dear alby

By SH and SC


So long, fair Alby. Godspeed.
I will cherish our moments of honesty and truth.
May your road be safe from thorns.
May the wind be always under your sail.

Your heart belongs to someone else.
Indeed, your heart does not belong to me.
She is your true north and not I.
May you find favor in the eyes of your true love, Alby.
May the stars witness your union and be glad.

You bewitched me but for a moment
I now let you go.

I surrender any claim on you
"Why do the white doves call?”
They call for their long lost lover.

Dear Alby, the moments will not be forgotten,
they will be cherished.
On that mist-filled night, when we prayed,
I sensed a connection
And the heavens affirm with sounds of trumpets.
And the angels laugh
With glee and benevolence
A cherub sat on your shoulder and gave his best
but alas, that connection was not meant to be.

Oh how cruel a life when he, almost a lover, finds you a friend.
How cruel indeed. Cherubs know not such wicked sadness.

Your heart will be averted to another dear one.
But not without breaking a little and without a few tears wetting your pillow.
Hope will rise up in the morning
Like wings of eagles
But, at night, tears
Oh, that I could forsake the memory of you.
That I could carve out the place you have made in my heart.

Adieu, Alby
goodnight you lovely one, goodnight you fair one.
Adieu Alby
Adieu...

Quintessential Mom

Quintessential: representing the most perfect or typical example of quality of class - and that is who she is, my mother.

  Gardening the front yard at my apt in Israel. 

April was a big month for me and my mother was there with, for, me all the way. Moms, you got to give them credit for their wisdom, experience and adaptability. They seem to become more beautiful every year. Have you noticed? After every cold and stormy season, they come back even more alive and more vibrant than the year before. You see it in their smiles and you hear in their laughters. 

There is something every special about mothers, the glue that holds the world together. My mother, the one person I know who took life as it is and lived it freely and daringly - with style. My role model and my best friend. Thank you for your profound dedication and love for your children.  

 Our neighbor dog, Paco, who visited my mother everyday when she stayed with me in Israel. 

treats and favors

The Cocktail Party (1949)
By TS Eliot

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.

Resign yourself to be the fool you are.

You will find that you survive humiliation

And that's an experience of incalculable value.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost

The desires for all that was most dersirable,

Before you are contented with what you can desire;

Before you know what is left to be desired;

And you go on wishing that you could desire

What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand.

How could you understand what it is to feel old?

We die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember

That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

Hell is alone, the other figures in it

Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from

And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

Half the harm that is done in this world

Is due to people who want to feel important.

They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.

Or they do not see it, or they justify it

Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle

To think well of themselves.

There are several symptoms

Which must occur together, and to a marked degree,

To qualify a patient for my sanitorium:

And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.

To men of a certain type

The suspicion that they are incapable of loving

Is as disturbing to their self-esteem

As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.

I should really like to think there's something wrong with me —

Because, if there isn't then there's something wrong,

Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,

With the world itself — and that's much more frightening!

Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me.

They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;

They make faces, and think they understand each other.

And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?

Can we only love

Something created in our own imaginations?

Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?

Then one is alone, and if one is alone

Then lover and beloved are equally unreal

And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

I shall be left with the inconsolable memory

Of the treasure I went into the forest to find

And never found, and which was not there

And is perhaps not anywhere? But if not anywhere

Why do I feel guilty at not having found it?

Disillusion can become itself an illusion

If we rest in it.

Two people who know they do not understand each other,

Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them.

There is another way, if you have the courage.

The first I could describe in familiar terms

Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it,

Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us.

The second is unknown, and so requires faith —

The kind of faith that issues from despair.

The destination cannot be described;

You will know very little until you get there;

You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession

Of what you have sought for in the wrong place.

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

If we all were judged according to the consequences

Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention

And beyond our limited understanding

Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

at 3:10am

Sirens, in the dark of the night. I'm reminded of these verses again. Oh how relevant are these words to me.

Keep me safe, O, God, for in you I take refuge.
I said to the LORD, "you are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing."
As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.
The sorrows of those will increase who run after other gods.
I will not pour out their libations of blood or take up their names on my lips.
LORD, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

I will praise the LORD, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me.
I have set the LORD always before me.
Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor will you let your Holy One see decay.
You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

lost items

to move on is to lose something.
but to not,
surely there will be no gain.
simple is what simple does.

some may say
no pain, no gain.
we are back to the beginning.
does it always have to be a struggle,
always a fight between the dark and the light?

say it ain't so.
say it ain't so.
when is it time to move on?
not just yet.
not just yet.

forget me not

Ain't nothing pretty about it, times of darkness. Those times are personal, those times are the most private. I think He meant it to be that way. May I not forget it. Recognize the wounds when the battle has finally ended and even when they are healed. They may be healed but they will always be there, just like His wounds. 

Feb 14th 2012 entry from Oswald Chambers' Utmost: 

Sometimes He puts us through the experience and discipline of darkness to teach us to hear and obey Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and He puts us into “the shadow of His hand” until we learn to hear Him (Isaiah 49:2). 

“Whatever I tell you in the dark. . .”— pay attention when He puts you into darkness, and keep your mouth closed while you are there. Are you in the dark right now in your circumstances, or in your life with He? If so, then remain quiet. If you open your mouth in the dark, you will speak while in the wrong mood— darkness is the time to listen. Don’t talk to other people about it; don’t read books to find out the reason for the darkness; just listen and obey. If you talk to other people, you cannot hear what He is saying. When you are in the dark, listen, and He will give you a very precious message for someone else once you are back in the light.

