sex segregaton policy on Brooklyn bus line to end, operator pledges

Story Bought Dress

2011-08-19T06:58:00.000-07:00

A new and very interesting online zine, Story Bought Dress, the creation of Andrea Quinlan, seeks to explore stories of outfits and their wearers in creative ways. I am inspired by fashion and writing is my thing, so I contributed a short piece, titled Woman Suit.

(Image created on Polyvore)

Lori

No Girls in the Smurf World

2011-08-04T14:21:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's about toys again. We went to McDonald's today. Yes, again. I think I must have said it before on this blog, but I will say it again: why isn't there any other restaurant smart enough to dedicate a room to a play place, where children can play and parents can sip a coffee in relative relaxation, on rainy days when the park is not a choice and the library is too stifling for explosive energies? Another restaurant, I mean, where the food would be healthier and where you wouldn't feel so guilty feeding it to your kids?

Anyway, we got a happy-meal thing and asked for a toy for girls. They are giving smurf toys these days, to coincide with the release of the movie in theaters. All right. That's fine. Although my daughter never plays with those toys again once we step out of McDonalds. But I am digressing. What I wanted to complain about today was the fact the the toy for girls was the Baker smurf. The boys got Papa smurf. And the girls get the baker? Why not the smart smurf? Why not the fearless one? The baker? Are they even serious?

And it's not only McDonald's, although seriously people, stop stereotyping and just give everyone the same thing. The whole smurf world concept is completely out of line anyway. It is a misogynist's heaven. There is only one smurf girl, and she is not even real anyway, being created by the bad wizard? What kind of world is that? (It kind of reminds me of some Christian theological debates, about women being people and having a soul, but I don't want to go there now.) Why would anyone (Pierre Culliford -- yes, I was sooo surprised to find out the creator was a man!) create a world for a children's story in which there are no girls? What message does that send? And why would I give my money away to expose my daughter to yet another image of a skewed and horribly unfair world? I am surely going to boycott the Smurfs from now on. This is not acceptable. Not right. In no world that I can wrap my mind around.

Lori

Why are there no girls building our tomorrow, Lego?

2011-07-09T05:22:00.000-07:00

It is depressing to go to Target with your daughter looking for a nice, small lego set for her. Don't try it. You won't find anything beyond the big pink box that contains a few pink lego blocks. There are no girl story kits, barely any girl characters. In the whole City series, there is one girl character, among many policemen and firemen and other boys. At least in what was available in Target. A quick look at the Lego website City series shows that things are somehow better. I just looked at the pictures of the sets and counted the characters that looked like girls and the ones that looked like boys -- all the characters with helmets, or non-gender specific I counted as boys, considering that there should have been at least a small effort to hint at them being girls: a dress, a pink bow, a red lipstick, a ponytail peeking out of the helmet, a purse painted on the side. Here are the statistics:

Lego City series
Harbor theme: 5 sets, 12 boys, 2 girls (both in one set)
Space theme: 4 sets, 7 boys, no girls
Police theme: 11 sets, 30 boys, 1 girl
Airport theme: 7 sets, 13 boys, 1 girl
Fire theme: 5 sets, 14 boys, no girls
Trains theme: 6 sets, 7 boys, 2 girls (in two separate sets)
Town theme: 3 sets, 8 boys, 4 girls (all three sets have girl characters)
Construction theme: 2 sets, 2 boys, no girls
Farm theme: 4 sets, 5 boys, 2 girls (in two separate sets)
Total: out of 47 sets, only 10 sets have girl characters, for a total of 12 girl-looking characters among 98 boy-looking characters.

And this pathetic presence of girls, in sets that are mostly not appealing to girls at all. At least not to mine. Except for the farm. My daughter would have liked a school, a park, a hospital, a vet office, a pet shop, maybe, something of that sort. But we couldn't find any of that. Of course, in the store the options went beyond the City series. However, in the Harry Potter kits only the very large (and expensive) ones have the Hermione character. The same with the Pirates of the Carribean set. You will find however, plenty of space ships, cars, planes, robots and knights, who are not at least saving one lame princess that we can identify with.

The Lego section in the stores looks like a boys' toys section. All black, grey and white. All weapons and machines. Nothing gentle, more feminine, not pastel colors, no animals, schools, unicorns and whatever other "girlie" stuff our girls have become accustomed to. I mean, Lego is not even trying. You know, I would be happy with stereotypes at this point, anything. But honestly, a girl character, is what I'm asking. A girl centric story. We have such things, don't we? All I was looking for was a small, $10 - $15 set with a girl and a house. A girl and a car. A girl and a robot. A girl and a forest. A girl and a school. A girl and a horse. A girl and a hospital. A girl and a police station. A girl and a farm. I want my daughter to be able to populate her imaginary universes with as many girls as boys (it not more, if we are to be realistic).

It does not make any sense to me. What world is my daughter living in? Did she already get the subtle message that she should veer away from the legos and turn to the dress-up clothes and the cupcake makers? Not that boys are allowed to even consider the dress-up clothes and cupcake makers. Which is sad, but not as serious, because these are considered inferior interests in our society anyway, compared to the creativity-enhancing, systematical-reasoning-teaching, "inspiring-and-developing-the-builders-of-tomorrow" Lego. The sexism that starts in the lives of children this young is unbelievable. I am reminded how J.K. Rowling did not sign Harry Potter with her full name afraid that little boys won't read a children's book written by a woman. I know. It doesn't even sound real. Embarrassing. Shameful.

Lori

Lyme health

2011-05-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

I just watched a documentary about Lyme Disease. It's titled "Under Our Skin," director Andy Abrahams Wilson. It left me crying in anger and frustration. It left me feeling helpless. Then I remembered that I have a blog. So, here it is.

I have mentioned on the blog that last year I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. When I went to the doctor, one of my knees was swollen to twice the size of the other. It took more than a month to recover normal function in that leg. Motion in my right arm was so restricted that I couldn't reach up and put my hair in a ponytail. I had a severe episode of vertigo, at home, alone with my daughter that scared me like nothing else in this life. I had bite my lips and stand next to the stove boiling pasta and fixating my eyes into one point, because if I lost a bit of control, I would have crashed on the floor and probably psychologically scarred my daughter seriously. I underwent an antibiotic treatment for two weeks and felt much better. When I asked my doctor what if I get these symptoms again, what then, because I had been feeling sick for about a year before going to see him, he said it was impossible. Lyme gets treated easily with antibiotics. If symptoms reoccur, it means it is a new infection, a new tick. I view of all the testimonies on the Internet from long-time sufferers of chronic Lyme disease, that seemed hard to believe. But I preferred to trust him, because it was easier, more comfortable.

First let me say that I do not have any symptoms that would lead me to believe I've still got Lyme. Let me also add that I do not feel 100 percent healthy. I do not feel like before. But, as they say in the medical documentation for Lyme, this can be blamed on the aches and pains of daily living.

I watched however this documentary about people who struggled much more than I did and about the doctors who tried to help them, only to be shut down by a medical system that seems to have taken the road of perdition.

It seems that in the 1980's, legislation allowed universities and researchers to patent, own and profit from their research. Which seems a laudable measure at first sight. As a result, however, researchers (who work hard and I admire them, and I agree they deserve compensation for their hard work and amazing breakthroughs) instead of disseminating the truth, chose to keep it under wraps for possible profit opportunities.

Most of the doctors from the Infectious Disease Association of America who wrote the guidelines for the treatment of Lyme disease (line in: it's only an acute infection, never chronic, and it gets treated with antibiotic treatment of two to four weeks) have to profit monetarily in one or multiple ways from the information they have. They are trusted however, to write guidelines that allow patients to basically die from Lyme disease because doctors refuse to treat them, to believe them and instead send them for psychiatric evaluation.

Lyme disease is a weird bacterial infection, from the same family as the syphilis bacteria. The Lyme bacteria was discovered relatively recently, but most doctors believe they have complete knowledge of it. Although the symptoms look alarmingly similar to those of diseases that the doctors know nothing about, like multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia. The little bug is also linked to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I have ceased long time ago to trust those who believe they are in possession of the ultimate truth. There is no such thing.

Thanks to the Internet, who has been nothing less than a miracle for disseminating information, we know that there are numerous people out there whose Lyme was never cured. There are people who have died of Lyme disease. And yet my doctor assured me that Lyme is very easy to treat. And if I still had symptoms today, he probably wouldn't do anything about it. Why would he? His books show clearly that Lyme is treatable and besides, even if he tried to treat further, he would probably lose his license or be sued by the insurance company.

This story reminds me that science does not have all the answers, that the answers that it does have might very well be proven wrong at any time in the future. It also reminds me that while we all deserve to make a living from our work, maybe there is something not quite right about all of us looking to make a killing. Because, what happens to our ethics then? I don't know the answers. But then again, no one does.

Lori

Psalm by Lucian Blaga

2011-04-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Painful your hidden loneliness has always been to me,
but, God, what was I to do?
As a child I used to play with you
and in my mind I used to take you apart like a toy.
Later my wilderness grew,
my songs disappeared,
and without ever having had you too close
I lost you forever,
in the dust, in fire, in air and on the water.

Between the rising of the sun and sunset
I am but dirt and wound.
In the sky you closed yourself, like in a coffin.
Oh, if you were not closer to death
than life,
you would speak to me. From where you are,
from the earth or from myth you would speak.

In the thorns from around here, show yourself, God,
to say what you're expecting of me.
Do you want me to catch in the sky the venomous spear
thrown by another to pierce you under the wing?

Or maybe you don't want anything?
You are a mute and unmovable entity,
(intrinsically round, a is a)
you do not ask for a thing. Not even that I pray.
Look, the stars enter the world
along with my questioning sadness.
Look, it is night without windows outside.
God, what am I to do now?
In your midst I undress. I take off my body
like a coat that you leave on the road.

(translated from Romanian by Loredana Tiron-Pandit)

Our electronics are made for the dump

2011-04-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

Clear and convincing.
Doesn't it drive you mad that it is cheaper to buy a new device than to fix your broken old one? Or that some gadget you buy stops working in a year, and you don't even care that much, because already there is a new one that you have your eyes on and anyway, you feel it's lived long enough? It's a mindset that I feel we need to change. It is not OK to trash so many of our devices so often. We need longer lasting, repairable, greener electronics, and simpler, clearer methods of getting rid of them safely, when their end has come.

