random thoughts

On 'The Last Samurai'.

The shame of defeat… no mind, one mind… no understanding…
Something new and old together makes up the beautiful…

Finding the blossom as perfect…
Together, we will let him listen to us…

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Elizabeth Browning said, ‘how do I love thee, let me count the way...’ but I say, ‘why do I love thee, can I ever count the ways?’

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When fate tells the inevitable. When the verdict says everything you never dreamt of ever hearing. Just when the impossible and nonexistent suddenly becomes real right at your face. Just when the time for confronting your greatest fear has finally arrived.

Onesimus said it very clearly. What could be harsher than freedom being taken from you? What can be harder than being stripped of your capacity to love and be loved? What can be more inhumane than being separated from your love, your very life? What lies ahead?

Separated

They were gripped with such deep sense of being different and set apart from that which is acceptable. They simply are unusual if not fully peculiar. It sprang from that belief of an identity that is separated from the ordinary and familiar. It is that separation of east and west, land and sky, heaven and earth, black and white, good and bad, and nothing else. A separation in all that matters in life here and now, there and then. An all of life difference.

A different worldview is worth looking at to begin with. How about a worldview on music? Music so they thought must be for an ultimate end. An end who is God, an intention that is worship, a form that is song and poetry.

Praise and worship. Quaker worship.

Musings of a Traveler

So they say that life is a journey… a journey of a thousand miles that may have started with a single step as Lao Tzu put it. A journey along many roads and options and that somewhere a fork would require a choice. One that is called as best. One that is seemingly right and good. The path towards the desirable if not the ultimately desired one.

Many roads. Many forks. Too many choices. Too many errors. And not a few are extremely costly if not totally life-threatening.

As usual, I’m on the road again. Walking, striding, at times gliding and going with the flow. But many times, I found myself going against the flow. This is a great time to exercise the soul. Many times, I do run. Run after life and run against the undesirable. This one is truly strenuous to a point of exhausting the very life in me. There are great demands beyond what I can give. That’s why a regular recharging is essential. A regular stopover, maybe a pause to inhale and exhale. A time to ponder on enduring and persevering. A moment to stop and gaze at the flowers. A moment to be grateful for the bees and the butterflies.

There are rocky roads and steep ones. There are the inevitably high climbs and lowest of the lows. And even the valley of the shadow of death. There are the necessary pains and the unavoidable grief. There are mourning and goodbyes. As well as hellos and how-are-yous. There are grave stumble and rising up to go on and stay in the journey.

But there are angels and strangers along the way, too. Helps abound in many forms, sizes, colors and faces. Faces even without names but much the same with big hearts. Hearts that are more significant than the names. But there are those unscrupulous strangers, too. Apparently, they seem to abound more than the angels. Yet, in the end, each encounter is necessary. Each heart and face is part of the landscape. Each experience is nothing more than essential. Ultimately one sees not the necessity of having new landscape, but simply having new eyes to see.

But the only path I’ve found worth the life in me is the path of obedience. The ultimate surrender and life!