To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it is like you have four legs, instead of two. That way you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.
The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi, once advised his students to write down the 3 things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously amid extremes? What if you would somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronise seemingly incongrous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing.
Bflygal's comments: And the author wanted 3 things... Eat, pray and love. But how do one immerse in the dual glories of a human life - worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence? Once again, an image popped into my mind... Ji Gong - the Living Buddha. The image of him savouring wine and meat totally undefines a traditional monk.
Kalos kai agathos (Greeks) - the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.
Dolce vita - the sweet life
Bel far niente - the beauty of doing nothing
It is a cherished Italian ideal. And you don't need to be rich in order to experience this either.
L'arte d'arrangiarsi - the art of making something out of nothing.
Anyone with a talent for happiness can do this, not only the rich.
It may seems like self-indulgence but Italians do not see it that way.
Bflygal's comments: my friend spent a few months in Japan before heading to UK for studies. And I remember how I strongly encouraged her to do so too. On hindsight, she probably could write a book on it too haha. Another friend of mine is now happily enjoying life in UK on a work-holiday visa. (Sigh I should have applied with her that time if I know what fate befalls on me.. but then on second thoughts... I will come to that later.. ) As for myself, having played for the past 5 months in Singapore, I guess I can still continue playing. Anyway I think I am destined to go Italy with my parents (that's the second thoughts), just felt so. After that, I hope that my heart will take control and lead me on the right path.
So be lonely Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human existence. But never again use another person's body and emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
Romans not giving her second looks. When
she was 19, she was constantly harassed. While it is certainly nice of course, to not get pawed by a disgusting stranger on the bus, one does have femine pride, and one must wonder, what has changed here? Is it me? Or is it them?
Bflygal's comments: Back from Italy and this post is still in draft mode haha. Anyway I wasn't harassed either but then, I'm not carino enough so that explains.
Pizzeria da Michele in Naples has Italy's best pizza, and Italy has the best pizza in the world. Thus to infer, Pizzeria da Michele has the world's best pizza.
Bflygal's comments: pity I did not have a chance to visit.
Piazza della Republica - fountain of bodacious naked nymphs
Bflygal's comments: I might have visited the place but did not find the said fountains.
I still can't say whether I will ever want children. I was so astonished to find that I did not want them at thity, the remembrance of that surprise cautions me against placing any bets on how I will feel at forty. I can only say how I feel now - grateful to be on my own.
Virginia Woolf wrote
Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition, and order where 'all is correct.'
But on the other side of that sword, if you are crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, 'all is confusion'. Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman,but you can bet it will also be more perilous.
Bflygal's comments: and I admit I want to cross the sword...
It is better to live your destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
- Bhagauad Gita, that ancient Indian yoga teacher
Wary of the danger that if I drift around this world randomly for too long, I may someday become the Family Flaker.
Do you believe that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. And if your personal word does not match the city, then you don't really belong there.
Rome: sex
Vatican: power
NYC: achieve
LA: succeed
Stockholm: conform
Naples: fight
What is the autho's personal word?
Family,
Depression
Seek? Or hide?
In Italy, it had been pleasure.
Anyway, I picked up some Italian words from the book...
HAttraversiamo - let's cross the street. A word the author seems to fell in love. Probably the journey of crossing appeals to her.
Parla come magni - speak the way you eat. In other words keep your language simple and direct.
Sei una trottola
You are a spinning top
Carina: cute
Grazie mille: thousands thanks
Goethe says without seeing Sicily, one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is.
Bflygal's comments: I must schedule a second visit to Italy - Sicily to see what Italy is then haha. Maybe a Greece-Sicily.
No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws, when citizens do nothin but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.- Plato
Of course one cannot live life like this forever. To learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than it pleases your ear to hear it. To nap in a garden, in a path of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain, and then do it again the next day. Real life and wars and mortality will interfere eventually.
Bflygal's comments: Sadly. I would love to exchange anything for the freedom I have now to last eternally... No wonder 自由价更高.
Next scene shifted to Pray - Yoga - India.
Om
Na
Mah
Shi
Va
Ya
Om Namah Shivaya
I honour the divinity that resides within me.
Yoga in sanskirt can be translated as union between:
Mind and body
Individual and her God
Our thoughts and the source of our thoughts.
Yoga can means trying to find God through mediation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence.
Imbalance: Taoist
Ignorance: Buddahism
Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God
Juedo-Christian attributes all our sufferings to original sin
Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the cllash between our natural drives and civilixation's needs.
The yogis, however, say that human discontenment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognise our deeper divine caracter. We don't realise that somewhere within us all, there exists a supreme self who is eternally at peace. That Supreme self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realise this truth, say the Yogis, you'll always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philioopher Epictetus: You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your non-stop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yoursel and your surrounding with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.
Bflygal's comments: I haven't been doing yoga for years since I left my 1st perm job...
Our whole business therefore in this life, write Saint Augustine rather logically, is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.
Guru - 2 sanskirt syllables
1) darkness
2) light
Out of darkness into light
The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants iis quietness. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go.
A true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everyting that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can shape your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your wall and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mate, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you and then they leave.
Bflygal's comments: and then.. They leave...
Look for God,
Like a man with his head on fire,
Looking for water.
If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it is working on you. This is what the Gurugita does. It burns away the ego, turns you into pure ash.
If faith is rational, it wouldn't be by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face first and full speed into the dark. If we truly know all the answers in advance, as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be a prudent insurance policy.
Poor man who goes to church everyday and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging
Dear saint, please, please, please give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the ecasperated statue comes to life, look down at the begging man and says in weary disguise,
My son, please, please, please buy a ticket.
Bflygal comments: Purely for humour. No offense intended. And beneath the humour lies a saying I strongly advocate - "God helps those who help themselves."
Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation but cannot even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half of the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well considered intention.
God dwells within you, as you.
We all seem to get these ideas that, in order to be sacred, we have to make sure some massive, dramatic change of character, that we hear to renounce our individuality.
Antenvasin: one who lives at the border. In between. Lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked towards the unknown. And he was a scholar.
Bflygal's comments: this is the author's personal word and I quite like this word.
The hub of calmness - that's your heart. That's where God lives within you, so stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep walking back to that center and you will always find peace.
This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
Karma: recycle back to the earth again in another form in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted the last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void.
Bflygal's comments: I strongly believe in this theory.
7 places up to Heaven - 7 happy places
7 places down to Hell - 7 sad places
Universe is a circle. Go up, go down, is the same at the end. If it is same in the end, it is better to be happy on the journey.
Bflygal's comments: haha a good one. Which is why I always say I'm heading towards the path of heaven :)
And you do realise I did not comment much on Love. I don't deny that Love is an absolute necessity in the world because "Make Love not War". But either I do not possess much interest in the Love that the author talks about or, like some reviews mentioned, the author did have a weak ending towards the last section. However I believed I learnt lots from her for the first two-thirds of the book and thus it has been a pleasure to read the book. Now to wait for the movie... and Julia Roberts *anticipation in glee*.
p/s: In between my Italiano posts.. decided to post this up due to my latest artwork. If I'm hardworking, I hope to change my artwork monthly. A big IF...
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