Living the Dream

Here we are in the next millennium and women are struggled against a prejudice again, this time the inherent prejudice is sister against sister.  Our sisters have bought into the masculine ideology that no longer respects and honors the divinity of women.

Some sisters have stiletto-heeled their way to stand above their male peers in high positions in government, business and society.  We watch Hillary Clinton knife her way to the forefront and then use the very sisters she backstabbed as cheerleaders for “Woman As President”.  I, for one, am grateful she is out of the race.  She does not represent the dignified grace of womanhood, in the way of sacred and purity and innocence and nurturing and healing.  Politics is one kind of power:  spirituality is another.  And this has nothing to do with religions.  Religions and women are another matter, while political and have curtailed the spiritual empowerment that women can hold and put forth, if they live the ways they were taught in the beginning.

We were once taught that both sexes were equal “two wings of the bird of humanity,” a prophet once said.  There were ancient celebrations for both gods and goddesses and now, as some sisters remember and listen to the call, are trying to restore the mother element to all things.  We have gone from religions that have portrayed women as enemy and as they defamed womanhood, they were, beneath the rancor, able to hide what else was going on.  One of the surest ways to obtain power is to translate Creator’s words to fit the political religious ploys that seem to work in our society.

It began a long time ago when male political figures, who were also religious figures, used their gifts of words and their physical prowess to dehumanize women.  Women were relegated to second class citizenry.  The women of biblical times were not educated and therefore their roles were diminished and carefully scripted in scripture.  It seems our societies through the ages have always had something against the feminine and their ability to give birth.  It was seen as power and it was totally gender-based.  Now, there are men having babies, or trying to.  There are men engaged in duplicating life in test tubes.  They are desperate to have what they were not given.   But, even with that, they will not ever have what women were given from first woman.  The men have their gifts.  The women have their gifts.  Those gifts were to be used together to become even bigger and better gifts.

Once men had to preen and earn the right to mate with a woman.  Now, the roles have reversed.  (Think about how silly woman can be to woe men that are not the best, not the strongest, not the hardiest, not the best qualifier for reproduction.  Pregnancy is seen by many as either an inconvenience or a mistake.  The progeny is either a problem or a bother, and stuck in front of a television, a toy, or with babysitters so life can go on as conveniently as possible in today’s society.

I was no more or no less guilty of some than any others.  It seems life made us need more time.  It was too difficult to carry our babies on our backs or under our cloaks.  And heaven knows, you had to promise not to get pregnant to get a job, never take a child to work, and never miss work because you had children.  In some cases, children become commodities.  The more children you get, the more perks you get.  The less educated use it as income.  And then we wonder why our children have become such hurting little souls, why our teenagers are so angry, why our young adults carry on as if there were no tomorrow.  We speak of what residential schools have done to our native generations that followed.  I see the same problems even in children of parents who were not taken away.  What do they blame?  Deadbeat dads are old hat.  Now there are deadbeat moms.  There is a world of hurt out there.  And, now, we turn on each other like rabid dogs.

The women who once ruled the house, ruled their kitchen, want to gain precedence over their sisters in any way possible.  The enemy is within.  We no longer gather in loving familial groups for quilting bees, in service of each other, in compassion for each other.  We wage war with ways to one-up each other.  We relegate other sisters to roles that liken servants and serfdom.  We say we want to live forever and in the end, we will be found to be strange mounds in deep graves.

The medical academia found ways to extend men’s virility.  Now they are trying to balance that with drugs to sustain women’s sexuality.  Not for procreation as sexuality was given as a gift from Creator, but to use sexuality as power and control.  And we compete, hardily….forgive the pun.  We seek our youth because we realize we have not planned for the future.  We have no present because we a slugging around in our past issues or have avoided our present by focusing on how to get more and more and more for the future.  The more that we have is a sickened society that runs in packs or isolates themselves in quiet desperation because they can no longer compete.  (See elders and the Peaceful pill blog).  Livelihood is too easy to get and lose now.  Rather than green fields we are concerned about greenbacks.  We can’t share because to share means someone might have more than we do then.  In the end of it, we have become mad dogs chasing our tails and looking for easy prey.

