Lady Breeze

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at, You can let them look at you. But do not mistake eyes for hands, Or windows for mirrors. Let them see what a woman looks like. They may not have ever seen one before. If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch, You can let them touch you. Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for. Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwich, a Pulitzer, another woman – But their hands found you first. Do not mistake yourself for a guardian, or a muse, or a promise, or a victim or a snack. You are a woman – Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat You are not made of metaphors, Not apologies, not excuses. If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold, You can let them hold you. All day they practice keeping their bodies upright. Even after all this evolving it still feels unnatural, Still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine. Only some men will want to learn what it feels like to curl themselves into a questi...

"When you love a woman, what do you really love in her? It will be different with different people and it will be different at different times. If love really g rows, this is the way: first you fall in love with the woman because her body is beautiful. That is the first available beauty - her face, her eyes, her proportion, her elegance, her dancing, pulsating energy. Her body is beautiful. That is the first approach. You fall in love. Then after a few days you start going deeper into the woman. You start loving her heart. Now a far more beautiful revelation is coming to you. The body becomes secondary; the heart becomes primary. A new vision has arisen, a new peak. If you go on loving the woman, sooner or later you will find there are peaks beyond peaks, depths beyond depths. Then you start loving the soul of the woman. Then it is not only her heart - now that has become secondary. Now it is the very person, the very presence, the very radiance, the aliveness, that unknown p...

In the early 1980s Amitav Ghosh was living in rural Egypt, engaged in field world for his social anthropology doctorate. In this book Ghosh plaits together three different stories: that of his time living in two Egyptian villages, his return to the villages eight years later and the life of 12th century North African Jewish merchant Ben Yiju and his Indian `slave' (actually more of a business associate) Bomma. Ghosh discovered the Ben Yiju story by examining documents from the massive haul found in the Geniza (synagogue document repository) of the Palestinian synagogue in the Egyptian town of Fustat. The documents were acquired by Cambridge University, where Ghosh tracked them down. Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating re...

'I know about these things,' said Zaghloul. 'But how could you know? Who was it who told you?' 'I've seen the way you stare at her,' said Zaghloul. '(...) If you're not careful, you'll find yourself saying "I'm in love," like a student or a college-boy. Watch what you're doing and don't forget you're a fellah: "love" is not for people like us.' (...) 'What do you mean?' I asked Zaghloul. 'Why can't a fellah fall in love?' 'For us it only leads to trouble,' said Zaghloul. 'Love is for students and mowazzafeen and city people; they think about it all the time, just like they think of football. For us it's different; it's better not to think of it.' (...) 'How do you know, ya Zaghloul?' said [Eid]. 'Did it ever happen to you?' 'Something happened to me once,' Zaghloul said quietly... Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land

"Perhaps the most elusive aspect of medieval slavery is its role as spiritual metaphor, as an instrument of the religious imagination. In south India, among the pietist and fiercely egalitarian Vachanakara saint-poets of Bomma's own lifetime, for example, slavery was often used as an image to represent the devotee's quest for God: through the transforming power of metaphor the poets became their Lord's servants and lovers, androgynous in their longing; slaves, searching for t heir master with a passion that dissolved selfhood, wealth, caste and gender, indeed, difference itself. In their poetry it was slavery that was the paradoxical embodiment of perfect freedom; the image that represented the very notion of relationship, of human bonds, as well the possibility of their transcendence. This imagery would not have been unfamiliar to Ben Yiju. He and his friends were all orthodox, observant Jews, strongly aware of their distinctive religious identity. But they were ...

We invented a mountain of superfluous needs. You have to keep buying, throwing away…  It’s our lives we are squandering.  When I buy something, or when you buy it, we’re not paying with money.  We’re paying with the time from our lives we had to spend to earn that money. The difference is that you can’t buy life. Life just goes by.  And it’s terrible to waste your life, losing your freedom.  -  Wisdom from José Mujica