I received this by email from someone who knows someone who knows the author of these words. I wrote to him and asked about his story and his grandma - and I asked him if I could share it by posting it on my blog and by asking visitors to share with us stories of their own grandmas or grandpas - he was kind enough to agree Read and share .. I would love to hear your stories. 

Dear friends old and new , I am sharing the below with you because you witnessed or about to learn what I have experienced as a blessing from God.

This was written on the 21 June 09 on the international day of 42 million refugees . to narrate my a life experience .

I was born in Jaffa, Palestine on February 3^rd, 1940 to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother. I have memories of my birth city; but a few short years later in 1948 catastrophe struck. I, along with my father, mother, sister and younger brother joined thousands of refugees who were forced to leave their homes.

Nothing can describe the feeling of helplessness and destitution when you leave everything that is familiar behind you, not knowing what to expect next. I can only imagine what my parents felt losing everything. But, we were among the few, who left the evils of war and the desolate Palestinians seeking a safe shelter. We were almost penniless and with barely enough means to sustain a family for a days shelter and food. Those were dark days like being in the abyss with hope of seeing the next day.

We were also luckier than the masses of stranded Palestinian refugees. We were blessed to move the day after with my grandmother Turkia Khanum, a great lady, whom we called Teta. She was as warm as the space of her home in lovely Damascus. To me it was like changing beds from Jaffa to Damascus,where my new life started good and well.

The Diaspora years started 62 years ago; and in that time I continuously to date still learn of the suffering, instability, hunger, and horrors others experienced. Teta, though, gave my family and I all means of a dignified, normal life. Teta and my parents made sure that we went to the best of schools within a week of our arrival.

I only appreciated many years later how much she truly gave us. She sacrificed her privacy and the space of her home; she didn’t allow us to be exposed to negative news and comments; she allowed my father the dignity of being a man by respecting his presence though the home was her own; she allowed us to live with dignity as Palestinians without losing our identity, sheltering us from resentment. And so much more. Teta with her loving smile and strong character gave us a normal childhood when so many of our compatriots lost many years of their lives ; and I learn to appreciate Teta more every day of my life. What she gave me still reverberate in my own daily life ,she was my bridge to a better liberal  life. 

I believe she was a Godsend. He gave her the serenity, patience and desire to take us in and give us a normal life; and had it not been for her contribution, we would have been forced to seek refuge in one of the many camps in host countries rather than in the home of our Teta. She gave us life her life ,may god bless her soul.

Nadim Abuljobain

Here’s the author’s name and email: Nadim Abuljobain <nadimsolo@hotmail.com> if you like, but you can simply share your stories here in the comments.

..it may be dangerous, but it is definately more rewarding

(just make sure you get out of the way of the speeding trains in time).

Finally, I have created and finished my “What’s in Your Handbag Right Now” ebook.  If you’d like to read it, or if you’re brave enough to add the contents of your bag, email me!

Click here to read or visit my inspirational blog and click the bag on the right. 

I’d love to hear what you think of this whole idea and the concept behind it. 

Thanks

ثبُت سياسيًّا أنّ الكلسون أبو خيط (السترينج) هو أفضل شعار للديمقراطية لأنه:

يفرّق اليمين عن اليسار
يُبرز الكُتلتَيْن
يهتمّ بالوسط
يوحّد أنظار الشعب

I’m thinking of making a for-fun ebook including all the responses I got for my posts What’s in Your Handbag - I trust everyone who joined in and published this info on my blog is OK with me creating an ebook to share for fun.

If you’re not OK with that, please let me know.

I began my life within layers of perfume; inside intimate, warm, moist membranes immersed in scent. I cannot recall spending a single moment of my life without being surrounded by aroma.
It’s not true that we get so accustomed to a certain scent that it no longer has an effect on us; for whenever I feel that I may have become used to to the scent of Frangipani, it overwhelms me with its magnificence again every evening. I believe it must be the same with my own scent.
My scent is not governed by any law. It does not know fear, nor does it know death. It is excited by the rains, by imaginings and by memories. If you smell my scent once, I will nestle within the corridors of your memory forever; I will build legends, palaces and temples that will stay with you always.   
I don’t do that intentionally. My scent leads me to control this highly sensitive sense. It creates epic proportions of beautiful memories making them agonizingly more beautiful, and endows a distinctive beauty to painful memories making them more tolerable. My scent is what gives life its distinctive features and its deceptive, sharp boundaries. My scent tricks you, and you want it to trick you; like a dream which you believe to be real or a reality that feels like a dream. My scent makes life slither like a snake, gathering, twisting, weaving stories within its folds where the aroma lives.
All my beauty resides in my scent; my scent is my soul; for I am not considered beautiful by the usual standards, and there are many who are more beautiful than me. And because I have never been afraid of life’s impulsiveness, I didn’t hide and I didn’t avoid it, so my eagerness has caused some tears in my petals and in my leaves.  
This never bothered me. I never wanted to hide from the sun and I was never afraid of swaying under the melody of the rains .. and because I believed that imperfection is the essence of beauty, I felt that it this gave me something special that bears the hallmarks of my individuality.  Besides, the birds and butterflies didn’t come visit me because I am beautiful, but because I am aromatic.  
* * * Never for a second could I imagine going on with my life without aroma. This idea would not have even occurred to me had it not been for the fact that I started noticing that the aroma in my surroundings was diminishing. The scent of the Gardenia no longer greeted me strongly and excitedly in the mornings as it had always done before, and the Jasmines seemed much whiter, but… As for my beloved Frangipani, its scent was barely carried to me even on the strongest breeze.
I found myself the only one among my species to remain the same. Perhaps it was the tears that resulted from my passion for life that had saved me. Had it not been for the fact that I could still smell my own scent, I would have lost my mind completely. This drastic change in my surroundings caused great confusion for me. I felt as if someone had removed my sense of smell and I that I shall bleed to death. I could not distinguish between losing my sense of smell and losing whatever there was to smell; and in truth, I didn’t know which was worse.
* * *
Is being left alone the worst that can happen? 
So be it, let me be alone. I don’t want to tread this thorny path; I don’t care for trying to please the owners of vases. Day after day, the young flowers around me were being subjected to hybrid experimentation; they were being created and recreated, in order to become that which is believed to be the only face, the only measure of beauty, until finally they all become alike. Twins made up of thousands of siblings, all of them, I admit, far more beautiful than I.
So be it, let me be alone. I don’t yearn for this kind of beauty; a dead beauty that is created solely for the purpose of being cut and imprisoned inside a dead container that provides it with life’s minimum requirements. A lifeless container that neither shares its feelings and passion for life, nor does it allow it to grow or open its petals; and there, it stands alone, eventually abandoned by all except the webs of spiders.
Its splendor and perfection become tedious within days. It withers and dries, and is ignored, while another is cut to replace it, then another. There is not need to distinguish one from another. There is no need for joy or sorrow; its life is reduced to a short existence in exile away from its roots, away from the warmth of the sun and the song of the birds, and out of reach of the butterflies and the beautiful relationships it could have had with them.
Only I know that the butterflies will no longer accept these multitudes of twins, because they can’t engage their souls with crumbs, remnants of life that have not soul, no essence.
But I don’t know who else but the butterflies will weep for their kidnapped scent?

Fadwa

(have a look at the collage: http://fadwas-inspirational.blogspot.com/2009/06/kidnapped-perfume.html)

Art is exalted above religions and races. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks. And their races are exhausted, crossbred and spoiled. Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time. 

- Emil Nolde, 1911, quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art