(One of my favorite books when I was a little girl and still, today. The Velveteen Rabbit.)
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
“The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
I was downtown this morning running some errands in the Pearl district and couldn’t stop myself from wandering into Powell’s Books AKA heaven.It’s a whole city block worth of books, several floors, levels, color coded rooms-thousands and thousands of books. I love going in there. The downfall, I always buy something regardless of how bleak my current financial situation is and somehow hours pass as I wander through the rooms, picking up random books and reading excerpts from every book I fancy. I get lost in the world of books. I think in another life I would be someone who holes up to read in a big sunny chair all day every day. My current reading habits are more along the lines of reading four or five books at any given time and sometimes finishing them months of years later. It’s not an effective process in slightest, but it’s the truth.
At one point I think I was holding a stack of ten books. I don’t have money for ten books, so I plopped down on the hardwood floor to read some more excerpts and narrow it down. I ended up buying On the Road by Jack Kerouac and The Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen. Here are the excerpts that sealed the deal for me.
From Kerouac,
“He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it, and he knew I knew, but I didn’t care and we got along fine- no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.”
“Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare”
(This is one of my favorite quotes-however; I didn’t know it was from this book until I read it on the pages.)
“Then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
And from Nouwen,
“Love Deeply. Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die. Your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain the comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.”
Good words, good words. Now if I could pull myself away from reading these new treasures and start reading my textbooks for school, I’ll be back in business.
“Our day–to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.”
I’ve been reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and fell in love with this passage. It got me thinking about coincidences or serendipitous events in our lives, those that we notice and those that pass us by without a guise or rarity. I lack an eye for coincidence or fateful moments until after the fact. Maybe it’s growing knowledge and perspective allowing me to look back on events and point out particular fortuities previously unfolded in time. Kundera writes later, “It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.” How true, if we had eyes to see each moment of serendipity, we would become more aware of the delicate weavings of our story and the stories of those around us. In those moments, each would find incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only
“But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.”
I loved this. As a bit of a music junkie, I am incredibly influenced by music and it’s a rarity to find me living in silence. It is the soundtrack to my life. I’ve always wanted to make playlists for a living and since that job isn’t so much knocking on my door, I volunteer my time making my own life playlists as well as the playlists for several friends. Mixed tapes and CDs were always my favorite gifts, with homemade cookies, too. I’m getting side-tracked here…I’m not entirely sure where I’m even going with this but I just know that I am highly influenced by music. Songs can take us back to a time and a place of joy or sorrow and I love its power to do that.
Whenever I hear, “sea breeze” by Tyrone Wells I immediately find myself back at the University of Washington on a sunny spring day, sitting at a table in the HUB completely unaware of everything going on around me and utterly mesmerized by his voice and melody. I skipped class that day to listen to him play. Whenever I hear that song, I find my insides fluttering just as they did years ago. In another moment, I recall standing with my sister-in-law Lisa, in the crowded Crocodile Café in Seattle listening to Rocky Votolato belt out “Montana” for the first time. Goose bumps greet my arms as I relive the moment. Every time I hear those songs, I experience the beauty of those moments, and that is such a cool thing.
