The beginning of love…

Sonder

Sonder – n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Winter

“Winter is the time for comfort,

for good food and warmth,

for the touch of a friendly hand

and for a talk beside the fire:

it is the time for home.”

~Edith Sitwell

How Did I Know?

I gave a little boy a Christmas present today of a pair of camouflage gloves.  He LOVES camouflage, so he put them on right away.  When he realized they fit him perfectly, he was totally amazed.  Immediately he began inspecting the package and when he saw they were a youth size, he looked at me dumbfounded and said, “HOW DID YOU KNOW I WEAR A YOUTH SIZE??”

Believing in Santa

In my elementary school today, the kids were watching The Polar Express while they had an ice cream party for getting their multiplication tables.  During the course of this party, there was a lot of talk about Santa Claus, including honest-to-goodness elementary-style POLLS of believers to non-believers.

Later on, one of my favorite kids (who has Asberger’s, or so it is called for the time being) is sitting there munching on his ice cream and says to me…

Boy:  ”Miss Eva, do you believe in Santa Claus?”

Me:  ”Yes!  Of course!”

Boy:  ”Me too.  I think [Bobby] does too…”

He paused for a moment, looking at his ice cream, and then said with conviction…

“Me, you, and Bobby… we just never stop believing.”

 

 

Advice for a Writer and Everyone Too

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

~ Ernest Hemingway

Sing Your Death Song

‎”When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.”

- Cheif Tecumseh

Imperfect We

‎”The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect,

[she] becomes an adolescent;

the day [she] forgives them, [she] becomes an adult;

the day [she] forgives herself, [she] becomes wise.”

- Alden Nowlan

We Learn Through What We Love

“Each time I hear
of some new passion, I feel gratitude
at one more instance of the many ways
we learn through what we love to love the world –
which might be all that we are here to do.”

- Julia Alvarez, from “Aficionados,” The Woman I Kept to Myself

For What It’s Worth