Random

Chinese chicken salad @ a gathering – In Japan considered bad luck to stick chop sticks into mounds of food servings but here’s it’s stuck to the side of the box so … not being superstitious.  Rather think it’s a super cute way to dish out this kind of salad.

Farmer’s Market scene …Fall season has arrived.

It’s been a troubled few weeks.  Whether you believe or not, I believe in this scientific reporting/findings.  This.  I also believe a mother, a wife, a professor can be so brave to risk her and family’s safety to speak the truth because anger and fear can move you. And so all the more afraid and yet, to realize how some people just don’t see things the way you do is stressful and a cause of frustrations and great deal of anger … I was reminded of this poem last two weeks.  :

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:

For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. 
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open. 

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place, 
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.
― John O’Donohue