How do we ever get back to balance?  How do we find the divine balance and equality in this mess?  Laura Kipnis , in her book, “That Female Thing” wrote that regardless of how feminist a woman may believe herself to be, she is always in a constant state of battle between being feminist and being feminine.  Somehow we have to go from being obsessed with food and love and religion and exercise and medications and diets and all the things we are addicted to, all the things that replace what it is our soul really wants, and different stages of depression and the projects of such, and find that peaceful place.

I believe that we have to learn to love each other, my sisters and I.  We need to gather in circles of every kind for the good of the world, and heaven and Mother Earth and Creator.

Somehow we have to be honorable women who respect themselves and their femininity… that great gift of purity and soulfulness of sacred sharing.  When we ground ourselves back to the way it was when we were created, we have the opportunity to realign ourselves so our relationships with all things do not wobble so.  We can share the medicine that women share.  We can relearn how to be grace and gratitude.  We can relearn how to truly honor and worship each other.  It is a case of, ‘we-HAVE-to if we are to fulfill our role as the peacemakers and healers of Mother Earth.  We are divine and we need to act like it.

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An old woman was living with her daughter and her family. Her daughter was always complaining about her life and she was bitter and angsty. The old woman was grateful to be able to live with her daughter, but was tired of the complaining. She knew she was a burden, but that is part of some old women’s lives.

On morning, her daughter came sighing into her room and the old woman asked her daughter to get her some salt and a glass of water. With a bigger sigh, the daughter went to get some salt and water for her mother. She loved her but she was feeling resentful at all she had to do on top of caring for her mother.

When the daughter returned, her mother told her to put the salt in the water and take a sip. The daughter complied; perhaps just to mollify her mother and cause no problems.

Immediately the daughter coughed and spit out the sip of salty water.

“How did that taste?” asked the mother. Gulping, the daughter cried, “Bitter!”

“Let us walk to the lake. Bring the salt.” The daughter protested and had all sorts of excuses but the mother was adamant they have just a moment of time at the lake.

When they reached the lakeshore, the mother told the daughter to take a handful of salt and put it in the lake. The daughter took a fistful and swirled it in the water.

The mother then told her daughter to cup her hand and take a sip of the lake water. The daughter did so; hoping this strangeness would end soon and she could go about her busy-ness. She took a cupped palmful of water.

“How does it taste? asked the mother. “Fresh,” said her daughter.

“Do you taste the salt?” asked the mother. “No,” said the daughter.

Lovingly, the mother took her daughter into her arms and whispered, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain is the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness it has depends on what container we put the pain in. When you are in pain, enlarge the container, your sense of it. Stop being the glass and become the lake.”

I have often prayed I would never become a bitter old woman. I have lived life as if it were an adventure. I followed the dictum: Live it or lose it!” I know what my genetic history is: Living to an old age and living with Alzheimer’s in the end. Now, I can bear living to an old age as long as I am healthy and able to find things I can do at whatever stage. And you better believe there a re a few things I would not mind forgetting.

I remember talking to a writer-friend about old age. I have told her she will be sitting in a chair, forgetful of everything, but she will be editing and critiquing old newspapers and magazines people put in front of her. She will be happy as a lark. Then, I realized, all I was going to need was some crayons and blank paper. How simple is that a request? Imagine the joy with nothing else but that in front of you…to draw in colors I wish to color with and not another care in the world.

