Why love? Because.

I brought two books with me to Wales: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo.

This is my first time reading Bradbury’s book. It’s fantastically written. I aspire to describe the way he does, to spin so many words together without producing a knotted incoherency. I was just reading before bed, and I think I’ve stumbled on my favorite passage in the book:

What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love a woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

But… how to say it?

“Look,” he tried “put too men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night, like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory. So, all men have one business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell.”

❤ Salma

Spread Your Wings

Wednesday, January 20th

I’m leaving tonight!  When I graduated middle school, a teacher, whom I was close to, gave me a card with a moving quote on the cover. It’s one of the many cards that I’m taking with me to put around my Welsh dorm room. You can never surround yourself with too much love.
The quote was appropriate for the experience of leaving a private middle school and beginning public high school. Now, it applies to leaving the country I grew up in for another.

When you come to the edge
of all the light you know,
and are about to step off
into the darkness of the unknown,
faith is knowing one of two things
will happen: There will be
something solid to stand on
or you will be taught how to fly.
– Barbara J. Winter