Holy Fools

Joanne Harris has this wonderful style of delving into areas unknown, of even if they are known, talk about them does not come easily...and she turns them into lovely tales - remember Chocolat?

In this book, while telling us about how a child's mind can be changed, she writes:

'A moment comes when even the most acquiescent of them may reach a point beyond which the cartographers of the mind can map nothing more. A declaration of independence, perhaps. An affirmation of self.'

Michael Ondaatje's book

The English Patient

There are many interesting descriptions that I came across, but these word-pictures gripped me:

The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treatises quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember.

and,

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

An interesting phrase

The 'whole nine yards' is a phrase we often use without wondering where it came from. Essentially it means the same as 'the whole hog'.

There are many theories of how it may have originated - makes for interesting reading. Check out this link - it's great fun...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27477422

Wonderful reading

Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.

I particularly love the way he uses words - they are colorful, paint the picture in your mind, and yet his words are very perceptive and penetrating.

Distinction between Faith and Belief

We often use these two powerful words interchangeably. These words are powerful in that, what they represent runs deep in our veins.

Alan Watts made the distinction clear in the simplest possible way:

Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.

Faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.

Where belief clings, faith lets go. Faith is the essential virtue of a religion, provided you are not using that religion to deceive yourself.