Let’s face it. The world is not suddenly going to recognize us something of worth and respect. If we have hidden behind reality with our ‘little obsessions, we are apt to be very bitter indeed. I am practicing things I can do. I am practicing smiling and being grateful. I am practicing living every moment to its fullest…maybe not its deepest and its full length, but moment by moment. How can I feel disappointed or bitter if I do not put forth my expectations into my future? I want to be loving and kind so that I evoke loving kindness. Grace: that which draws others to you: Humility, the evocation of Grace. Yes, that’s it! Let me be grateful and humble for anything I can do now, so I will be grateful when I can do less.

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a woman gives birth in deepest forest,

cleanses child of its journey,

rubs it vigorously to bring out its lusty cry,

and there is hope, singing out

under great leaves of darkness

in shawl-drawn sky, brass-button stars

pin those desires in the ether:

like eyes of elders

peering over a cradle

eyes wet with wonder and wishes

bring babe to breast, she releases

what only earth can, as thick as cream,

as yellow as emerging dawn

and encourages suckling

the held-breath hour as sun rises,

light filters through a dance of orbs,

quiet as a maternity ward at moment of crowning

and darkness in newborn’s eyes

squeeze tightly, as if all it ever needed was this

woman looks upwards,

lump from stomach diminished

but the one in her throat

leaves no room for words

and causes her to hum

©Carol Desjarlais

A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost

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“I am mature, and wise, and have a lifetime of experience… and I am proud of it.”

It has been said, by older women, “We’re not in a crisis, we’re on a quest!”  We have forgot the root meanings of many words.  The root word of Celebrate (celebratus)  comes from Latin, meaning “to attend in great numbers, to throng, and much talked about, and is related to the Latin word “swift” .  It is a communal event, apparently, and this is the crux of the problem with today’s society.  Society does not ‘celebrate’ the aging process.  Celebration is an antidote for loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of having moved into a place where we are not needed anymore.  Being older is to move to a sad, aloof, place in society.   For women, it is a angst-ridden time to realize we are ‘old’.

As we become Monarchs of our families, we find there seems to be no honor to it anymore.  We are no longer revered and respected.  Our wisdom collected in life is no longer used for healing and we are thought to having weakening minds that are ‘old fashioned’.  Many of us are seen as useless because we did not sell-out to the false youth society would like to promote.  We represent everything the rest are trying to avoid.  We are aging naturally in an unnatural world.  We have not dried up and blown away.  We are active and welcoming our new ways of thinking in old ways.  We are self-sufficient and willing to share.  No one knows what to do with us.

In the early times of our world, an older female was a wise woman.  To reach that stage was an honor and was a welcomed time in our lives.  We do not feel comfortable with the plastic women behind us.  And those that are, or are not, plastic younger women, definitely do not feel comfortable with us.  We represent everything they dread:  Looking, feeling, being ‘Old’.  This fourth cycle of womanhood is a gift we have to relearn to love and take on as a responsibility.  When the plastic walls all fall down, there we will be.  Are we preparing ourselves appropriately?  Have we gone through our physical, intellectual, emotional periods of life and now know how to tap into the spirituality of all the other three components?  Do we know how to be physically spiritual?  Do we know how to think spiritually?  Do we know how to be emotionally spiritual?  Perhaps we have spent our time and money wisely and have figured it out, or are in the midst of figuring it out.  Bless those that already have.

We have decades of experiences and lessons behind us.  When society stopped honoring what we learned, it has fallen into an abyss of addictions, angst and avoidance.  Our young girls are desperately seeking something and do not even know what it is they have lost.  Their own mothers, and some of their grandmothers have slipped the braces of natural aging and are so busy finding and amusing themselves, that the children are lost without normal models that take life as it comes and enjoy what they can and learn the lessons from the rest.  They are vulnerable and therefore fearful.  They are not as resilient as they could have been if they had had coaching and training in the honor of womanhood and aging by those who honored and remembered to live it.

I have often used this quote for almost everything I do:  I (fill in the blank…) _____, “…so others may know, I have not lived this life as if a dream.” - Richard Hooker

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote:  “The purpose of life, after all, is to live it - to taste and experience to the utmost; to reach out eagerly and without fear for new and richer experiences.”  “NEW”….RICHER”!  Our lives can have great meaning if we have been deepened through truly living an authentic life.