We do use a lot of electronics in my house. We have three e-readers: the Sony, Kindle and Nook color). The Sony reader has some issues and the last time I borrowed an ebook from the library to read on it, it froze every time I tried to start it. So I am not sure anymore that when I take it out with me I really have a book to read every time. My once-beautiful macbook (bought in 2008) is now chipped on the keyboard side, which is a common problem with these laptops. I had it already repaired for the same problem in its first year of life. But they are made of the worst possible, crackable plastic. It is in its third year of life now, and I am hoping it will make it to maybe five, since we just upgraded its memory. I am going for a PC next time for sure and for a metal, unbreakable case. See, I am already planning. At least we still have our old tube TV and we just got a second one from our friends who moved away (too far away, heartbreaking) and we hold our ground here -- not buying into the flat screen, plasma, LCD, 3D or whatever else is out there. Until our old TV completely breaks down. We are kind of proud of that.

Lori

April and me

2011-04-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Hi, everyone. How have you been? Anyone there? No? Oh, well, it's OK. Let's just pretend. For my sake? Thanks.

My daughter requested that I smile in a photo because she doesn't like my serious face. So here we go.

The snows finally seem to be behind us. So are the winter blues ... or at least let's try to pretend (again).

Gardening is happening. Not enjoying it all that much this year. You know, after the poison ivy and the ticks attacked me viciously in the past three years, it is hard to get back into the bucolic idealism of long time ago. But our garden is starting to look prettier this year. I'll have to take some photos soon.

I am working on new bags for the summer. Trying to work with leather this time. Inspired a lot by the beautiful bags of Studio Waterstone. My bags are nowhere close to that. I'll have to take some photos and show you.

As summer is in the works, I am also reinventing my seasonal wardrobe. It will be smocked dresses and light cardigans --I am now cutting all the T-shirts that I am not crazy about to see how they might work as cardigans.

I am trying to see that I am content and trying to find acceptance. I am trying to work harder and be happy with that, find joy and satisfaction in that. Sometimes it has to be enough.

I am trying to smile more.

I hope you're all doing well. What? I don't hear anything. Seriously disappointed in you, people. I thought we were all making an effort to pretend we were having a nice dialogue here. This is not working.

Well, whatever. I am still smiling, see?
Hope you are too.

Lori

Our food is dead.

2011-04-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

I have at least two friends who's younger children were born with food allergies. Last week I witnessed an allergic reaction of one of these babies and I don't know if I've seen something similarly scary ever before. A child and her body's disfiguring reaction to ... food. Or what we still call "food." In Romania food allergies are almost unknown. I have not met anybody or heard of anybody in my circle of friends and acquaintances who has a food allergy.

This video made me cry. It shows clearly and logically the trajectory of our foods in the past few years.

This documentary helped me finally decide to buy exclusively organic food (not just the dirty dozen), although our food bills skyrocketed.

Watching these videos and learning the outrageous things they reveal is not easy. It makes me sick. But unfortunately we have to know if we do not want to relinquish control of our lives and health, if we want to protect what we can of our children's lives and health.

The feminism in the clothes

2011-03-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

(photo of beautiful card created by Rachel Fenton)

There has been a lot of discussion around the blogosphere about how feminists represent their views in the way they dress. Although no one invited me to participate, as I am not much of a fashion or feminist blogger (just a little bit of both, I guess), I am very interested in the topic and I did follow it closely, and I have been pondering over my own response.

I do enjoy what is considered feminine clothing, like dresses and skirts, lace, embroidery and flowery prints. However, I always wear loose, flowy clothes. If some article of clothing makes me feel self-conscious or requires too much of my attention (like too low pants or too deep cleavage), they are not for me. I value my freedom of movement. I value clothes that feel soft and comfortable and do not restrict my body or my spirit. This is my perspective on feminist clothing. If it is restrictive in any way, it has to go. I do not see clothes as only utilitarian, I do appreciate their aesthetic value, but I do not embrace their socially acceptable (punitive?) transformative value. I do not want to "celebrate my feminine shapes" by trying to look slimmer, taller, more hourglasslike. I would rather not wear stilettos and body-shaping undergarments (although I will not throw away the bra). If some piece of clothing hurts in any way, it is not worth it. Life is painful enough as it is, and there are many other things that are worth suffering for. Clothing is not among those things. In Romania there is a saying that you have to suffer for beauty. I disagree. It is not beauty, if it hurts. It is just a manufactured idea of beauty. We are natural beings. Beautiful enough.

I have also realized that I have been rejecting my attraction to pink, because, you know, it is such a "girly color." Which it is. I know there have been studies done on the subject, but I have also been following my daughter's tastes in clothing and colors and I can tell that is it not a learned behavior, it is innate. She just likes pink. And I think I like it too. I think I should not feel embarrassed about it anymore. It will be a feminist statement, like it's been for women's groups all over the world, like the Pink Gang in India and the Code Pink in the U.S.

A third aspect of clothing that means a lot to me is the fabric -- it has to be natural. My most favorite fabric is linen. I like the irregular look of it, the feel, the wrinkles. Everything about it. But if it is not linen, it has to be cotton, wool or silk. Polyester makes me sick. I cannot touch it, I don't want to see it, I cannot have it in my house. I know there are advantages of synthetic fibers, like ease of cleaning and durability, but they are not worth it. They feel horribly on your skin and they take a big toll on the environment. I think we should try to get closer to nature, to our nature, as much as we can, and this is a concern that women share, more than men. Not to mention that women, the most vulnerable of the world's poor, are more seriously affected by climate changes and environmental toxicity.

Many other bloggers have shared how their clothes represent their feminist views, and I enjoyed the elegance with which they tried to demonstrate that there is no feminist uniform and that we each interpret our clothes and political views differently. Our clothes speak our message, although in different ways, and the important thing is that a lot is being said.

~*L.*~

"The Female Advantage" by Sally Helgesen

2011-03-16T06:17:00.001-07:00

I reviewed the book in The Reading List, so if you're interested, you can read it there.

~*L*~

To my readers, by Lucian Blaga

2011-03-10T01:51:00.000-08:00

This is my house. There is the sun and the garden with beehives.
You pass on the road, looking through the gates
and waiting for me to talk. Where should I start?
Believe me, believe me,
you can talk as much as you want about anything:
about faith and the serpent of goodness,
about the archangels who plough
the gardens of man,
about the sky toward which we grow,
about hatred and fall, sadness and crucifixion
and above all, about the great passing.
But words are only the tears of those who wanted
so badly to cry and couldn't.
Bitter are all the words
that is why -- let me
walk mute among you,
come out to meet you with my eyes closed.

(translated from Romanian by Loredana Tiron-Pandit)

~*L.*~

New month: new blog fixture

2011-03-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

I have decided to do a post on the first week of each month meant at building a more personal connection with you, two or three wonderful people who read this blog. I will post a small picture of myself and chat a bit about nothing in particular -- how I'm feeling, what I'm dreaming, how is my hair, I don't know. I have realized on my blogging roadways that I enjoy the most those blogs where I can connect with the author on a more personal level. Maybe it is just me, I do not know. But I am suspecting there are more unfocused people just like me, who enjoy knowing the person behind the blog as a complex phenomenon of spirit, light, ideas, doings and makings. Each of us has a different comfort level when it comes to how much we reveal on the Internet, so this can be done in many ways. I like a certain amount of privacy and my closest friends can attest to that (why are those people still friends with me I will never understand). But then, somehow I am also not afraid of the Internet too much. It can feel at times more comfortable than the company of my closest people. A little weird, now that I think about it. But you know, it's like there are people who feel lonely walking on busy city streets, in a crowd of people; for me that is heaven.

Now, the only thing I'm worried about is that posting your own pictures everywhere is a very narcissistic stance and I do not like to think of myself as narcissistic. If you know me a little, you realize that I would have to do a lot of work to get there, from my usual position of loathing my guts. I am posting the picture only as a way to establish a closer connection to you. So that our chat seems more like a coffee outing among friends, where how you look that day and what you're wearing are telling bits of the story.

So, hi. How have you been? It's good to see you. You look great. Me? Well, I am feeling hopeful this week, because they tell me it's spring. Isn't the tea here just out of this world?

~*L.*~

Quiet (Liniste), by Lucian Blaga

2011-03-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Quiet, precious and deeply disturbing as it may be, fascinating in this poem by Lucian Blaga. You can read my translation here.

Feminism -- A few more thoughts

2011-02-26T12:47:00.001-08:00

There must be something in the air, you see, because as soon as I wrote my article in defense of style I stumbled upon a whole group of ladies who blog about fashion and feminism. I have to say, I do not entirely agree with certain stances on feminism, although I do appreciate all points of view on this.

My feminist thoughts veer around the idea that in truth, as much as sometimes we do not like to accept it, being a woman is not just having a vagina. We are biologically .... much beyond that Otherwise, how do you explain that some people simply feel like a woman, even when born in men's bodies, for example. Because being a woman is much more than a physical state. A woman's biology goes beyond the genitalia and marks our psyche, our inclinations, tastes, behavior, movements, desires, attractions and so on. We are different and until we accept that, we cannot possibly achieve peace.

The big problem with how society is built and fiercely maintained, is that our particular brand of difference is considered inferior. Our particular, feminine inclinations (see fashion), attractions, desires, way of thinking, are not valued as much as the masculine counterparts. Women are more sensitive. Yes. The problem is that sensitivity is viewed as a weakness. Women do tend to choose family and home against job and social status. The problem is that family and home cannot be quantified in money or power and only those are valuable in this society. Which is just wrong. Women are biologically inclined to have a broader view of things, a more organic view, a non-violent approach to conflict, but these qualities are not prized by society as it is today, as it has been for centuries.

In my view, we have to stop fighting against ourselves. We cannot do it all. We have to love and accept our own values. We can do whatever we want. But should we want to do it all? Women can only lose in this struggle to be both men and women. We have to both go to work and compete for advancement and pay increases and all, while also having to come home and cook and clean and take care of our kids. Sure, men can help. And sometimes they do. Some do it a lot. But we are the ones who have a biological need to keep a clean/healthy house, care for our children, to feed them, to keep them safe. Men do not. Motherhood does not stop at birth. We stay highly wired to the needs of those children, in a way than men just don't. And it's not their fault. It's not our fault either. It's just how things are. Women take care of family and home. It's not a social contract. It's nature. Of course, there are women who have no desire to birth or care for children. Or the men who are much more tuned with their feminine side. We are not all the same and I don't want to generalize too much.

