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when you save a fig tree from a storm, it is someone’s memory you are saving.
Look into each religion and creed, and you will find me there, present in every creation story, bearing witness to the ways of the humans
anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.
Trees are full of songs and we are not shy to sing them.
‘Fine, but when you are, just remember, foam love is interested in foam beauty. Sea love seeks sea beauty. And you, my heart, deserve sea love,
the past is a dark, distorted mirror. You look at it, you only see your own pain. There is no room in there for someone else’s pain.’
Sometimes family trauma skips a generation altogether and redoubles its hold on the following one. You may encounter grandchildren who silently shoulder the hurts and sufferings of their grandparents.
Peru, where tomatoes were believed to have originated, they used to call it ‘a plum thing with a navel’.
she had thought, rather than being given abstract names, a random combination of letters. A bird should be ‘a feathery thing with a song’. Or a car, ‘a metallic thing with wheels and a horn’. An island, ‘a lonely thing with water on all sides’. And love?
love ought to be called ‘a deceptive thing with heart...
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wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.
‘There are moments in life when everyone has to become a warrior of some kind. If you are a poet, you fight with your words; if you are an artist, you fight with your paintings … But you can’t say, “Sorry, I’m a poet, I’ll pass.”
He explained that five billion birds flew to Africa and north of the Mediterranean to spend the winter there and, of these, one billion were slaughtered every year. Therefore, every little bird that she saw in the sky was a survivor. Just like her.
They can fly for an impressive 2,500 miles. I have never understood why humans regard butterflies as fragile. Optimists they may be, but fragile, never!
Way too often, the first generation of survivors, the ones who had suffered the most, kept their pain close to the surface, memories like splinters lodged under their skin, some protruding, others completely invisible to the eye. Meanwhile, the second generation chose to suppress the past, both what they knew and did not know of it. In contrast, the third generation were eager to dig away and unearth silences. How strange that in families scarred by wars, forced displacements and acts of brutality, it was the youngest who seemed to have the oldest memory.