Did you think celebration meant to be loud and laughing, and fun, fun, fun?  No, celebrations can be sad as well.  It can be a quite contemplation of a friend’s sorrow.  It can be sitting at the bedside of a dying friend and celebrating friendship.  It can be a wife sitting at her husband’s deathbed and celebrating their combined service to each other through all kinds of life.

Consider these things:

Can you still feel, sing, see, smell?  Do have fairly good health and can work in the garden, paint, read?  Do you have a little cottage, an apartment, an old house on the farm, or any roof over your head?  All things can be gone in a flash.  Do we remember to be grateful for what we have when we have it?

If society does not honor us, let us, at least, honor ourselves and each other. “I am mature, and wise, and have a lifetime of experience… and I am proud of it.”  Live it until you are it.

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“Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent.
As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.”
May Sarton
Last night I watched a documentary on Seniors in Australia that belong to a group of death by choice.  They go to workshops that explain methods to take one’s (Seniors only) life,   They are told where they can get the drugs to do it:  Mexico Veterinary stores.  The documentary stated that the group had secretly made death pills so that they can choose when to end their lives.  It is called “The Peaceful Pill”.  Dr. Philip Nitschke is a right-to-die campaigner.  Each of the group that spoke, were still in good health and ranged in age., one was in his late 90s but has put off his end because his wife had Alzheimer’s and needing him to care take.  “When she goes…..” his voice faded off.  Dr Nitschke speaks of senior’s fears of being trapped in a “medical nightmare” where they might be forced to beg loved ones to help end their lives. One man has a special self-suffocation kit and practices with it to make sure he has it down pat.  They cannot have anyone with them when they do it for fear of legal repercussions.  There is a book published about the Peaceful pill.  Suicide is not a crime in Australia.  What questions are entertained, what thoughts this gives rise to.  Is it an easy way out, a giving up, or is it a way to die with dignity?  How desperate we have become as modern miracles keep us alive longer, can put life on hold, and for whom?  There was a news article on CNN that spoke of findings about God having the power to bring people back from the brink of death.  Such smugness!  I, for one, want no intercession.  I don’t want to come back to a life of pain, forgetfulness, because people can not stand to let me go.  How unfair.  I understand some point to the Peaceful Pill.
Thoughts, last night led me to elders I have met, my parents as they aged, and the gift their agedness was to me.  But, then, I remember a sister-in-law who had brain cancer and her last conscious reaction was screaming…and they hooked her up and kept her alive for months, with that scream frozen on her face.    I know that pain medications just make you unable to react to pain.  The morphine drip, drip, dripped, and the pain was there but I had no way to relate to it until the drug wore off enough hat I could beg.  What is right?  What is good?  What is just?  We can speak of perseverance, fate, karma, determination, and surrender to age.  But that is not speaking to aging that might be torture.  Once we hit that place of being put in hospitals, in nursing homes, in senior’s housing, we are at the mercy of everyone and totally powerless.  This has to be a matter of consternation for the baby boomers who are living longer and those parked in front of the entry in homes and have that look of need to go home in their eyes.
With grace, many of us will live long, productive, healthy lives as our body goes through the stages to its end.  May we be blessed with a quiet ending in the middle of our sleep.  But what if it isn’t that?  What if all dignity, grace, and mind is gone?  What then and WHY?  What is compassionate:  Is it the understanding that we might choose our time and way…or is it that we might suffer so others can choose?
Don’t worry, I do not have any preplanned ideas, nor little stash of pills.  I am one who will let life unfold.  But comes a dawn, when I know, even if others do not, what, then, would be my choice, my regret, my unplanned plan?  As baby boomers, we need to think about what strength we have to bear what we might have to bear.  Do we have it in s?  We can not just let life have its way with us, governments make our choices, and medical professions do as they will.  At some point, we must know, absolutely and for sure, what we are willing to do and have done to us.  It is a huge part of our reality.  What takes more strength, wisdom, and personal volition?  I am grateful for the unsettling stir of this documentary.  It has made me think about my own aging in a different way.

