Le Petit Prince.. MY Petit Prince.

Letting go of people is hard for me. I think it is hard, not so much in death as it is hard when I know they are out there but I can never reach out to them or know what is happening on their planet. I think the movie violated this first rule of letting go. The colour of the wheat fields was important to me. The anxiety and sadness of not knowing what happened to the little prince was important to me. Not being able to make second contact was important to me. Not knowing the end of his journey and having to live with the mystery of the sheep's muzzle missing its strap.. it gave me a way to solve a puzzle in my head. It gave me a solution to my problem. The movie took that away from me all over again.

" 'And when you're consoled (everyone eventually is consoled), you'll be glad you've known me. You'll always be my friend. You'll feel like laughing with me. And you'll open your window sometimes just for the fun of it.. And your friends will be amazed to see you laughing while you're looking up at the sky. Then you'll tell them, "Yes, it's the stars; they always make me laugh!" And they'll think you're crazy. It'll be a nasty trick I played on you..' "

They don't need to understand my craziness. I can laugh and never solve my laughter for their understanding. I can be on the wrong end of this particular nasty trick.. which will actually be just the right end for me.

I imagine the movie was maybe made by a happier person. Someone who was not eternally touched by the sadness of the state of limbo someone leaves you in when you have been tamed by them. The joy of sorrow. The consolation in sadness within sadness itself. The art of laughing with yourself just by memory.
The strength of a bond made by the sound of a pulley or the pouring of water..
Or the colour of the wheat fields..
Or the shape of a mountain..
Or the wrinkle of an eye..
Or the smell of cinnamon in tea..

I found my consolation in the smell of cinnamon in my tea after reading this book. The movie was too happy and giggly. Life has not been so giggly. The book was deeper and happily sad. Being ok with sadness is essential. Children can be sad too. The sadness of a child is much greater than that of an adult. Adults have the distraction of a bigger plan. Children have now. It is one moment for the rest of your life. But when a child is consoled, s/he is consoled completely. It is us adults who need more reason and constant reminder. This book is my constant reminder into consolation. The constant reminder to sometimes not look for further consolation. The reminder to be consoled for the sake of the colour of the wheat fields. For the sake of that cinnamon in my tea.

Can't disconnect

"How do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Hear what I'm thinking."
"Well.. there's two things
One.. years of practice.. and two.. I think it must be because of that time when I tied my soul to yours.."

Men Don't Cry

I heard quite often "men don't cry"
Though no one ever told me why
So when I fell and skinned a knee
No one came to comfort me.

As I grew to reasoned years
I learned to stifle any tears
Through "Be a big boy" it began
Quite soon I learned to "be a man".

Then one long night I stood nearby
And helplessly watched my son die
And quickly found to my surprise
That all the tearless talk was lies

And still I cry and have no shame
I cannot play that "big boy" game
And openly, without remorse
I let my sorrow take its course.

So those of you who can't abide
A man you've seen whose often cried
Reach out to him with all your heart
As one whose life's been torn apart.

[Ken Falk]

Where does wisdom come from?

Even though the bench had a plank missing from the base, but when you sat on it you couldn't feel it missing. The wood was a very dark brown. The frame of the bench was made of a very very heavy kind of iron. Very solid. Really heavy, but there was a leafy design in the part on which your arm rests, which would have given it a really artistic look when it was new. There were splatters of white paint all over it, as if it had been sitting under something which had been painted white and the bench was utterly neglected through the whole process as if it wasn't there at all. I imagine later someone removed it from the freshly polished neat and clean place and placed this worn out 'thing' where I found it, under a very old, very huge, very shady tree. The tree had millions of clusters of leaves of a very very dark, almost blackish leaves. Maybe emeralds were black in some world. The grass that must have grown in a time was long, dry and faded under the wood and iron. I was only in F-9 Park, Islamabad, but it seemed like a tiny patch of forgotten land, where I spent some 40 wonderful minutes imagining what the tree or the bench might have seen to become so wise :)

Vote for Imran Yuan?

So yesterday I decided I need to improve two things. My Urdu and my general knowledge on post-khulafa Islamic History. To do that I started reading Novels by Naseem Hijazi. There is one called 'Akhri Chataan'. Roughly it means something like 'The Last Mountain'. Anyway, so I started reading it and there came the mention of Mongols and Genghis Khan. It didn't have much detail so I started reading on them on the internet and whoa! I thought if Tamerlane [Temur Lang] was a descendant of Genghis Khan via Kublai Khan, and if Kublai Khan named The Yuan Dynasty, and if the Mughal Empire was a descendant of the Mongol Empire, then maybe.. just MAYBE, our Khan brothers are actually descendants of the Yuans!! So, then that makes Imran Khan... Imran YUAN!!

Wow.. I'm such a genius! *sigh*

The Yuckiest Recipe

This ridiculously yucky thing called a papaya leaf extract is kind of saving my life so I thought I should post how to make it as a lot of people were asking me about it :) For those who don't know what it does.. it stops your platelet count to drastically go down. So, here goes..

First you need two really big, fresh papaya leaves. I put a teaspoon in the middle of one just to let you see how big it is.

One leaf should be big enough to give you a full tablespoon of extract. The doze is two tablespoon fulls a day. If the leaves are smaller you should take more than two.

You only want the leafy part. No stem or sap. The sap is very milky and when you break the stem away it will ooze out. You should wash it away. I'm not sure why because all it really contains is papain but that's what I have been told. You can decide for yourself though. [Or you can research :)] This is what the sap looks like:



Once you have the stem removed



you should wash them thoroughly. I prefer to partly break it upbefore I wash. It makes the job easier :)



Now you need a mortar and pestle.



Break up the leaves further. Leave out the fatter stemmy parts. Put them in the mortar and pestle and pound them to a mush.




Take a bowl and put a clean cotton fabric piece on it. Put the mush in the bowl over the cloth.



Now gather the cloth and squeeze the mush so that the extract comes out into the bowl. I didn't have help so I was taking the pictures myself so I couldn't take a picture while squeezing, but this is what the cloth with the mush looked like after I had squeezed out the extract:



And this is what the extract looks like:



That's it! The yuckiest recipe ready to drink! Oh, and it works great with vitamin C :) If you have low platelets you also want to take a lot of calcium :) Happy platelet growing!

Lazy Sunday

Happy Mothers' Day to meeee :D