I just feel sad. It has gotten so bad that women are feeling ashamed to call themselves feminist. Because obviously, that is not an attractive trait in this world, is it? No. It is ridiculed to death, despised and viciously attacked.

I think I might have written too much. I don't like long posts, so I am going to stop here. I was going to tell you how my own feminism has evolved over the years, from my first ever job with a women's empowerment NGO. Next time, maybe.

~*L.*~

New flower

2011-02-24T07:31:00.000-08:00

I am playing again with my website's design. This time I feel truly professional, as I am working with a nice new gadget that allows make digital drawings with a pen and all... very much fun. I used this opportunity to finally create my entirely own blue flower design for the graphics of this website. The previous one, although tweaked and made perfect by me, was only free-graphics from the gifted and giving people of the Internet.

I am also considering altering the concept of the entire website, because the gardening thing makes me feel too much like an impostor. I am no gardener and I don't think I make a good metaphorical one either. Well, I don't know. We'll see.

~*L.*~

Books I'm reading

2011-02-21T07:43:00.001-08:00

Although I would like to ideally read one book per week, that doesn't happen very often, unless I get connected with an unusually light book. Right now I have three books that I am reading and I suddenly realized they are all feminist writings: The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership by Sally Helgesen, Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Wise Women: Over Two Thousand Years of Spiritual Writing by Women by Susan Neunzig Cahill. I am slowly going through them, reading from one or another depending on the mood. In a neutral, intellectual everyday mood, I will read about women's style of management and leadership, in a particularly reflective mood, I will go for the ancestral truths about women's inner lives as explored by old tales and decoded by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. If I need my spirits lifted, I choose the spiritual writings of women. But apparently, I am in an all-around feminist mood.

Next on my list are two books authored by Romanian writers: My Life on Craigslist by Alexandra Ares and Coming from an Off-Key Time: A Novel (Writings from an Unbound Europe) by Bogdan Suceava.

~*L.*~

Not frivolous! A few thoughts on style

2011-02-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

(photo by Saumitra Pandit)

I am going to talk about style and clothing. Not about fashion, because the word has too many consumerist connotations that I want to stay away from. I am not a lover of fashion, but I do enjoy expressing some sort of personal style through the clothes that I wear. And I feel bad about it. Because it is considered frivolous. Mindless occupation of women who have nothing better to do. Or they are simply too vain. From my husband to my favorite sitcom on TV, I get the same attitude. I am getting a little sick of it.

So lets talk not about fashion, but about clothes and style. And then maybe we'll talk a little bit about men and their stupid sports, which are more mindless and meaningless than all the fashion in the world, and yet considered very acceptable. Because we live in a man's world. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

So clothes. What is there frivolous about clothes? Well, someone I know will say that the mere fact that we have to wear them. But, well, we are not all nudists at heart. Clothes are extremely important in providing us with comfort for our daily lives. They keep our bodies warm and protected from the environment, because unlike most other animals out there we do not have the advantage of fur or feathers or scales, right? I believe we should be all drawn to the softest, most body-hugging clothes. The fact that we actually don't wear those, and prefer to stumble around in plasticky fabrics and restraining, uncomfortable cuts, that's just crazy and topic for another post.

So clothes are a necessity. Why does it make me frivolous because I care to make this necessity a pleasurable one? Food is a necessity too, but people don't generally go around telling others that they should not care so much about what they put in their bodies.

Unlike other creatures, who cannot do much about their fur and feathers, we can wear multiple types of clothes. We can wear linen in the summer and wool in the winter. Not only that, but we can wear green linen and orange wool if we want. We can. Why not take advantage of it? Because of these multiple options, besides their primary function of protecting our bodies from the elements, clothes have slowly started to take on more subtle functions, like differentiating who we are, to what group we belong and how much money we make, how much we honor the people or the occasion we dress for. Clothes have a language of their own. They have their own voice. And that is not something we can turn off, unless we want to go naked, but again, what a loud shout would that be!

So style is an added bonus to the necessity of clothing. One that we can use or not, but one that we always have, regardless. Style is often part of any spiritual experience. Am I the only one noticing that even monks wear a certain style of clothing? Of jewelry? That they even have specific hairstyles? All these play a significant role. And frivolity is not part of it.

I will come back to this topic. I am too tired now to get to the men and sports part. But you know, you don't see many monks kicking balls around on grassy fields, do you?

~*L.*~

Romanian arts on the move?

2011-02-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

I found this very interesting article on how Romanian art is starting to get some exposure, only literature and its writers are left behind. Not for much longer, they say. Will I live to see it?

In the photo is Romanian writer Alice Nastase. No relation with the article. I also never read her work, but I am so far behind everything. She wrote a book called "We Are Goddesses." I don't need other reason than this title.

Me Bags

2011-02-14T14:01:00.001-08:00

Remember how I was wanting a new bag in the fall? Well, I did buy one (and decorated it to make it more "me") and I also made another one from a wool vest that I felted. I've been wearing them all winter quite happily. The crafty story in Flower Seeds.

Lots of love.
~*L.*~

Cold

2011-02-08T13:29:00.001-08:00

I am the master of short wordings, aren't I? What's with these titles? It is a weird sort of writing ability, isn't it?

Very wintery here, out and in. Mountains of snow around the driveway. Giant icicles hanging on roofs. Heavy on the chest also. Stifling.

I am trying to show the winter out by spreading flowers around. Flowery sofa covers, colorful table linens. Blooms on dresses and scarves. I have taken to going out and working from the library while my baby is in school. But then the big snows hit again and again I am left inside.

I have published in Written my translation of "Shakespeare" by Marin Sorescu.

~*L.*~

"Out of the Transylvania Night" by Aura Imbarus

2011-01-29T07:27:00.000-08:00

A Romanian author and her journey from communist and post-communist Romania to U.S. and to herself. A great read. My review in The Reading List.

~*L.*~

Low

2010-11-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of lows that I've been fighting of late. It takes work to believe that there is something, anything worth saying.

Trump

flat
lump
scattered

undone

grunt
moan
cringe
grind

and up

forward
jump

binge

leap
flap
wing
--
soul
fringe.

~*L.*~

The elevator

2010-10-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

She stopped, panting,
in front of the narrow stretch of light
coming from the elevator door.
Last hope.

She closed her mind
to the creations of darkness behind,
to all her dear lost ones,
who were moving again
inside the potentiality
of the blind open space.

If she could only erase
what took place
in each story
of the enormously tall
and suspiciously unlit building.

But it was now all showing
right in front of her eyes
in elevator's window,
like a disjointed projection.

The building kept going up and down
story after story
of once lived lives --
the old man in black suit,
the baby in white lace,
the two headscarf-wearing old women.
the long, quiet table of the feast for the dead.

Then the doors finally opened.

"Welcome"
the seemingly empty
beautiful coffin
didn't say.

Check out Rachel Fenton's blog Snow like thought for more tales of darkness.

~*L.*~

Pan sings (of loneliness)

2010-09-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

Pan sings
by Lucian Blaga

I am alone and all covered in spines.
Long time ago I had been king
of the full sky of stars
and to the worlds
I played my pipes.
Its bow arched nothingness.
Today, inside my cave
no stranger comes,
only the mottled salamanders pass
and the white moon,
at times.

(translated from Romanian by Loredana Tiron-Pandit)

~*L.*~

Ready

2010-09-08T06:06:00.001-07:00

It looks like it's finally here. Bits and pieces of it. Drops and pours. Looking back. It's been a good summer. We're ready for what comes ahead. School. Work. Concentration. Turning the focus inside, as the outside is finally shedding its splendor and releasing us from the spell. Ready for fall.

~*L.*~

Thoughts

2010-09-03T04:52:00.000-07:00

Summer is over now for sure. The last rays of warm, mellow sun filtering through my kitchen window. The last week of vacation for my daughter. We are expecting a hurricane today. I've seen some beautiful, printed and embroidered corduroy fabric at Jo-Ann yesterday--what cute fall/winter skirts that would make. I have a headache again. The book I'm reading these days (A jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter) is really inspiring. I wonder what to do today with my daughter. I have a lot of editing work to catch up with and I feel guilty for not planning my time better. I need (want!) a new bag. I'm feeling a little hollow, with the fall coming and all. In need of a change. A small change, almost imperceptible. Would do.

~*L.*~

The cradle (Leaganul) by Lucian Blaga

2010-08-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

I was so tired
and in so much pain.
I think I suffered of too much soul.
On the hill, dawn opened her eyelids
and sleepless red eyes.
Lost, I asked myself:
Sun,
how have you been feeling lately the insane joy
of rising?

And that sleepless morning,
as I was walking with heavy steps,
in a dark corner, I found a cradle.
The spiders were building in it their small worlds,
and borer insects were grinding its silence.

I looked at it with wide open thought.
It was the cradle
in which a hand aged by my present fate
had rocked
my first sleep and maybe my first dream.

With fingers of remembrance
I touched my past
slowly,
slowly,
like a blind man,
and not understanding why
I broke
in tears

and started sobbing over my cradle.
I was so tired
of springs,
of roses,
of youth
and laughing.
Delirious I started searching
in the old cradle
for myself
as a baby.

(Translated from Romanian by Loredana Tiron-Pandit.)

The translation will be posted later on my website, in Written. Right now my website is a bit disabled. Something to do with the fact that I changed hosts and the new one is not as great as I though, in spite of the fact that it is 100% powered by wind energy.

~*L.*~

The city

2010-08-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

I am dreaming of moving to Boston and living in a beautiful loft downtown. Suburban life is so hard, so isolating, so empty many times. People are such rare sight and nothing ever seems to happen, either good or bad.

Meanwhile, the city has crowds and beautiful old buildings, and you feel life pulsating there and rising in your chest.

The city has grand views.

And Spectacle Islands.

It has history, poetry and music.

It harbors a greater density of dream stuff.

The mystic

2010-08-19T06:15:00.001-07:00

The mystic
by Lucian Blaga
translated from Romanian by Loredana Tiron-Pandit

Your body and your soul, the vast, are
like twins: they look so much alike that
you do not know which is one and which the other.
I only know your soul's face.
Every time when by chance I meet your body, I do not
suspect it, I am confused, and I believe it is the soul I see.

