September Sparkles: Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar
Contemplating longing ... that bittersweet state often written off as melancholy and depression ... turns out it's a gift to be cherished!
Hello, Dreamer!
I was hoping to have a new book ready for release this month, but I always seem to forget how many little things need to be done behind the scenes before a new book can make its way into your hands or e-reader.
Instead, I'll share with you a tentative cover for the new title. It's not finalized; you can see the watermark on the image. But I wanted to have something to offer in lieu of the real thing!
So, tell me! What do you think?
As to what the book is about ...
Sight is a privilege denied to everyone by law in the land of Parinara. Every child is blindfolded at birth. Even the dead are buried blindfolded. To see is an unpardonable crime, punishable by death.
Yet, fifteen-year-old Anaya indulges in a momentary curiosity and violates the law, only to find that the gift of sight comes at an exorbitant price.
To look outward, she must first lose sight of what lies inward. But therein lie the secrets that even sightlessness cannot conceal.
You don’t need eyes, or a mirror, to peer into the depths of your own soul.
The Land of No Reflection is like nothing I've written before. Yet when I was going through the manuscript to ready it for publication, I couldn't help but think that this is exactly the kind of stuff I write.
Read it, and you'll know what I mean.
Hopefully it'll be out in the stores by the time I write to you in October!
Now, on to what I've been yearning to share with you this month. This is going to be a long one, so grab a cuppa, make yourself comfortable and enjoy reading this month's missive!
I realized only this month that most of the feature photos I use at the top of the Monthly Missives are of Lake Ontario as viewed from the grounds of Paletta Mansion, an early 20th-century estate home now owned by the City of Burlington.
So much so that if I find myself there in the days leading up to the last Sunday of the month, I inevitably think of you and wish that I could somehow share with you, in whatever limited capacity, the immense beauty and serenity of that place. Hence, the photos.
This month's image was taken on one of my early morning solo walks, a luxury I enjoy on weekends or holidays when the mornings are not otherwise occupied with getting-ready-for-school busyness.
I head up New St, then down Belvenia Rd, a few steps along Lakeshore Rd, and I'm at the entrance gates to the mansion and its grounds. I run up a little slope and down a short flight of steps, and the world explodes open in front of me. Like an age-old secret revealed at long last!
The walk to this beautiful spot is as thrilling as arriving there. Every time I walk down Belvenia Rd — your typical North American tree-lined suburban street with beautiful houses set a little ways behind, their elegant front lawns maintaining distance between the sidewalk and the homes — I catch a glimpse of something rather commonplace yet mysterious.
Picture one such large house. Then, a large window on one side offering a view inside. The room is bathed in a dim, yellow light that is just as soothing as the pale darkness of new dawn surrounding it. The wall at the far end is covered by an enormous bookshelf made of a rich brown wood that gleams in the yellow light as do the spines of the countless books it holds. In front, by the window, sits an old man sipping a cup of coffee (or tea, perhaps) and reading a book.
This is all I see. And I see this for barely a second or two as I briskly walk past. As much as I'd love to stand and stare for much longer, I don't wish to alarm him by intruding his privacy. But this snapshot is imprinted in my mind. And I think to myself this guy must be in paradise!
And my heart aches with joy. It overflows with both delight and longing, such contrasting emotions. Delight at the sight of such beauty. And a longing to luxuriate in more of it, wishing it were not so fleeting, so ephemeral.
A room full of books, pregnant with the aromas of rich wood and old paper and coffee mingling in a space kept warm by the relentless efforts of a crackling fireplace, at this wobbly moment in time that separates dusk from dawn, in this liminal space where the shadows of the night cling for one last moment before they're chased away by the light of the morning.
Except ... I don't really like being in enclosed spaces for long. Give me the most elegantly furnished room, and I'd seat myself closest to the window so that I can look out.
And contrary to what most writers seem to love, I don't care much for enormous bookshelves either, not enough to put one up in my own home. I mean, the pressure of all those yet-to-be-read books would be too overwhelming for me to bear!
Yet, there is something about that scene that tugs at my heart every time I see it. I don't even go looking for that quiet house with the single lit window on the way to Paletta. It simply appears.
I do look for it on the way back, about a half-hour or so later, yearning for another glimpse of that magical sight. But by then it's gone. I can't even remember which home the window and the room belong to, and it is as if it didn't even exist. Which makes it all the more mysterious and magical ... like 12 Grimmauld Place.
(Of course, the more sensible conclusion to arrive at is that by the time I walk back, the guy has finished drinking his cuppa, set aside his book, turned off the lights and left the room to go about his day now that morning has well and truly arrived. But what's the fun in that?)