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Our family has lost the Matriarch of my Mother’s side of the family. There is a family reunion in heaven this morning.

“Aunt Berth, my mother’s youngest sister, was my favorite person other than my immediate family and Grandpa Smith. She made me feel special. She loved her sister so much that she adored me and the gift I was to her. When mother died, I felt so alone and said just that. Aunt Berth came over to me and said, “You have me.” It comforted me. To feel loved by her at that moment was one of the most important moments in my life. I was motherless not once, but twice and she seemed to know exactly what I needed to hear.

Aunt Berth remembered my adoption birthday, February 10, as I was growing up. She would bring or send out a gift. The gift was always a beautiful many-yarded, ruffled dress and in the box, scattered in the folds of a Cinderella dress, were cinnamon hearts. She made me feel like a princess. She loved me without any ifs.

… When people tried to find a way to make a connection for me, they would say, “My, she looks like Berth’s kids.” There was such comfort in that connection.” (Shhhhhh: A Creation Story, Carol Desjarlais, p5)

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Richard’s Grand-niece is one years old today.  How to make diapers look like an interesting presetn?  Voila!

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As we live in the present, there comes a Visitor:  The Past Wound that is not healed.

It begs us to respond to it.  We can not close the door, stuffing it back into its dark place again.  To gain authentic Presence in the moment, we have to align personality and soul.

We all have key triggers to our worries, sorrows, sadness, and personality challenges.  Those things are the WHY of how we act and react.  We can not solve anyone else’s WHY.  We must retrace our history until we find the hole in the woodwork that lets the returning of old wounds leak out, like light wanting to be full force.  We need to explore all aspects of WHY we act and react, not just the difficult ones:  Why we love what we love, why we appreciate what we do, why we appreciate what we do, why we like who we do, etc.

We have held onto the hem of happy endings at the price of closing off those things that made our journey difficult.  We disallow the blessings that come for challenges, from barriers to that story-ending.  After all, endings are only another beginning.

Our soul wants things finished.  Our psyche says: Quick, toss it away and give it up, hide it, store it, deal with it later…or never.  We will spend a great deal of energy barring that door where we have those things we have not dealt with.

We do not live in a static world.  It is always changing and challenging.  At the right time and place, the right thing happens.  When the soul knows you are ready to know and learn the lesson of some past incidents, it will reveal them to you.  Sometimes they come as flashbacks, an unsettling feeling, or come crashing down, like a door whose hinges have rusted, on you with a thud.  Endings are required.  Always.  Doors always have a way of falling down or having the walls around it corrode and the light within gets out.  That light is awareness and the need for full examination of it.

Our future depends on going back and housekeeping.  Like houses, things can fall into desperate disrepair.  A new hinge, a new board; we add-on, change walls, fix steps.  So it is with those memories and difficult things we did not deal with until we sorted it.

Our soul needs peace.  Old wounds fester and emits doubt, discord, disharmony and the ego, the bad-house salesman, will try to redirect the complete fulfillment of peace.  We see it all the time; those bad deals that were made.  We know how we, and others, disassociate, grab on to alternate obsessions, to smooth over the want and need.  The want and need exhibits itself in one way or another, though.  It is so apparent.

A friend of mine met a lady who has daily multiple visions.  She says when her body feels cold, she knows evil.  When she meets people, she can tell them all about themselves, and that God appears to her many times through the day.  Later, she explained to my friend that she had been a drug addict and abused alcohol and then Jesus saved her.  She says, Jesus gives her daily visions to keep her strong.  Does this not seem incongruent to anyone else?  This is an alternate obsession in order to block the real need for healing the key triggers that led her to the abuses in the first place.  Her ego is working especially hard to keep things at the door at bay.  It will eventually all fall down; this house of cards.