~*L.*~

"The Beauty Myth" by Naomi Wolf

2010-08-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Read, loved and been transformed a little by this book. You can read my review of Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" in The Reading List.

~*L.*~

Henna

2010-08-11T04:28:00.000-07:00

(India Day celebration in Worcester, MA)

Getting henna on her hand for the first time. What fascination.

(Two years ago in India, during my brother in law's wedding festivities)

Indian henna designs can be so intricate and spectacular. So much work and inspiration needed for this ephemeral art. The wedding designs are particularly intricate, beautiful and playful. The henna artist hides in the bride's design the letters of the groom's name and he later plays the game of trying to read his name. The groom also gets the henna on his hands. The darker the design becomes, the greater the love between the two is going to be all through their marriage. Of course, the whole wedding party gets henna, but less intricate and smaller dimensions (the bride will many times have her arms covered up to the short sleeve of the sari).

(my sister and brother in law on their wedding day)

It is a beautiful tradition, although I have to say that I did find it inconvenient (to say the least) having to sit for one hour for the artist to put on the design and then for another two hours not touch anything or do anything with your hands so that the design sets in. Who has the time? Or maybe that is another lesson of the henna--to stop, learn patience, let time blossom, let life develop, while you just contemplate the beauty ...

Romance for the mute response and Romance for us, by Ion Minulescu

2010-08-06T05:04:00.000-07:00

I have translated two more of Ion Minulescu's poems. His verses have a mesmerizing rhythm that is hard to capture in such a different language as English. But I did the best I could and I am quite pleased (although I do foresee that tweaks and small improvements will be made in the future). So you can read "Romance for the mute response" (Romanta raspunsului mut) and "Romance for us" (Romanta noastra) in WRITTEN.

~*L.*~

Summer time

2010-08-04T06:39:00.001-07:00

Time is flying. It now seems so true that the older you get the faster time seems to vanish away into past. It's August already. Summer vacations felt so much longer when I was in school myself. I used to spend them at my grandparents' house with no TV and just nothing to do all day long. I would read huge piles of books and hate my life. It all seems like such a dream now.

We are trying to take advantage of the warm weather. We go every day to the lake for a swim. We go to the little farm that we have close by every week to pick some fruit or just to enjoy a smoothie, the idyllic setting and the playground.

But we just got into a routine and soon this is about to change again. I now wake up late, get the Big Girl ready for camp, drive her there, come back to do some editing, go back to pick her up, have lunch and a break and some more editing work while she watches a movie (or two), then we do again something together (go out for groceries, cook or just play). And then it's evening, time for the girl to go for a swim in the lake and for mama to do some reading or just be by the water. Full days. Not ready yet for summer to end.

~*L.*~

Photos by phone

2010-08-02T04:30:00.000-07:00

I am having fun with my phone camera. My little new phone can take crazy good pictures, which is such a big thing because we have been constantly forgetting to take the big DSLR with us everywhere we go. Summer trips are getting heavy with water bottles, towels and swim suits, bug creams and sun screens. Not to mention my new handicapped situation (I got Lyme disease and suffer from pretty intense joint pains pretty much all the time). So there is rarely any energy to carry a big camera. But this little phone... it is a life saver, not to mention the fun of new camera applications.

These pictures have been taken yesterday, a beautiful summer Sunday (I didn't do any post-processing).

(my living room in the afternoon)

(taken from the moving car)

(reading in our favorite bookstore)

(enjoying the beach and new phone app camera settings)

~*L.*~

"Train to Trieste" by Domnica Radulescu

2010-07-27T03:41:00.001-07:00

I found this book long time ago in a bookstore but never got to it until now. It is written by a Romanian emigrant about the communist experience and about leaving the country and recomposing herself on a new land. All on the background of a beautiful love story, because it is love that makes it worthwhile, right? You can read my review of Dominica Radulescu's "Train to Trieste" in The Reading List.

~*L.*~

Clean water and natural soap

2010-07-23T06:46:00.000-07:00

These are the latest implements in my family's natural living efforts: a nice and simple natural soap and an amazing water filtration system. You can read about it in Flower Seeds.

~*L.*~

Sewing bubble skirts and learning to give

2010-07-14T04:25:00.000-07:00

About how I am sewing lots of little skirts and teaching my baby to appreciate giving, in Flower Seeds.

"Women, Food and God" by Geneen Roth

2010-07-12T06:40:00.000-07:00

You can read my review of
Geneen Roth's "Women, Food and God"
in The Reading List.

~*L.*~

Too many photos?

2010-07-06T04:58:00.000-07:00

(images from Japan)

We had a great long weekend, filled with celebrations and friends, and I have no photos to show for it. We left our camera behind (forgot it) and that dreamy spring in the mountains hasn't been captured for eternity. I am pretty sad about that. But then, not that much. I figured out that we rely too much on photos to keep our memories, when memories are best kept inside. I have also been feeling overwhelmed lately with the amount of photos we take and sort and enhance and store digitally and print and store the prints in albums and ... seems never ending. This is not the simple life.

I have yet to find a way to simplify the process. It will all start with taking less shots of the same thing, in the hope that one will be better than others. I think we should never take more than 20 photos of one event. One vacation, one graduation, one party, whatever it is, 20 photos are more than enough to cover it. I remember my parents and their one or two photographs of a late summer picnic with friends, my mom with short bob hair, knit fitted top and bell-bottom pants. Or the single party photograph, with her white lace shawl on her shoulders and complicated up hairdo. And then I think of my own loads of images: with a little smile, with a bigger smile, from the side, with more exposure and with less, in portrait and macro mode (these are all the adjustments I know how to make). Maybe a good idea would be to study this photographic process a bit and take better first shots? Maybe that would help towards taking less photos. Just because we can have a lot, it doesn't mean that we have to have a lot. Right?

~*L.*~

Life, Death and the Artist Dan Claudiu Vornicelu

2010-06-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

It happened two weeks ago. On June 14. I read about it on the news. He had been labeled a genius since childhood. The violin in his hands turned magical. He had been the favorite of the dictator, pride of the communists who could point and say: "look what brilliance we can breed."

At 37, Dan Claudiu Vornicelu threw himself from the top of his apartment building.

They say he was too sensitive, too withdrawn. The expectations of him too high. The burden of the real world too puzzling. They say he killed himself out of love.

He was not the star. Not the extravagant celebrity. He was forgotten. Until he died and made the news once again. Barely.

There are no images of him on the Internet. The Romanian press online used generic images of violins for his death news articles. There is just one video on YouTube with him playing his violin, which is not representative. But this is all there is (Dan Claudiu Vornicelu is the violinist):

You cannot stop but think how we treat our true artists. How we value the flamboyant extroverts, the show people, and forget about the shy, the interiorized, the little understood.

I am want to add two other magnificent pieces of Romanian violin music, written by George Enescu and Ciprian Porumbescu. Dan Claudiu Vornicelu was playing Enescu since 9 years old.

~*L.*~

P.S. I managed to find a video of one of Dan Claudiu Vornicelu's last concerts with the Bacau Philharmonic, with which he had debuted at 6 years old.

More sewing

2010-06-29T15:06:00.001-07:00

Sewing is just happening to me. More in FLOWER SEEDS.

~*L.*~

A bit of summer (in the garden)

2010-06-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

We have a little garden growing. Heirloom tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis, eggplants and herbs. Stubborn plants. We brought them home and kept them on the deck for about two weeks before we got a chance to take care of the garden and no, they didn't die.

More in FLOWER SEEDS.

~*L.*~

"Can you not tell?" by Lucian Blaga

2010-06-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

Can you not tell my madness when you hear
how life murmurs inside me
like a boisterous
spring in resounding caves?

Can you not tell my fire when in my arms
you shiver
like a drop of dew caressed
by rays of light?

Can you not tell my love when I look
with passion at the precipice inside you
and say:
O, never have I seen before
a God this great!?

(Translated by Lori Tiron-Pandit)

Read more Lucian Blaga poetry in WRITTEN.

~*L.*~

"The Land of Green Plums" by Herta Muller

2010-06-11T04:55:00.000-07:00

You can read my review
of Herta Muller's "The Land of Green Plums"
in The Reading List.

~*L.*~

Sewing peasant blouses

2010-06-08T03:04:00.001-07:00

More in Flower Seeds.

Oh, Wen Prior at "On Words and Upwards" has a heartwarming contest for her readers. She is a wonderful writer and her novel "Encore" (a beautiful book, I can tell you, as I've had the honor of a preview) has to do with Romanian gypsies, so she gets lots of love from around here.

~*L.*~

Japanese things

2010-06-04T03:21:00.000-07:00

My husband is back from loooong (10-day) trip to Japan. It seemed like forever. Children become so hard to entertain at the age of 4. I was getting only "I'm bored. This is the boringest day ever! You're a boring mami and not my best friend anymore!" Arms crossed, frown. Tough. But, hey, Japan, with its temples and gardens, looks beautiful. Even in photos. Doesn't it?

Also, I did get some good Japanese gifts as a reward for hanging in there: two adorable Japanese dresses (one I wore at the fair and the other one is shown down here), some spellbinding Japanese sewing books and a bottle of lovely Japanese Shiseido perfume (with mostly natural ingredients).

I can't wait to start a project from one of the books. Maybe that little grey dress? But I have to say, I am happy to even just look at them. I didn't get earlier what it was with all the craziness for Japanese sewing books, but they do have quite a different and charming aesthetic: the clean spaces, the worn beauty (wabi-sabi?) of the decor, the kind of frumpy (not even trying the "sexy") look of the models. I understand the fascination.

~*L.*~

A fair

2010-06-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

A perfect summer day. Community to enjoy. People to watch. Old books and garden plants to take home. Japanese dresses to wear (more about that later). A beautiful moment to remember and smile.

~*L.*~

Give me a body, you mountains, by Lucian Blaga

2010-05-21T03:51:00.000-07:00

Indian rural landscape, taken by Saumitra Pandit

Another Blaga poem that I translated. It's Romanian title: "Dati-mi un trup, voi muntilor" or "Give me a body, you mountains." Take a trip on its fearless word-wings here, in WRITTEN.

~*L.*~

The visitor I am

2010-05-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

Street musicians in Cambridge, MA.

