Post Ashara 1437
We just got back from Houston Ashara 1437.
Still reeling. Processing my feelings. Trying to absorb this incredible experience.
Hectic, chaotic, exhausting, amazing, beautiful.
We stayed with friends who are like dear family. And my parents stayed with us for a few days too.
I got to attend waaz daily with someone who is my dear bhen. We got deedar. We got qadmbosi. We got nazar. I attended my R2S meetings and there I got to connect with new people and old friends - all wonderful people. We went to a ziyafat where such intense and surreal and beautiful things happened that I haven't yet been able to journal about them.
And the waaz. The daily, incredibly rich, metaphor-filled, enlightening, reassuring, encouraging waaz, which charged our batteries and renewed our strength and readied us for the year ahead. The best new year's resolution one can make at the beginning of moharram, the first month of the year, is to spend the following first month of the new year exactly the same way. Letting these waaz envelop us.
We are lucky, blessed. Alhamdolillah.
I think the feeling of renewal and recharging has trickled into other aspects of my life too. I am noticing that as I read, I am picking out gems the way I used to, writing them down- I haven't done this for years, since I had kids and my leisure time diminished. I still read constantly, but I don't have the luxury anymore of easily transcribing the gems into my journal or this blog.
But let me try to get back into that.
I am reading "The Little Paris Bookshop" at the moment. Two gems I came across so far:
"Some stars had seen the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals; they had seen the pyramids rise and Columbus discover America. For them, the earth was one more island world in the immeasurable ocean of outer space, its inhabitants microscopically small."
"Perdu suspected that these small children, listening with eyes wide and in rapt concentration, would one day grow up to need reading, with its accompanying sense of wonder and the feeling of having a film running inside your head, as much as they needed air to breathe."
Still reeling. Processing my feelings. Trying to absorb this incredible experience.
Hectic, chaotic, exhausting, amazing, beautiful.
We stayed with friends who are like dear family. And my parents stayed with us for a few days too.
I got to attend waaz daily with someone who is my dear bhen. We got deedar. We got qadmbosi. We got nazar. I attended my R2S meetings and there I got to connect with new people and old friends - all wonderful people. We went to a ziyafat where such intense and surreal and beautiful things happened that I haven't yet been able to journal about them.
And the waaz. The daily, incredibly rich, metaphor-filled, enlightening, reassuring, encouraging waaz, which charged our batteries and renewed our strength and readied us for the year ahead. The best new year's resolution one can make at the beginning of moharram, the first month of the year, is to spend the following first month of the new year exactly the same way. Letting these waaz envelop us.
We are lucky, blessed. Alhamdolillah.
I think the feeling of renewal and recharging has trickled into other aspects of my life too. I am noticing that as I read, I am picking out gems the way I used to, writing them down- I haven't done this for years, since I had kids and my leisure time diminished. I still read constantly, but I don't have the luxury anymore of easily transcribing the gems into my journal or this blog.
But let me try to get back into that.
I am reading "The Little Paris Bookshop" at the moment. Two gems I came across so far:
"Some stars had seen the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals; they had seen the pyramids rise and Columbus discover America. For them, the earth was one more island world in the immeasurable ocean of outer space, its inhabitants microscopically small."
"Perdu suspected that these small children, listening with eyes wide and in rapt concentration, would one day grow up to need reading, with its accompanying sense of wonder and the feeling of having a film running inside your head, as much as they needed air to breathe."
Labels: beautiful words, faith, family, moula, wonder, writing
...Natural is the static