Sometimes, in fact, most times, we grow the most peace when we are willing to look at problems as they arise…right in the midst of great conflict.  There is no peace until we do.  Seriously.  There is always the fear that something will leak out at the wrong time.  And, there is no wrong time.  There is only the right time.  When you notice a nail is loose, fix it before the whole roof falls in on you.

We say we desire peace in the world, but we do not even know how to accept the challenge to have peace within.  When we go back and know those woundings as the dear children they are, we can nurture and heal those starving waifs we abandoned.  I know about starving waifs.  I was one in real life and I have spawned many more as life went on.  I had to go back and rescue them.   No one could rescue them for me.  I had to open the door and welcome the visitors in as they come or they would have become a raging mob and broken the door down.

©Carol Desjarlais

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Reply to Paul Coheo’s Warrior Of Light, “Why Women Believe We Love Them” - www.warriorofthelight.com

http://www.warriorofthelight.com/engl/index.html

Why Men Believe We Love Most Of Them

*because their youthfulness thrills us, their adventure, their play, their ability to amuse themselves and us and we show it to them by joining in;

*because a child can bring them to tears and we are drawn to touch them in that brilliance;

*because they are so easy to read and can a simple reading usually tells us what they really need;

*because they are easy to please in bed and it is never a bother but a good way to ensure communication…our rewards are many for this simple soulful connection;

*because they need rewarding for what they do, and in rewarding, they learn quickly to reward back;

*because they can be such little teenaged boys with their toys and their delight in breaking down and building up and the pride bouncing off them when they clear land or grow a tomato;

*because they accept the changes in their bodies better than we do;

*because they are meat-eaters, and we have to cook it for them, so we get to eat it too;

*because painting a house takes the consternation and concentration of Michelangelo painting his most admirable work of art - their home is their chapel;

*because a stain on a tee-shirt is not death, a hair out of place (think eyebrows, ears, nose) is not reason to die of embarrassment;

* because they have initiative in solving problems…not that things aren’t ‘gormed’ together…. Just that they get solved one way or another.  Don’t ask policy is best.

*They are better at showing love than saying it…and sometimes it is really important to feel it and see it rather than hear words that have come to mean so little in depth and have become just words;

*because they like nurturing best when they are sick and they can be easily swayed to understand what we might have been going through without notice;

*because they balance our fantasies with their reality;

*because, for all their bravado and war stories, they can still be more afraid of snakes;

* because they don’t get the words to their favorite song or why you like the ones you do so you do not have to have a long drawn out conversation about the depth of your meaning to them;

*because they can wear three piece suits and not have three-piece-suit mentalities;

*because taking a shower carries more meaning than simply getting clean…wink, wink, nudge, nudge;

*because they never fail to notice beauty of other women, but still tell us they love us even when we wake up looking like a bat that has hung upside down all night;

*because they take everything we say seriously and that makes them fun to tease…and make feel better after their moment of angst over what we just teased about might be true;

*because they can’t fake what they don’t feel;

*because they are so predictable in ordering or buying their favorite drinks, and we know what to expect because it is same old, same old;

*because they blunder in to a bad pick-up line that they get such joy out of saying;

*because you will always find a man hanging out with women friends when he doesn’t have one of his own;

*because deep down inside, we still love the “me, man/you woman” macho-pretense of them.

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I am opened with compassion through Hosseini’s storytelling.  The book has put names and faces to Afghanistan.  I begin to understand the heritage, the land, what the Afghani has lost, how they have suffered and how they suffer yet.

Amidst the social upheaval, there is pure magic in the complexities of psychological insight, the arc of the story from beginning to end, and   Hosseini’s dear, real voice, drawing the reader in until we feel what it is he wants us to feel:  Compassion, yes, compassion.