How I want to move to this town. I don't know if all university towns have this energy, but in Cambridge you breathe more than air. It is an enhanced experience. The best part are the people, of a different breed. It is like a certain type of people from all parts of the world, who simply look good with Cambridge. With its music, bookstores, sidewalk cafes, and funky little boutiques. I wish I was that type. But I am just the wide-eyed visitor. Always.

The good part about visiting is that I can always leave with a memento. Like a pair of lotus flower earrings and a small silk scarf from the cute Tibetan store.

~*L.*~

Thoughts on blogging and books

2010-05-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

I have decided to focus more of my energy and space on this blog and website on promoting Romanian writers who write in English or have been translated in English, and also on books that have a Romanian theme. I know this new direction will make my blog an even more boring place for most of you and I apologize for that. I have never been good at entertaining. The thing is that I believe this is a good niche for me. I also see it as a sort of a duty to promote Romanian writers and Romanian issues and I think it is something I could do rather well.

I have been in a great impasse about blogging for a long time now. I am a private person so unless I have a very clear, well-thought focus for my online writing, I tend to see it as potentially harmful, out of place, derisive. It matters to me to keep this under strict control and not feel like I am exposing too much of myself. I know, blogging has not been designed for people like me and yet, even I sort of love it in so many ways and I want to try to make it work for me.

The blogs that I love to read are those that share a lot of personal experience and emotion. It makes it easy to relate with these bloggers, to see them as friends. I could never be like them, however, and maybe that is one side of the whole fascination. How people can so honestly reveal so much about themselves is wonderful and mysterious to me. I could only possibly do it under the disguise of whatever I think of as "art."

In other news, my town library had its annual book sale this weekend and that made me happy. As you would suspect, I went for a few gardening books, and for spiritual and feminist non-fiction. On my night table, awaiting, are now books like The Spiritual Life of Children, The Peabody Sisters of Salem, A Short History of Women and The Artist's Way. Doesn't that sound like a great collection? Cannot wait for the church book sale on Memorial Day! Anyway, now I have to finish reading The Land of Green Plums, of Herta Muller, the Nobel Prize winner. Beyond beauty.

~*L.*~

Summer dress and writing shawl

2010-05-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

In FLOWER SEEDS, things I've made, stuff of inspiration.

~*L.*~

"Romance Language" by Alan Elsner

2010-05-02T16:20:00.000-07:00

A book about the 1989 Romanian revolution. Read my review in THE READING LIST.

~*L.*~

"Girl Mary" by Petru Popescu

2010-04-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

A review of this wonderful book in THE READING LIST.

~*L.*~

Lhasa de Sela: Rising

2010-04-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

All I feel like doing today is listen to her voice.

~*L.*~

I want to dance by Lucian Blaga

2010-04-14T04:12:00.000-07:00

I translated a new Lucian Blaga poem: I want to dance (Vreau sa joc).

~*L.*~

This year's imaginary garden and a girl's new bed canopy

2010-04-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

In Flower Seeds you can read about my latest gardening thoughts and sufferings and flowery sewing pleasures.

Reminiscing about the village, the town, the food

2010-03-31T03:17:00.001-07:00

The snow in the village.

The frozen well.

The town park.

The beautiful theatre building.

The City Hall.

The vegetable market.

The flowers.

Mamaliga.

Sarmale.

Mom's cake.

Back (?) and book review -- Simple Days by Marlene A. Schiwy)

2010-03-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

I miss blogging. I've been away from it for quite a while, to observe from the distance and decide what changes need to be made. I think I had become too ambitious with my whole website idea, with all my sections and my images that needed too much work. And it burned me out. Does it really have to take hours to put up a blog post? I don't know. On top of that I had become to feel overexposed, and like I lacked motivation, inspiration and all it takes to seem interesting online. I also started to hate the idea that I have to seem interesting when in reality I am simply boring and plain and with no real ambition to become something else. I don't want to attract attention. I like it when I get it, I guess, I cannot pretend that I don't, but it depends on the quantity. Less has always been better for me.

I am thinking of returning to my blog. It might get different this time. Less organized, maybe. Less categorized. I don't know. How can I keep up with all the widgets and stuff that I have put on this website and I have to update all the time? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure it out, or maybe I will just give it up. My Reading List page had a side widget with books on my bookshelf, which I hadn't updated for a year maybe. So that is gone. Simplifying. Maybe that will give me new wings.

Also the blog might not be as writerly anymore. Because I do not get much into the writing spirit lately and I don't want to feel like a fraud every time I write about writing that doesn't actually get done. Maybe I'll write more about all the other things that interest me. And writing will always be there, but more in the background. A floody day's thought.

Anyway, for now I'm back, the fog seems to be lifting and I have a book review. (I have been missing my own book reviews. Crazy?) Simple Days, A Journal on What Really Matters by Marlene A. Schiwy is a book that I loved and I had to write a little about it (and that felt almost as good as reading it).

Thaw, by Fiona Robyn

2010-02-25T21:05:00.000-08:00

Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free. Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.

"These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits traveling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision.

That’s it for today. It’s begun."

Continue reading tomorrow here.

Bringing the rain

2010-02-14T20:34:00.000-08:00

Not like we need rain right now. The snow has been melting around here and the streets have been flooded. So, we're pretty good. But I remembered arid summers in my grandparents' village where everyone was praying for rain. I remember how we, the children, used to make this clay silhouette on a piece of wood. We would decorate it with flowers and let it float down the river. This custom is called Caloianul, and it actually imitates a funeral event, where this clay person is buried and grieved over, taken out of the grave after some days and let to float down the river. It is even given a feast for the dead.

"Caloian, Caloian
Go up to heavens and demand
The sky to open the gates
To let pour the rains
To help grow the grains
nights
and days
to help grow the grains."

(A few images of a Caloian ritual:)

Sometimes Caloianul is accompanied by the Paparuda custom. Paparuda is a girl dressed up in foliage and greenery. She dances around in the village and people throw water on her. When her dance is done, she throws her green garments down the river. Isn't this just fascinating and beautiful?

All these beautiful, pagan customs, barely survive in Romania of our days. The Christian church and the many close-minded priests have raised against such pre-christian rituals that they couldn't understand and people let them go, in fearing the wrath of the Christian, church God. What a terrible, unbearable loss.

"Paparuda ruda,
Come to drench us all
Make rain pour
Fall over our lands
in buckets, buckets."

(An old and loved Romanian rock band, Phoenix, with their famous interpretation of the Paparuda song:)

Dragaica and the Sanziene night

2010-02-08T21:02:00.001-08:00

It's a June ceremony of protecting for the harvest. It's a summer solstice celebration. It's the dance of a group of girls who dress up in beautiful clothes and adorn themselves with yellow flowers (sanziene) and wheat ears. The most beautiful of them is chosen to be Dragaica. She has to stay unmarried for following three years.

Dragaica is in some interpretations one of the iele, while in others she is an entirely benevolent being. She offers protection for the fields and crops. She is the mother. She is the deity of flowers, summer and fecundity. The protectress of women.

When two groups of Dragaica dancers meet in the same village, they have to put on a "fight" with scythes. The would tear their head scarves and tie parts of them on the gates of houses, to keep them protected.

That night of June, the night of the Dragaica, or of the Sanziene, is when women go into the fields and forests to pick healing, magical herbs. They collect the dew from the plants and that "water of the stars" wash their faces with it to make them beautiful and heal their pains. Love spells are made.

On that Sanziene night,
somewhere between the earth and sky,
adored by moon and wind
above the lands they fly.

The groups of Sanziene sing
and braid their flower crowns
from evening dew just picked,
moon rays and summer blooms.

If moon and sun
wear the crown
they become one.

The following dance is called Ciuleandra and it is part of the same mythology of the Dragaica and Sanziene. A dance imitating the wind blowing in the thistle fields. The music, mesmerizing. It starts slow and it gets faster and faster.

Calusarii

2010-02-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

The mystical dancers. The ones with covered mouths (the name "calusarii" comes from "calus" or "gag" in English). The ones who cannot tell their secrets. Who can heal. Who can chase away bad spirits.

It's a tradition with roots back to ancient Dacia. Groups of odd numbered men, sworn to stay together in celibacy and ritual dancing for a period of nine years. Their secrets never known. Feared warriors, fighting the "iele" ("them," whose name cannot be said, the magical dancing maidens who you should never glimpse at or they could take your mind).

The Calusarii have to stay together for the sworn period to remain invulnerable and invested with the supernatural powers and if they break away from the group they would fall prey to the iele. But together, they can heal those possessed by evil spirits by performing their dancing and rituals around them.

Many ancient traditions have been lost in Romania, some due to the Christian church that rejected all native customs and rituals and many because of communism and its fear of everything. Calusarii have remained as a source of fascination and national pride. In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed Calusarii one of the masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

The village soul (and images from Romania)

2010-01-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

The village soul
by Lucian Blaga

Child, come and put your hands on my knees.
I think eternity was born in the village.
Here each thought is much slower,
and the heart beats at another pace,
as if it doesn't beat in your chest
but somewhere deep, in the ground.

Here the thirst for salvation is quenched
and if your feet have bled
you can sit on a clay hearth.

Look, it's evening.
The village soul flutters around us,
like a shy smell of cut grass,
like a lowering of smoke from straw eaves,
like the playing of lambs on tall graves.

Translated from Romanian by Loredana Tiron-Pandit.

Dormancy

2010-01-06T03:46:00.001-08:00

So, how have you been, everyone? I've been a bad blogger and I cannot stop yet. Snowed in, foggy, uninspired and leaving for Romania is how I am. I know that this blog will live again and breathe new air soon, but right this moment, it's still dormant, like the daffodil bulbs. It's gathering energy and developing under the frozen ground.

In my winter kitchen, behind closed doors, the light is on and I am brewing ideas with a hint of mint. It smells good and uncertain. The concoction is coming with me to Romania. I am hoping to find something that can revive my inspiration for blogging. Something to keep me interested. A good project that I can be excited about. Because blogs grow old. At least mine did. Maybe others are more vivacious. Mine is suffering. It doesn't inspire me or anyone else and what's the use then?

I hope you are all well and happy in this new year of blogging, writing and abounding inspiration.

Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat

2009-12-23T08:39:00.000-08:00

A book review with food and spirit.

The Faith Club

2009-12-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

I haven't written a book review since September. That is way too much. So here comes The Faith Club, by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver and Priscilla Warner.

