Suzy Valtsioti's Blog, page 3
November 14, 2023
a cup of coffee and a good book…
Sometimes we search for a book that ‘keeps’ you reading…the way we look for a good series to watch and end up wanting to binge watch a whole season’s worth of episodes!
Good Books, like good series/movies, are meant to be revisited. They are comfort food- serving their purpose as escapist, relaxing, amusing, or even to provide a mysterious twist…
I have many favorite books that I would recommend….One that comes to mind right now, since I am in a “bookish” mood is Make Way for Lucia by E.F. Benson.
The book is actually a collection of a six book series. The book provocatively paints an accurate behind the scenes picture of an era long gone…It takes place in the English countryside in a snobbish, pretentious and socially rabid environment.
Lucia is quite ‘a character’. She is amusing and amusingly ‘distinctive’ in her ways.
Lucia and Miss Mapp vie for their place as the ‘queens’ of society…they seek to be the dominant figurehead of their own small, hypocritical, vain world… But even though their ‘behavior’ and situations are appalling, Benson presents them in such a way that the reader can’t help but laugh. The characters are annoying, yet addictive!
It is this satirical story telling that makes the book a fun read…
“With regard to religion, finally, it may be briefly said that she believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia. For she had no doubts whatever as to the existence of either; and she went to church on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in the zoological gardens; for kangaroos came from Australia.”
― E.F. Benson, Queen Lucia
Make Way for Lucia is one of my all time favorites…I have many more and I will post them too, when the mood arises…to spread the joy and share the vibe…lol…..
what are your favorite books?Feel free to share them with us in the comments!
[image error]Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Both Sides…two sides (?)
[image error]a family united. a family divided. a family together. a family separated. each time one looks at “Both Sides”, they see a different story. different chemistry. different relationships. different reasons. different expressions. different times periods, different ages, different experiences, different points of view. just like life. just like families. just like people…ever changing,
Suzy Valtsioti
each moment passes and nothing remains the same.
November 13, 2023
The Courage to be Yourself…an excerpt from “The Marginalian”.
this fascinating article continues with Virginia Woolf’s ‘take’ on the soul….
“It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to the quantum foam.
The best shorthand we have for it is soul.” …
The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul
BY MARIA POPOVA
Contemplating the soul — that most private part of us — as “so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public,” she writes:
Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he decreed to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it. Woolf writes:
The man* who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul
BY MARIA POPOVA
November 12, 2023
Tangled Tales…a glitch of sorts…
Enjoy moments of ‘art’? Would you enjoy seeing a bit more creative arts?Aside from the culture tid bits here on “aesthete”, I also post original ‘artful moments’ fresh from my art studio and writer’s desk at ‘Suzy Valtsioti’. That blog is my personal gallery and “workspace”. Please visit and follow! I would be honored!.namaste. follow “Suzy Valtsioti”.
suzy-valtsioti.comHope to see you there!
November 11, 2023
The Cycle of Life.
Cycle of Life
Salt of the earth.the earth.salt.salt of the sea.the sea.tides.ebbing and flowing.tugged by the moon the moon. waxing and waningtugging fertility.fertility.shedding and flowering.a fetus.floating and nestling.waiting.for the wave.the wave. rising and gushingriding the baby to shore.the baby.emerging.out from the water.onto the earth.bearing the salt.made of the water.the new salt of the earth. Salt of the earth…(The Cycle of Life, from Capturing the Moment - A Collection, Suzy Valtsioti) If you would like more artful moments delivered straight to your inbox, please subscribe!bits of murakami, human cultures and the musical spheres of the planets…from the writer’s desk…
Today’s Perusing…for more arts & letters, notes, blurbs and original work:
Today’s Perusing…
photo credits: Photo by Pramuk Perera on Unsplash
from Cultural Preservation in the Digital Age
“…A global monoculture would be terribly boring. It is our diversity of cultures and all the elements that make them up that weaves the stunning tapestry of humanity.”
Cultural Preservation in the Digital Age
The ‘Music of the Spheres’[image error]from Harmonices Mundi, Johannes Keppler 1619If you would like more artful moments delivered straight to your inbox, please subscribe!“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
November 10, 2023
Torn Roots.
She wanted to unleash those emotions that were roaring inside of her, caged and pacing about.
There was anger. There was defiance. There was a sense of knowing things…but she wasn’t sure what exactly had triggered these emotions.
But there was also this peaceful yet nagging notion that would trickle down her thoughts…that would meander and wind its way through her mind.
This notion was old…ancient, a relic of a very distant past. It was a real part of her, even though she knew that it contained things that she didn’t understand.
This notion wasn’t made of words…it was a mosaic piece that hung in her mind. She would see it reflect the light, and she would see it casting shadows…
The bits and pieces on this mosaic fragment where the stories, the experiences, the lifetimes, the pain, the joy, the battles, the victories, the losses, the everyday sighs and smiles of her ancestors…
There it was…hanging…elaborate..ancient…real…a gift…a legacy…a birthright…in her mind…
so visible to her mind’s eye – but she couldn’t put any of this image into words. she couldn’t begin to describe the emotions it would trigger.
Those were her roots. Those were the secrets of the distant past…those were her legacy…and she knew every story, every detail, she felt every emotion stored in that mosaic…but she couldn’t put them into words.
And those emotions stored in the mosaic swelled. And they needed to be freed. Justice needed to be served…but how…
where these her feelings or theirs? where these handed down through the ages?where they always there? is she looking for an excuse to express them?
[image error] If you would like more artful moments delivered straight to your inbox, please subscribe!… her mind sometimes would feel the anguish of her ancestors and her mind sometimes would feel the joy they passed down…through the ages…in that unknown genetic code that feeds the roots of that tree… keeping that tree flourishing…that ancient family tree that we can’t see….
Suzy Valtsioti
“eye see”, she said…nodding her head….
we look, we observe, we notice, we gaze, we stare…but do we ‘see’?
[image error][image error][image error]If you would like more artful moments delivered straight to your inbox, please subscribe!Suzy Valtsioti's Blog
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