I see as I get older my tastes are becoming more Eastern almost against my will, but really I was always an Eastern person at heart. I jokingly told my mother the other week that I believe I was kidnapped as an infant from another country and bought here and placed with this family and that my real parents have been looking for me ever since. She told me oh yes I was her child. She knows what she had to go though having me. She said she also knows I'm her's because I resemble my dad a lot and her slightly, and that I have her character. Mom has a big heart. Her parents had big hearts and were generous and un-bigoted. They had high morals and little or no education. Grandma only got to the sixth grade. Grandpa went to school one day and hated it. He never went back. The most he could do with book learning was write his name, but he had more wisdom and goodness than a lot of educated or rich men.
My mother and I have plenty of eccentric conversations that we immensely enjoy and laugh about. Mom is excellent with sarcastic and deadly humorous one liners. We love those little moments when such as the other day I made us both an amaretto flavored cappuccino with cinnamon, and we just relaxed and talked. It's those little moments. Living in Turkey taught me to slow down and smell the roses and love the little things. I never liked the rat race here, but for a very long time this was all I knew.
Well, I'm not trying to completely copy Sei Shonagon, a Japanese court lady who live a thousand years ago. Perhaps if we could meet we might find out that we have some things in common besides writing, and perhaps we might not. Anyway, Sei wrote random thoughts, observations, and lists in her book that is a classic in Japanese literature. These writings were about her time, existence, and way of life. I don't live in medieval Japan. I'm not a Japanese noble woman. I live now in a very complicated and confusing world that moves too fast and senselessly sometimes because some very powerful, wicked, and irresponsible people are trying to make it into their image. I don't know anything really about Sei Shonagon's Heian Japan, but a glimpse of the Wikipedia page on it shows it might have have been a more easygoing, artistic, and civilized time than now.
I'm not trying to completely copy Sei Shonagon's book with this blog. I haven't even started to read it all yet. I've just scanned bits of it. But the book will be my model for writing about my time and existence. My loves and hates. I will write about beauty and madness. I will be controversial without being vulgar. I don't know why some folks always equate controversy with vulgarity. It doesn't really make you sophisticated or cool. I like realism, but just being ugly, nasty, and cheap isn't my style. The kind of controversy I'm talking about will be the truth since a lot of people don't like the truth. That's a big problem in this country. I have to really put on a mask and veil here to survive, but I get tired of it sometimes and fling them off. I will write about sweet nothings too like Sei Shonagon. I will even be kookie at times.
I like this which Sei Shonagon wrote about clouds long ago.
Clouds
I love white, purple, and black clouds, and rain clouds when they are driven by the wind. It is charming at dawn to see the dark clouds gradually turn white. I believe this has been described in a Chinese poem that says something about 'the tints that leave at dawn.'
It is moving to see a thin wisp of cloud across a very bright moon.
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