This longing—for what, exactly, I don't know—has haunted me for as long as I can remember. For years, I worried that this state of longing for something indescribable, something otherworldly, was at odds with peacefulness and contentment.
I thought, perhaps I was craving for the material manifestations of it, a magnificent library in a large well-kept house with a beautifully manicured front lawn ... and that not being able to have those things was what was filling up my heart with an ache, with desire. How could I tell the difference?
Author Susan Cain asks this question poignantly in her book, Bittersweet.
... From all these (Rumi's) poems (and indeed from all of Sufism, and from all the world's mystic traditions) came the central insight that "Longing is the core of the mystery / Longing itself brings the cure."
... I'd been reading about Buddhism as well as Sufism, and many of its teachings seemed to contradict the Sufi idea that longing is spiritually valuable.
... As one Buddhist website put it, "After a lot of training with the Buddha's teachings, we tend to recognize longing as an unproductive mind state and just move on from it to whatever is actually present."
How to square this view with Sufi poetry? Were Rumi and Buddha offering contradictory teachings? Was longing in Sufism different from what Buddhists call cravings?
Cain posed this question to a Sufi teacher named Dr. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (LVL), and this is what he said in response.
"Longing is different from craving. It's the craving of the soul. You want to go home. In our culture it's confused with depression. And it's not. There's a saying in Sufism: 'Sufism was at first heartache. Only later, it became something to write about.'"
... he describes longing not as an unhealthy craving, but as the feminine expression of love: "Like everything that is created, love has a dual nature, positive and negative, masculine and feminine. The masculine side of love is 'I love you'. Love's feminine quality is 'I am waiting for you; I am longing for you.'
... Because our culture has for so long rejected the feminine, we have lost touch with this potency of longing. Many people feel this pain of the heart and do not know its value; they do not know that it is their innermost connection to love."
These words instantly reminded me of Christopher Pike's Thirst series of books, featuring a 5,000-year-old vampire named Sita and the Hindu god, Krishna, among its many enchanting characters.
In one of the books, perhaps Thirst No. 3, Krishna's lover, Radha, says to Sita.
"Krishna means love," she said. "But Radha means longing. Longing is older than love. I am older than he. Did you know that, Sita?"
Cain quotes C. S. Lewis to explain why this longing can never be sated.
"Our most common expedient is to call [the longing] beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter ... But the books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."
Hiraeth, anyone?
Well, this certainly explains why I love that image of a person in a room full of books, welcoming the morning with a cup of coffee and a book, but I also know that I wouldn't last longer than five minutes in that space because I'd much rather walk a few blocks down and watch the sun rise over the endless lake and feel my heart burst with inexplicable joy.
Do you too feel such desperate longing in your heart for something unnameable? Write to me and let me know, and we can feel a little less alone in our inexplicable madness.
Tales for Dreamers
A Cinderella Tale
Fairy tale retellings have become all the rage in recent years. I wrote this story in another lifetime and I didn't even remember it existed until I came across it in my search for something suitable to include in the newsletter this month. Turns out this is as unsuitable as can be, not at all in keeping with the theme of this month's missive. So here's to a little incongruity!
Books You May Love
I have more treasures for you this month!
I've already raved about BitterSweet by Susan Cain. I'm still making my way through this book, slowly savouring the nuggets of wisdom filled in its pages. It's hard to describe the book; it's about a lot of things, but essentially it is the author's quest to find out why some of us are deeply moved by what society dismisses as depressive or tragic.
Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.
Cain's weekly newsletter, The Kindred Letters, are an endless source of delight and a joy to receive in my mailbox every Thursday! Sign up. You'll love it!
My other delightful find this month has been the Russell & Holmes series of books by Laurie R. King.
Featuring the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, the books are written from the point of view of Mary Russell, whom we're introduced to as a recently orphaned 15-year-old girl living in Sussex who finds herself a neighbour to Holmes, now in his mid-50s, who has retired from detective work.
Russell is a formidable character, with a wit and daring to match Holmes's! She's an equal partner to him in solving crimes.
The first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, or On the Segregation of the Queen, is set in the time period of World War I and pits Russell and Holmes against a foe who seems to outsmart them at every turn. The book also brings back the dear characters of Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson. There are a total of 17 books in the series so far, and I'm simply in reading heaven at the moment! 😇
Well, it's that time again, dear Dreamer! Time to part. Time to bid goodbye. Such a bittersweet moment this is.
As of today, there are 99 days left in this year. What do you plan to do with them?
Whatever you choose, keep Rumi's words in your heart:
"Do not seek for water, be thirsty."
Until next month,
Anitha