After every time of darkness, we should experience a mixture of delight and humiliation. If there is only delight, I question whether we have really heard He at all. We should experience delight for having heard He speak, but mostly humiliation for having taken so long to hear Him! Then we will exclaim, “How slow I have been to listen and understand what He has been telling me!” And yet He has been saying it for days and even weeks. But once you hear Him, He gives you the gift of humiliation, which brings a softness of heart— a gift that will always cause you to listen to God now.

it's a human thing

I love The Moth. It is a non-profit group based in NYC featuring storytelling. Individuals, famous or not, would go on stage and be given 15 some-minutes to tell a segment of their life that they think is worth telling. The topic varies from life's defining moments to the random encounters.

What is admirable about The Moth's work is that they treat storytelling like a work of art; they take it very seriously and the product is of true value. Some of these stories are rather out-of-this-world kind of tale, as if the storytellers were just vessels of these stories, people who have been chosen to deliver a message. Perhaps it is a sign that the group has outdone itself. Have they successfully attributed honor and worth to the human experience? Whatever it is they've done, I think the work is truly a beauty.

My friend Jamie once told me that one of her new year's resolutions was to become a better storyteller because her father tells the best stories. That goal of hers somehow stucked with me for years. I never really thought storytelling is something that one can work on to get better at it. Boy, how differently I think now.

Great storytellers can somehow transport the listeners to their reality. The Moth does that for me every time I give it a listen. I remember my first Moth very clearly. It was on a car ride back to Rome, at the end of a trip in Italy with friends from school; one of those late and dark February afternoons, rain sporing, beating down hard on our car windows. We were all tired and ready to head back to Israel. The drive was rough on our friend Paul, so he decided to play The Moth podcast to keep himself focus on the drive. "Welcome to The Moth Podcast and I'm Dan Kennedy...The Moth features stories told without notes, the story you are about to hear is by...". As the announcer spoke, the noise of a crowd chatting and applauding in the background, an image of a live stage performance immediately got my heart racing. As the stories took off, we just kept listening, one after the another. It was suddenly hard to stop. Some of the stories made us laugh sick to our stomachs and some kept us quiet in our thoughts. I had my hands tugged underneath my legs sitting at the edge of my seat. I remember looking out of the car window, the sky was in this deep purple color engulfing the earth beneath it. It was an image of a cold and harsh reality but I remember feeling incredibly warm inside.

I didn't grow up listening to the radio, so the podcast will have to do for me. I can just image how visceral the experience must be for the ones who grew up listening to the radio. Like reading a novel, the most skilled storytellers can make you think and feel at the same time. The most incredible thing about the entire experience is that it allows the listener the freedom to think and imagine. We live a world where thinking is really not an option but a conscious choice, therefore, when a space is given to thoughts, it is quite a precious thing. Perhaps thinking gives a person the solidarity of being alive and a sense existence. Without thinking, I don't know how a person can say that he possesses anything substantial. Without possessing something, I don't think passion can be conjured. And without passion, I don't know how a person can honestly say that he truly lived.

The best stories are the ones that make you feel that you are in on a journey with the storyteller, not only so, they are the ones that are solidly built on honesty and truth. I have a friend who likes to tell people all the time what he has been up to. At the end, we figured out that his real purpose was to make people envious of his life. For him, it was a one man show. Though selfish on his part, it was actually quite sad for him because in wanting to feel included he probably felt more alone. Some of the most incredible stories I have heard were the ones that taught me deeper truths about life and I have found meaning in them and sometimes answers. There were stories that have helped me find a part of myself that have gone unnoticed and only to be discovered through another person's experience. It is rather an incredible thing that human beings are such creatures of relevance and connection.

What is it about stories that are so incredible? It is perhaps a way to set free the boundaries that time has created to limit the human experience. I recently watched the film called 50/50. There are many ways to interpret this film but one thing I found important was the disconnection between time and the quality of human experience. Time doesn't stop for anything or for anyone. The main character battled a life-and-death situation and after all it was said and done, all the heart drenching battles to stay alive, oh he lived. His friend said to him at the end of the film, "so, what's next?". Those three words perhaps didn't mean anything to anyone but for some reason it meant something more to me. After given it more thought, it was clear to me that life is a lot about moving on, but I don't think the human heart does that so naturally. We don't do it beautifully and it is often messy. The question is: are we honest with ourselves when we don't linger on or hang on to those memories and wishing to relive them again? Perhaps storytelling is our human way to salvage the lost times. A chance to live and experience again an event that epically changed and inspired us. I think it is a primitive human desire to put value and worth in those experiences.  

I finished my Internal Medicine, Pediatric, Neurology clerkship. Spending a lot of time in the hospital now. It is nice to finally get here, yet to understand the reality of the work is quite a challenge. We live in a chaotic world. Meaninglessness is that thing, standing in the corner watching you and taunting you to believe in him. It is the easy way out. I don't have answers but just more questions. 

What sustains me is this: He reached down from on high and took hold of me. He drew me out of deep waters, and he rescued me. He brought me out into spacious place and rescued me because he delighted in me. He shall remain nameless because he is in all names. And because in the land of the dead, no tongue is pure enough to utter his name. However, because of his son who shared the father's heart, died in pain and suffering, we can say that He is our God.