Busy

2009-12-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

I am a slow blogger. I am slow in many ways. And I have been becoming slowly busier and busier for the past few months. Until I found myself with no time at all for one of the things that gives me most joy, blogging. I am sorry. I haven't been visiting any blogs, or if I visit in a hurry, I have no time to leave comments. It's ugly. I am still hoping that I will be able to incorporate regular blogging into my routine again. I am a dreamer.

In the meantime, a short post about a birthday party and a new play kitchen.

Bags and tin boxes

2009-11-25T12:28:00.001-08:00

A fascination. In Flower Seeds.

Romanian Gypsies, compassion, art

2009-11-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

It's a hard subject to write about. Let me start from the end. Yesterday I felt ashamed of being Romanian. Yesterday for the first time I felt a thunderbolt of compassion, understanding and identification with the Romanian Gypsies. Those people who have always been treated as second class citizens without embarrassment or regret. These people who have been living on Romanian land for centuries and yet are not considered Romanians by most. These people who are blamed in all, for all, because they have dared to maintain their own identity, language, culture, which is many times hard to understand for the rest of us and maybe sometimes conflicting. How we fear what we do not understand. How we fear what is different. How we feel threatened by what's not our own. How we'd rather distance ourselves and malign, than reach out to try to understand and help.

In her concert in Bucharest, Madonna spoke about tolerance. And she was booed.

I am ashamed.

Yesterday I was looking on YouTube for a Gypsy song. What I found has brought me to tears and a reconsideration of things from my "reality." Each and every Gypsy song put up there was accompanied by terrible, injurious, hateful, diseased comments from my fellow countrymen and women on both sides. Some non-Gypsy Romanians would start throwing their abusive, lazy minds and souls out there, and then some Romanian Gypsy would respond, in a chain of shame and disgrace that I cannot remember without starting to shake and feel ill. And all this happens right next to some of the most innocent, breathtaking examples of the gypsy musical genius. It is beyond my comprehension how someone can be showered in pure light and not rise in it.

It feels to me today like the world's troubles are nowhere close to over. That the spiritual leap we all dream is just living in our feverish minds, that the human spirit has much growing to do, more than the time we have left.

This is a Hungarian Gypsy group called TerniPe and I think they are brilliant and I choose to think that ultimately their music will help. Music will help. Art will help. Words will help. And I think that for a while I will keep silent about where I come from. I think that, for a while at least, I will come from no land. And I'm still going to speak my words from there.

Start from the end

2009-11-13T07:33:00.001-08:00

This is a post on a revelation I've had while watching a morning talk-show. I know, it doesn't seem like something that would happen very often, but well, you never know where comes from. As long as you're always keeping the eyes wide open ...

So I was watching The Bonnie Hunt Show a few days ago and she had Dr. Wayne Dyer as a guest. I am not what you would call a fan of Dr. Dyer. I mean I thought I was because I was always mistaking him for the author of The Road Less Travelled, who actually is M. Scott Peck, M.D.. What a brilliant book that is.

Well, anyhow, Mr. Dyer said something interesting during the show. He is planning to write another book with some title that I have forgotten. (Found out the title, it's Wishes Fulfilled.) He is scheduling to start writing this book in six months. But he has already the title and the cover for it. And he keeps that cover in a visible spot. He looks at it every day, imagining that it is the actually finished book sitting there in front of his eyes. He visualizes it finished, complete and waits for the book to come to him like that. He starts from the end. This technique actually has a name, apparently, but I can't remember that either. My memory takes selectiveness very seriously, let me tell you.

Does it make sense to you? Starting from the end? To me it doesn't really, and yet, just like that, it seems perfectly true.

Fall Emotion

2009-10-30T12:37:00.001-07:00

I have been absent from the blog and I am not proud of it. This fall has come down on me busier that I expected and it's taking time to find a daily rhythm that includes darling blogging. But I will, I will find it.
To make up for it a little, I have translated for you two Nichita Stanescu poems: Poetry and Fall Emotion. My friend Monica has been telling me how much revelation she has recently found in the poetry of Nichita Stanescu and I promised her I would take another look into the work of this poet who has always seemed too difficult before. Take a look for yourselves.

Poetry, by Nichita Stanescu

Poetry is the eye that cries.
It is the shoulder that cries,
The eye of the shoulder that cries.
It is the hand that cries,
the eye of the hand that cries.
It is the sole of the foot the cries
the eye of the heel that cries.
Oh, my friends
poetry is not tear
it is crying itself,
the crying of a not-invented eye,
the tear of the eye
of the one who has to be beautiful,
the tear of the one who has to feel bliss.

Fall Emotion, by Nichita Stanescu

Fall has come, cover my heart with some thing,
with the shade of a tree, or better, your shade bring.

I’m scared that I’m not gonna see you, sometimes
that I will grow wings pointing towards the clouds,
that you will take refuge in a foreign eye,
and with wormwood leaf it will close you from sight.

And then I approach stones and keep silent
I take the words into the sea to shove
I whistle at the moon to make it rise and turn it
into a great love.

-*~

I have realized with this blog that we, Romanians, kind of like to sing our poetry and here is another proof: Nichita Stanescu's Fall Emotion sang by Nicu Alifantis, accompanied by Alexandru Andries.

~*~

Oh, it's not over yet. I have to thank Deb, from Ranch Girl Ramblings for awarding me this:

I obviously don't deserve it, especially after being so inactive lately in the blogging world, but I am very grateful, because it makes me aware that I am making some real good friends here, who don't forget me very easily. This might just be a better world than the real blood and flesh and eye contact one in which I wake up every morning. Isn't it wonderful? Thanks again, Deb.

Pink winter

2009-10-21T14:20:00.001-07:00

Pink is not among my favorite colors. Nonetheless, it does make me feel bright and optimistic sometimes when I wear it, so I have some pink in my wardrobe.

My daughter is a big fan though. Societal brainwashing success. Everything she wears must have some pink. Or a bow. Or flowers. Or at least something sparkling. But also some pink. I tried hard to explain to her that her favorite color is orange, what a great nice color, let's wear orange. But no. I'm not as successful as Disney in putting ideas into her head.

Anyway, this winter it looks like pink is taking over mommy too. All my turquoise, teal, green, brown wardrobe strategy is going with the wind. A few months ago I bought a pink bag. Then I took out the pink shawl which hasn't been worn since immemorial times. And now a pink wool hat joined the gang. They cornered me. What is my dark, olive green winter coat going to say when she sees all this? It sure looks like this is going to be an interesting winter.

Diwali, snow in October and other wonders

2009-10-19T05:20:00.001-07:00

Yes, it snowed. And it was not a plain, regular snow either, but enormous, fist-size flakes floating in the air. Falling on the leaves that didn't even have time to change. Even considering how long usually are winters here in New England, it looks like this one will beat them all.

Oh, before I forget, Happy Diwali to you all. Diwali is like the Indian Christmas, big enormous holiday requiring garlands of lights. See, this is another advantage of marrying someone of a different faith: the number of your holidays increases. Our holiday season has started already. For those who hate holiday decorations that are put out much before Christmas, I'm sorry.

In case you were wondering how I did with my speech on Sunday, let me tell you that to my big surprise I did pretty well. We had a rehearsal on Saturday, in front of the microphone and all, and that time I had much more anxiety than on Sunday, in front of everyone, when I am happy to report that my voice didn't register any tremor. I paused, I breathed, just like you advised. I even got two or three laughs. Yes, in places that were meant for that! And I even got compliments for how good the poems were. But not only that. I was complimented on my delivery of the poems. Can you imagine that?

People were so sensitive that they asked if I am a poet because they couldn't have imagined someone other than a poet making such nice translations ... I know! I was overwhelmed. Thank you so much for all your support, advice and encouragement. It worked. Thank you. I will never doubt the powers of my blogging friends.

Because I cannot talk

2009-10-13T13:44:00.001-07:00

I need to thank Kit from Kit Courtney Writes for awarding me the pretty Kreativ Blogger Award. Kit has been very encouraging of me since I started blogging more seriously and I have so many reasons to thank her.

This award comes with the requirement of the recipient to write seven things about herself/himself that nobody knows. Well, this caught me at a bad moment. I cannot think, as Kit does, of funny cute stuff to say. I just take myself way too seriously as usual and think: oh, if nobody knows about them, there probably is good reason for these things to stay secret.

This Sunday I have to speak in front of people in our meeting house about my personal theology. For five minutes. Five whole minutes. So much time for people to slowly fall asleep. Or quickly get irritated with the irrelevance of my talk. Or maybe even laugh. In places that were not meant for that. I'm scared. I cannot put any words down on paper.

I think of myself as a writer because I am unable to talk. I do have a need to say stuff that I think, because as much as I don't appreciate it and think it rude, I do keep thinking. I just don't want to face people when I do it. I don't even want to imagine that I am facing people. I don't want to think that they might be imagining me behind those words either. Oh, yeah, paradoxically, here I am writing to you about all these on my blog.

How I do admire though the writers who are different, who can laugh and make others laugh, who are not cursed with seriousness and inescapable ridiculousness, like me.

I was watching this Anne Lamott interview from last year, before the elections and she speaks so well, so calmly and truthfully, so unafraid about her own faith and her ideals of the world.

What am I afraid of? When I have that answer, I am going to share it with you. Well, at least I intend to, OK? But in the meantime, my talk this Sunday will be made of a series of Romanian poems that will describe the evolution of my spiritual truth. I am not going to use my words, because I cannot completely come out of my safe place. Come on, stop grumbling! I am doing the next best thing I can. Really, people, from now on I am not telling you anything!

The Nobel for literature goes to a Romanian?

2009-10-09T03:08:00.000-07:00

My husband made me aware the this year's Nobel prize for literature went to a German writer of Romanian origin, Herta Muller. A woman!

I am not sure she likes to call herself Romanian, although she was born there and lived in Romania until she was maybe 34. But she comes from the German community in Romania and now she probably writes only in German and she is published in Germany. It does look like she writes about Romanian subjects (communism), though, and that is significant.

It made me think of Kafka and his ambiguous national affiliations: he was born in Prague, in a Jewish-German family. He wrote in German and although he did speak some Check, that was highly unusual for people with his background.

