Just now.

A few moments ago, I read a ReTweet on Facebook and decided to Blog about it (yes, it's all about the Internet these days!!) This is what the Tweet said:

RT @BraveKidsVoices Never let a day go by without giving your children love, affection, attention, protection, respect. Always... 

Earlier today,  I had been thinking about how often we don't really know the meaning of the word "love", although it's probably one of the most frequently used words in the English language. In every language, perhaps. I wonder what results and statistics would come out of a research study on love, and whether any corporation would fund it in the first place. 

I suspect that most of us believe that love is that wave of emotion that hits us when we look at a baby or at someone we're romantically interested in. Sadly, I have come to learn a large part of this wave is made up of chemicals designed to ensure protection or procreation! But love has to be more than that. 

What if love is not an emotion, but rather a collection of emotions? Surely respect, compassion, protection and attention - all these are part of love, not separate from it? Because if one of these is missing, how can we be telling the truth when we say, "I love you"?  

Ode to Amazon

In answer to your possible question, "Where have you been?", I have explored all options and chosen to blame Amazon.com. Of course, it's not entirely their fault that I've been away so long. But they did cause me enough of a distraction to put down my drawing pencils for quite a while.

This distraction came not because I am a bookaholic, but because of one book in particular: a how-to guide for paedophiles that Amazon published on their site recently. It disturbed me right out of my depression. The warrior in me (now a one-and-a-half-eyed warrior) woke up. And while my health won't permit me to return to full-fledged activism on the child abuse issue, my heart and my history wouldn't allow me to stay in hibernation.

So I have been doing what I can, updating Askios, (online resources on the child abuse issue), reading, writing, sometimes despairing and taking short trips back into that abyss of depression that I can't seem to erase entirely from my travel itinerary. But mostly, trying to deal with all the emotions that Amazon's attitude to the CSA issue succeeded in jarring awake.

And now I'm here.  And while I did put aside my favourite 9B pencil, I did find the time, one angry-sad evening, to pick up a pen and scribble this out:


Ode To Amazon

In our dreams, the monsters don't win.
In our dreams someone walks in.
Someone who's ready to stand up and fight,
to tell us what happened to us wasn't right.

But that's in our dreams. In the clear light of day
things tend to go in a different way.
We reach for a bottle, a pill or a knife.
We search for solutions and try to live life.

We may hide the wounds
but we can't lose the scars,
and we bleed when betrayal
mocks this pain of ours.

###

Serendipity, Sao Paulo

It was love at first sight for me. From the moment I discovered
the Internet, I was hooked. To seal the obsession, I was part
of the team that developed the launch campaign for the Internet
in Bahrain, inet for Batelco. I was one of those copywriters
who liked to believe in the products she sold, and with inet it was easy.

I could go on and on about the joys of the Internet, but for now
I'll rave about just one of them -  the way it connects us all,
around the world. Every day that I check my blog, I'm amazed -
and awed - that there are visitors from continents I may never see,
from cities and towns I have never heard of, or places whose names
bring back memories of books I have read or songs I've listened to.
Every now and then I like to google and look for the deeper connection
between myself and these places or the people who come to this blog from them.

This morning I blog-hopped over to Angela's blog in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
It was all in Spanish, but there was one little box in the top right corner,
whose contents I recognised immediately.

Se Deus e por nos,
quem sera contra nos?

It's a line from the Bible's New Testament, one that I'd heard
so often as a schoolgirl, but nothing that I've kept top of mind.
This morning, however, I was disturbed and confused about
something I'd read last night, and there were a zillion questions
bouncing around my mind. My little blog-hop to Sao Paulo
gave me the answer to them all.

Thank you, Angela, for being my connection to this.