We all have stood at the corner of our own dark alleys.  Only our memories, as we have scripted them, hold those memories as fact.  We have been the lamb, some of us.  We have seen the eyes of the lamb.  This book has been another Passion Play.  We have been borne into something sacred.

Hosseini has said that the book is not autobiographical, and yet Hosseini comes from a prominent family in Kabul.  His father was a diplomat.  His mother was a teacher.  He says there is no childhood memory that haunts him other than that he felt guilty about his privilege.  And yet, all writing carries bits and pieces of us, as writers.  There is a sacred entwining in such a book as this, between the write, the reader and his characters.   I believe Hosseini’s true nature is exposed in this book, as is the reader’s as one relates to his writing.  We all know tragedy, tragedies, and we know better, the trgedy of Afghanistan through Hosseini’s voice.

The book is broad and humane.  The characters live.  The Persian words come alive for us, in deeper contest.  I was thirsting for more and found I spent a great deal of time researching Afghanistan, not just the history, nor the wars, nor the religions, but the sights and sounds and smells.  I began at that corner, staring down an ally.  I have come out into the field of sky where kites are flying.

The characters are all intriguing and real.  The relationships are complex, as real relationships are.  Hosseini approached them all with such compassion and caring, as if, and I expect they did become, if they were not already, people he knew dearly.  There is such humility.

The theme of guilt, redemption, sin, atonement, shame, is deep and the reader is willingly drawn in to tread the waters until there is saving.  There is deception, despair, disappointment and unification of characters within it all.  The reader is given cause to know their own.  Hosseini knows his people, all people, well.

The unrequited paternal love is the impetus for the story.    Our worst behaviors come from servitude, inequality, paternalistic ownership, and beyond this…Brotherly “love.  Who of us has not known culpability and shame?  Who of us has not witnessed aggression, brutality, hostility and violence of some kind?

We know bits and pieces of the Taliban.  We know those men’s sadism, and inhumanity to man.  We come to know more of them, as well, and that they are not the real people of Afghanistan, nor the real Muslims.  We know them to be Assefs, to be bullies, to be beyond that everyday forgiveness.

Everyone has a past that is living and breathing, betimes.  We have had to face them down in order to have a present and a future.  We know the need for loyalty, forgiveness, friendship, redemption, sacrifice, understanding of races, cultures, differences and similarities.  We know Love as Redemption.

This is a story that will stay with me for a very long time.  Prior to this reading, Afghanistan was a place on the map, and I admit, I didn’t quite have it ‘placed’.   I have been taken on a walk, with Amir, with Hosseini to the last forty years of Afghanistan and its people.  I have been asked, as a reader, to look at basic humanness of us all.  We are all human, we are complex, we are both defined and crippled by tradition; all the same, in different ways.  I am more clear about the struggles of Afghanistan and why we are there to help them…the real Afghani, and I no longer automatically think of bin Laden  but more:  I know more of Afghani traditions, struggles,;  the real faces.  And the message?  When we turn away from our self-pity, and self-interests, and self-imposed misery, we have a chance for absolution.

The Christ-like character of Hassan is a role model for us.  “For you a thousand times over.”  He was sacrificed.  He had his Judas’.  He was, indeed, the lamb of the story.  The story had no frills.  It was raw and real.  There are graphic scenes, but perhaps we needed to read it, after we were well-tuned to love the characters.  It was not a newspaper or newsman’s report.  The violence is more real than he could write it, I am sure:  A thousand times, a thousand Hassans.

I can tell you, I am going to read “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, by Hosseini, next, in which Hosseini tells his story from women’s perspectives.  I will take a break.  I am not, nor really ever will be, done with Amir and Hassan yet.  Like the story, ending with Sohrab’s dear smile:  “It was only a smile, nothing more.  It didn’t make anything all right.  Only a smile.  A tiny thing.  A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird’s flight.” (p391)

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