Many brilliant Romanian writers and artists left the country and created in other spaces and other languages. It is not unusual. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have become the artists they were. Romania is in Europe, in the middle of all the cultural happenings, but we have a very different language, spoken by only a handful of people (around 22 million) and our literature never makes much impact. Plus, we have always been a pretty needy and poor country, with people who loved culture but never had the means to support it. So it has been easy for many artists to take an overnight train and settle in France or other European country where they would get more support and more visibility.

Oh, and on newer news, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel prize for peace! Go Nobel prizes!

Who are you, wonderful, generous, patient readers of my words?

2009-10-07T02:47:00.000-07:00

We had a play date at my house yesterday and I am starting to enjoy those more and more, as my baby grows and they can all play pretty much by themselves while we can talk grown up things.

Just as in the blogosphere, the subject of Facebook and Twitter comes up in real life conversation very often.
Do you have a Facebook profile?
Yes, I do.
I don't remember what it is, though.
Lost the password a few times.
Do you like to use it?
Not really.
Yes.
Let's start a page for our group.
Let's not.
My mom is my friend on Facebook and I have a friend request from my boss that is still hanging there for a few months.
And those high school friends who I haven't seen in years and don't really need knowing my business every day...
What about Twitter?
No, don't.

Who do I write for? I put so much of myself out there not really knowing exactly who is at the receiving end, not really able to tweak the information for each individual group. How easy it was earlier, when we kept our personal lives in the oral communication and the public space was clearly drawn on the pavement with fresh paint and regulated safely with glaring traffic lights.

Nowadays, everyone is everywhere doing everything. My work, my family, my friends are all online, reading fragments of thoughts I throw around, and how I wish I could still keep them separate, contained. How much safer is my paper journal. How exposed and vulnerable I feel typing away at the computer screen. How much satisfaction it gives in return though. How many new friends. What extraordinary, effervescent bubbling of ideas. How to choose?

No vaccine

2009-10-06T03:31:00.000-07:00

I had heard some time ago on the car radio, my only source of news lately, that the pharmaceutical industry was trying to push on the market a new flu vaccine, with a booster to make it stronger, which hasn't even been tested. Not properly. No time. The swine flu scare might just fizzle out without anybody profiting from it! Oh, no!

It seems that now the vaccine is finally coming out and I am sure many will run to get it, trusting that it is for their own good, not aware that there are risks that they don't know about, that they should consider, because they might just be bigger than the health risks they expose themselves to by contracting the flu. This flu is not even that strong anymore. Most cases are so mild that they don't require any treatment at all and what you need to do is keep yourself hydrated and wait a few days until it passes though your system.

I do have a problem with the drug and medical industries and even my own husband thinks I am crazy, so I understand that nobody wants to listen or believe me. But here there is finally a doctor who has the courage to tell it as it is. Just watch this!

The Disease, by Marin Sorescu

2009-10-01T05:10:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time favorites.

The Disease (Boala)
by Marin Sorescu

Doc, I feel something deadly
Here, where my being is
Every organ hurts in my body,
During the day the sun hurts,
At night, the moon and stars.
I feel something very painful in that cloud on the sky
And I wake up every morning
Feeling like winter.
I took all kinds of pills for nothing
I hated and I loved, I learned to read
And I even read some books,
I spoke to people and I thought,
I was good and beautiful…

All these didn't have any effect, doc,
And I spend a lot of money on all these.

I think I must have caught the disease of death
Some time ago,
When I was born.

translated by Lori Tiron-Pandit

Hey streetcar, take me home

2009-09-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

How do you ever feel at home? When you're not?

It didn't seem in the beginning the moving to US would be an enormous cultural change. I compared it to moving to India and though, oh, US will be just like home. But the difference, although not so apparent, proved to be enormous.

People do not wear different clothes or have completely opposite cultural perspectives. They don't believe that men are the ones who should dye their hair while women should just learn to age gracefully. Sleeveless blouses are not an outrage, but subtler and upsetting differences happen. People value the individual to the detriment of the community. They value change more than roots. Comfort more than family. Quiet more than children and laughter. Large mansions more than friends. Lawns more than birds. Bank accounts more than life and health. Acres of land more than neighboring hellos. When will I learn?

Gica Petrescu - Du-Ma acasa Mai Tramvai

Hey streetcar, take me home,
What are you still waiting for,
Take me to my little cot
With small gate and water spout.

Night is coming down on the town,
People from our street are gone,
But at a gate someone is waiting
for me to come.

Of writing poetry and writing novels

2009-09-23T03:22:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking lately of the large gap between the two types of writing, how they require to be approached with a different soul, many times by different people.

To some poetry seems hard and prose easy. I think this is the first thought that comes to mind, when you think of the difference. Anyone can write prose, right? It's basic writing. Sentence after sentence, makes a story. Story is what counts more than the aforementioned sentence.

Let me tell you from the start that I cannot be included in this group. I have always believed that a brilliant, 300 pages novel is the writer's Wholly Grail. That's where my admiration was always going, to those incredible people who can keep their concentration and inspiration going through hundreds of pages. That's what I wanted to do, to have respect for myself as a writer. Besides, who even reads poetry unless they are in school or in love? Who's life is ever changed by a small poem?

As I grow old and the novels in my drawer (barely 200 pages) look at me with impossible eyes, when my frustration and pain starts exploding in small gatherings of five-word lines, I am having a small revelation: what if I was wrong all along? What if I am actually a poet? And then I remember.

I've never been able to write long essays and compositions in school. What a pain to fill all that required number of pages.

Poetry is put on music and sang to leads battles. Poetry is what we first teach our children. Poetry is what we learn by heart.

I am short. 1.55m. Never cared much about it. "Strong essences come in small bottles", an aunt told me once, and I never forgot. Today it comes to mind again. What if I apply it to my writing too? The clouds might finally be lifting.

Back in town

2009-09-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

It was a fun vacation. The weather was wonderful, better than expected for this time of year (and after this terrible so called summer), the place was more magical than I remembered, relaxation was complete.

We stayed in a lovely cottage, about which the Princess-Witch-Balance Girl complained from the first day: "I don't want to go back to that little thing. I wanna go home." This remained every evening's refrain.

It was a little thing of beauty, though, that even had a writing nook.

She did love the beach, the long walks, the zoo and the candy store. I enjoyed the overflowing blooms in front of every house, hotel and shop...

... the colors, the natural flair for beauty of Maine and its people, the natural food store from Kennenbunk, every little thing about Kennenbunkport dock square...

... York's beach drive, Ogunquit's Perkins cove, the antique and thrift stores along the way.

And I loved another thing: my pretty, little, cute new Nikon D5000, and the amazing husband who got it for me. Am I lucky or what?

Now we're back. School, work, our life. We'll finally be accepting that fall has come. We'll wait for winter. After Ogunquit.

The light of yesterday, by LUCIAN BLAGA (poetry translation)

2009-09-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

In WRITTEN there is a translation of Lucian Blaga's The light of yesterday (Lumina de ieri). Don't you just love the sound of this sequence of words: the light of yesterday. It's music.

I feel on a mission lately to translate all Blaga. Like a compulsion. Maybe it means something. I don't know.

Tomorrow we are going on a short vacation to Ogunquit, Maine, so I won't be online much. Our camera is in the repair shop (it turns out that we couldn't fix it ourselves) but we'll borrow one from a friend and I hope to come back with a few beautiful photos.

See you again at the other end of next week, which I hope will be just miraculous for everyone.

My Blogger: improving image quality

2009-09-10T08:40:00.001-07:00

I have been struggling with the image quality issue in Blogger for a long time and last week, finally, I found a solution that makes me happy. Not that my photographs are so artistic and amazing that they need perfect display. On the contrary: they are rather bad, so that could use being shown in the best light possible. Plus, I just like to have control of my blog, make it really mine. Blogger cannot mess with me, all right? I was about to switch to Wordpress just for this small reason.

But let me tell you what is happening, so if you struggle with the same issues, you can use this solution too. Until now I used to upload my images from the blog editing console (is that what it's called?) by clicking on the little icon on top for Add Image. My photos used to show on the blog very blurry and bad. I could tell, because if I clicked on one, it would open in another window, and there it would look much better. I think you can check it now, with this image on top.

I was not happy.

I found a way of modifying the image size (because Blogger resizes everything) by changing the width and height parameters in the lines of code that show up in the text editor when an image is uploaded. I did get a bigger image, but not a better one:

Now I discovered another way (or rather some smarter people discovered it and I just found their instructions kindly posted on the Web). How it works: I downloaded the Picasa software on my laptop and I choose the photo I need from there and upload it by clicking on the Blog This! button. Here is what I get:

As you can see, the image is smaller again, but the quality has improved. First I have to remove part of the coding which makes that icon and link to Picasa. In order to change the image size, this time I don't have the width and height parameters showing in the code. Yeah. But what I can do is change the s400 number, which does show in there, to s800.

So from this:

<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_kwcZ6o5jNCw/SqY2LNT8H9I/AAAAAAAAEjQ/2VsHtsfcuiY/s1600-h/indian+child-1.jpg'><img src='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_kwcZ6o5jNCw/SqY2LNT8H9I/AAAAAAAAEjQ/2VsHtsfcuiY/s400/indian+child-1.jpg' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div><div style='clear:both; text-align:CENTER'><a href='http://picasa.google.com/blogger/' target='ext'><img src='http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif' alt='Posted by Picasa' style='border: 0px none ; padding: 0px; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial;' align='middle' border='0' /></a></div>

We change to this:


<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_kwcZ6o5jNCw/SqY2LNT8H9I/AAAAAAAAEjQ/2VsHtsfcuiY/s1600-h/indian+child-1.jpg'><img src='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_kwcZ6o5jNCw/SqY2LNT8H9I/AAAAAAAAEjQ/2VsHtsfcuiY/s800/indian+child-1.jpg' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div><div style='clear:both; text-align:CENTER'></div>

And here is the final result:

PS: Until I post this, I cannot tell if these images are really different. This is a really good photo, (taken by Saumitra Pandit, a very talented photography enthusiast) so even at a lesser quality, it still looks great. Right now they all look the same to me. Let me just... publish.

PPS: Lately, I have been skipping the uploading through Picasa step completely, going only after changing the dimensions and the s400 to s800 in the code that appears here, in the Blogger post editing window. It works just as well.

Bucharest's Flash Mob Tribute to Michael Jackson

2009-09-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

This is because I am proud that the Romanian dance tribute to Michael Jackson is simply the best, because we stopped traffic, because people are such creatures of beauty and perfection to celebrate the artist in this way and perform in such spirit in towns all over the world, because I am in tears and disbelief that these things have been happening out there, while I live away, in the secluded USA, where it all should have started, but for millions of reasons that I don't care about, did not.

Who does she think she is? (a documentary film)

2009-09-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

I cannot stop blogging.

This documentary seems very powerful and immensely inspiring. I have to see it. I am going to reopen my Netflix account just to be able to watch this (can't find it anywhere else). How can I miss it? It's about women artists. And artists who are women. And mothers. And who need to create in spite of it, along with it, precisely for it.

Daily Writing in the snow

2009-09-08T04:32:00.000-07:00

Wonderful and too kind Rachel Fenton, from Snow Like Thought has written some amazing stuff (as only she can write) about a blog that I'm afraid is not as great as that. This blogger, though, couldn't be more grateful.

If you could whisper two words to a dying person

2009-09-07T04:12:00.000-07:00

What would you say?

This question was asked in the letters-from-readers section of Spirituality & Health magazine, section called "Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler".

The answer of Rabbi Rami Shapiro was "Courage. Love. I'd whisper the same to a newborn as well."

What do you have to say about life and death, in two words? What the essence of everything, of all you've ever learned? And if you find that essence and are able to express it in two words, do you consider them valuable enough, encouraging enough to help someone who is stepping beyond?

Beautiful.
Safe.

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, BRAD GOOCH (book review)

2009-09-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

In THE READING LIST I have posted my review of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by BRAD GOOCH.

While you can read there about the book, I am going to use a little space out here to express my frustrations (again) about the author's web site.

First of all, there is no large size image of the cover on the site and that is something that I am sure many reviewers could use. Why is it not offered?

The author's web site is very basic, actually less than basic, which comes as such a surprise to me, considering that he's written about ten books. That's plenty of time to develop a web site, isn't it? Or it is just time to write the actual books?

It's weird, because unpublished writers, like me, fret so much about web presence and blogging and networking sites and all that... stuff and sometimes I just stop and look around and it doesn't seem right. It seems like this is not the world where real things happen. Maybe writing that book should be all that matters... Maybe we just try to justify blogging as work, when it is really only fun. It is only one inch above watching TV or playing video games. But work... is it really?

Cell phones and brain cancer and why I wish I lived in another time

2009-09-03T04:06:00.001-07:00

This morning I woke up to another e-mail about mobile phones and cancer research. Another study, more proof. Future epidemic of brain cancer? Very believable.

I feel like the humanity has completely lost control. Like the magician's apprentice who gets in trouble from having too much power that he doesn't fully understand, we make spell after spell, bring into the world these amazing technologies, cures and whatnot, but we fail to completely grasp the whole effect these changes have on our environment and on ourselves.

And tragically, the most exposed are our little ones, our babies, the innocent ones we expose to the amazing novelties right from birth, right when they are most vulnerable.

How am I going to keep my daughter away from the mobile phone radiation? Is that even possible in this world? Until she's at least eight, she should not be able to touch a working mobile phone. I'll use the speaker phone option. I'll use shields and protective earphones. But what I really wish I could do, would be to go back to a time when all this didn't exist, even in imagination. To a time when magic hadn't yet gone out of control.

The old monk whispers to me from the threshold, by LUCIAN BLAGA (poetry translation)

2009-08-31T02:48:00.001-07:00

I haven't done this for a while: in WRITTEN you can read the new Blaga poem I translated: The old monk whispers to me from the threshold (Calugarul batran imi sopteste din prag).

In other news, my old camera started working again, this is the last week of vacation for my Princess-Witch and I dreamt that I was dying. I'm still adjusting to being alive.

I hope everyone is starting a fantastic week.

Wardrobe simplicity: the uniform?

2009-08-28T04:03:00.001-07:00

In the FLOWER SEEDS section I wrote about simplifying the wardrobe and the possible benefits that come along with it.

I planned this as an article much richer in images, but my camera broke off last night so I might just well post is as it is for now, while we try to see what to do about our little Canon. It's a PowerShot S80, which we bought about four years ago, just before my daughter was born. It is a beautiful camera that we love and it served us well until now. We were hoping it would last a little longer, though. It seems that the lens getting stuck and the cover not powering the camera is an issue that happens quite frequently with the Canons. Unhappiness.

Anyway, I cannot say that I'll be completely devastated if I end up having to get a new one. I have been dreaming of a certain Nikon for a long time. We'll see.

Until then, my blog will suffer a little, with not many new images. But we'll get back better and stronger.

Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart D. Ehrman (book review)

2009-08-26T02:36:00.000-07:00

A controversial book.

What other fate could it have had, when it wants to reveal a conspiracy of keeping hidden the contradictions in the New Testament? When it wants to make it clear as day that the books were not written by the apostles, not even by people who ever met or lived in the same time as Jesus, or who even spoke his language?

You can read my entire review of Bart D. Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted in THE READING LIST.

(And isn't this a great cover?)

Shadow of doubt (a poem)

2009-08-24T03:43:00.001-07:00

I stopped her right there:
It remains to be seen, I said,
someday I am going to show you
that I
am the chosen, the beautiful,
the magical one.

But the incredible shadow on the living room wall
didn’t leave.
She stared at me through veils of dusk
and linen curtains.
She looked at me with eyes
of knotty, grabby tree branches.

READ THE ENTIRE POEM.

The Green Tara and the betrayal

2009-08-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

I was born in a religious environment of strict orthodox Christians. Strict because I was never taught there is anything else out there, and I didn't know for the longest time. Because I was born in this religion and because my family belongs to this tradition, I will always consider myself a christian orthodox. But that doesn't mean that my views haven't evolved and my beliefs haven't transformed much beyond the confines of a certain structured religion, as we know them today.

I am reading now a book called Jesus...Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman, which makes my heart ache for what has happened to his teachings since he brought them into the world. I now find out that most of the Gospels don't seem to have been written by people who ever met Jesus, but decades after his death, from compiled hearsay. What is more painful is that they seem to present discrepancies that are consistent with certain religious agendas. There are many things in this book which I feel are not new revelations but things that most of us have known and yet we preferred to overlook them, because we just need to believe. We have our personal belief agendas too.

I think that the need to believe and make our beliefs rational is so enormous, so overwhelming, that it pushes us sometimes to make many mistakes or at least to alter what we know, what we see, what we feel.

As a child I learned that we should not pray to "clay figures", as the priest and my grandmother repeated to me. We were not pagans who prayed to statues of cows, but Christians. We only had icons.

Although I wanted a little statue of Green Tara for my personal altar for a long time, the moment it came on my doorstep and I let her in, I felt guilty. I have Buddhas, Krishnas and Ganeshas in my house, but I never felt like they were entirely mine. Tara is and suddenly I felt at odds with everything I had learned from my grandmother. It felt like betrayal.

And she looks wild, with her crown, her lotuses and her fluttering silks. She looks menacing.

The truth is that I wanted a feminine spiritual representation. That's what I was looking for in Tara. Because it is my belief that the religions of today (most) evolved under masculine guidance and women were unjustly left outside of the circle, barely admitted in churches for the longest time, robbed of their right to spirituality. That is why I am slowly creating my own system, which involves icons, altars and statues, and in the end none of them mean anything, because what I am looking for is beyond these manufactured images that don't even look an ounce like the reality that I seek behind them.

So I am again at peace with my ancestral christian roots. Because I do not worship any statue, just as I do not worship an icon either. Just as I cannot worship the Bible (as much as I might feel tempted to). I am just adoring and searching communion with an immaterial spirit that they represent and remind me of, when I start to forget.

My web site taken apart

2009-08-19T04:08:00.000-07:00

Remember how Jordan McCollum who is a writer and an Internet marketing professional and Kathleen MacIver, writer and web designer at KatieDid Design, so graciously offered to analyze some aspiring author web sites? My own web site was one of those who made it for the review and has just been taken apart on Jordan's blog at Optimizing a site for users and search engines: LoriTironPandit.com.

So yeah, as they show, my web site has two big problems: it doesn't show much in search engines and it takes a long time to load because of the large images.
I am very thankful to Jordan and Kathleen for the solutions they suggested, especially as most of them never occurred to me. I've already tried some improvements and I am quite happy.

The series of web sites (and blogs) analysis continues on Jordan's blog, along with very useful other posts about building author web sites. Go and take a look.

Celebrating India

2009-08-17T12:37:00.001-07:00

When I moved to US I was shocked to see the many Indians in this area. Everywhere you go you'll see groups of ladies dressed in saris or shalwar kurtas. Indian restaurants are of course at every street corner. Indian jewelers, cosmeticians (think threading) plenty of Indian grocery stores and even Indian temples don't let the nationals who live here miss home all that much. Which is nice, right? My only question is, where are the Romanians? Tell me, people, where?

Anyway, given the number of Indians in our area, there is a huge India Day Celebration that takes place in Boston every year. It's fun. Lots of "India people", as my baby discovered.

She can tell by their beautiful India clothes. She also has India dresses from Dadima (her India grandma) and she never wants to take them off because they're so sparkly and beautiful. Unfortunately, I forgot to dress her up in one for this occasion.

We sat on the grass and watched the dances, ate samosas and idlis, met friends and strangers, and talked all the way home about what we liked best (have you ever watched Dora the Explorer? Like that).

The dances are always the best part for me. That's why I'm going to leave you with this one, from Orissa.

Can't find author web site, very frustrated

2009-08-13T05:30:00.001-07:00

Remember how I told you in my post about Salem that I bought a new book, Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider, by Suzanne Clores? Well, I started reading it and I became more interested in the author, so, obviously, I looked her up online. And what do you think? Although there is a suzanneclores.com, it is "temporarily taken offline". It looks like the temporary situation has been going on since 2004 too, since this is the date the copyright notice gives.

When I cannot find an author online it is not only very frustrating, but I feel cheated. I am investing so much in this person (money, time, emotion) when I read her book, and she almost doesn't exist.

I did find the web site of a shaman mentioned in the book though, Jyoti Chrystal, so I am partially satisfied. But I have become strongly aware of the real importance of a web site.

I learned in my mass-media courses how people (used to) believe that if something is written in the newspaper (or shown on TV), it just has to be true. Now, if something is present online, we all know that it doesn't mean it's true at all. But if it is not there, then does it even exist?

~*L.*~ Daily Writing