Flowers are wondrous little things; little cups of petals, little bells of pollen, little thimbles of pastel.....

God is the gardener, and we are His flowers.  :)

The night is sprinkled with stars...
Circled by them is a blotched red moon...
Dolled up in crimson, scarlet and roseate hues...

In the alley where tom-cats slink and roam...
In the alley where bedraggled grimalkins crouch and caper and wail at the moon...
Like a matriarch warbling her battle hymn...

On the empty roads where stray dogs trot and cower...
On the empty roads where malevolent canines snarl and grunt and howl at the moon...
Like a bard chanting his scorn for mankind...

Over the roofs where the moon is high...
The cacophony of eerie cries and savage barks...
Forged into a midnight serenade...
Of crushed dreams and lost hope and jungle nights...
Of everything crumbled and gone...

A haunting song...
Often known as...
Music of the night...

Now a major motion picture. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon.

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."

* * *   * * *   * * *   * * *   * * *
                                                             
......trapped in a perfect world.
Welcome to Susie Salmon's heaven! It can look like Nova Scotia, Tangiers or even Tibet; anything you have dreamed of. A heaven, where there is no cornfield, no murder, no grave; but there is something......something Susie needs to learn. She needs to forget the endless pain brought to her from the living world, she needs forget the unspeakable grief brought to her family; threatening to tear their love apart and smash it into pieces: slivers and shattered bits of glass. Susie was merely fourteen when she was murdered in a cornfield: a tragedy that relishes in the agony of her family, nibbling at their shins and leaving them to question, "Where has our Susie gone to?" A mother, endeavoring to seek for the door that will somehow lead her out of a broken heart, finds an open door - she stands at the edge of her daughter's room, not having the courage to take another step. She feels it then.....the excruciating pain piercing through her flesh and into her heart.....tears begin sliding off her cheeks; she commands her tears to conceal themselves beneath her wet eyelashes, breathes in and shuts the door, without looking back. A father, however, communicates with her daughter through a flickering candle flame, a geranium flower, a snow globe.....and every single piece of memory that has been held in its own place. A mother seeks comfort in another man. A father, however, seeks comfort in his own son. Each one of them struggles to mend the visible cracks....but who notices the obscure crannies? No one.....but Susie.

Death itself is nothing but a hushed gentle breeze disappearing into the atmosphere, but murder.......changes everything. Susie's murderer is a man from her neighborhood; a solitary shadow overwhelmed by aloofness, a single man who has never married, an outcast named George Harvey. As Susie's father begins to harbor suspicion for his bizarre antics and starts an investigation on him, Mr.Harvey covers each of his tracks of which could have been an evidence of Susie's brutal murder, leaving none of them behind. He feeds on the delicious moans of death, but often thirsts for more. But what he has never understood is the immeasurable and unconditional love a father can have for his daughter. Love is something beyond his comprehensible mind; love is something so vast, so great, so magnificent......
it is beyond infinity.


The Lovely Bones, with Alice Sebold's brilliant craftsmanship of words encased in a net of fantasy and reality, reflects our grievous but transcendent moments in life, impeccable beauty out of misery and despair, hope and love out of tragedy and loss.........a captivating work of a genius!

A bloodshed enveloped in a funnel of miracles, a compelling tale filled with a little brother's innocence, a sister's courage, a father's bottomless love and.......a mother's wounded heart; a mother, who has needed the time to know that the undiminished love she has had for her daughter would not destroy her, finds herself walking through that same door again. The pine floorboards underneath her feet creak softly as she walks into her daughter's bedroom - for the very first time since her death. She closes her eyes, breathes in and whispers into the air, "I love you, Susie." She has needed the time, and Susie has given her that time. I can imagine tears of joy rolling down in heaven now, glistening under the sun.
* * *   * * *   * * *   * * *   * * *

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened when I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

I wish you all a long and happy life.  :)

Beneath the dead, and decaying trees,
Past the long deserted nests of birds,
In a world of silence.

Comes the light.

Glittering on feathers of snow,
Shining through prisms of ice,
Circling trees with its warm embrace,
And bringing life with a single dawn.

Today, I've decided not to write anything of my own, nothing fancy; just some timeless touches of irony encased in simplicity. Well, come on, give it a guess!........

Yes, that's right! Quotations! Some by the greatest English poet of all times, some by the most influential Greek philosopher and polymath the world has ever heard of, some derived from the international best-selling novel, The Lovely Bones and some......barely known, but still impeccable. Now, may I present to all of you.....my very first 'Quotes Of The Day'!

Put yourself in their shoes before you decide on the best way to take their shirts.
-David Sklansky

The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging.
-Molly Ivins

The test of a book's quality is not if it reflects my life, but if it reflects yours.
E.L Doctorow

Anybody can become angry-that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way-that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
-Aristotle

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
-Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do.
-Aristotle

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
-William Shakespeare

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
-William Shakespeare

Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Because horror on Earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

You hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

At the tips of feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light...still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is just like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

I could do nothing - trapped in my perfect world.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

My mother's eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. I thought I had my whole life to understand them, but that was the only day I had. Once upon Earth I saw her as Abigail, and then I let it slip effortlessly back-my fascination held in check by wanting her to be that mother and envelop me as that mother.
-Derived from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Now a major motion picture. Starring Brendan Fraser, Andy Serkis, Eliza Benett and Helen Mirren.

Inkheart.....a book that should be tasted, chewed and devoured thoroughly; a magnificent feast for book-lovers, noblemen, vagabonds, fair folk, outcasts, fire-eaters, magicians, pirates, fairies, trolls, ogres, sorceresses..........

Now picture this: you are reading a book aloud to your wife and your three-year-old daughter on a cold, rainy night. All of a sudden, something slips out of the pages.....something that has a breath of life. The creature that has escaped the boundaries of fiction and tumbled into your living-room, unfortunately, is an evil tyrant named Capricorn. Barely breathing, you stare at the creature incredulously. A breathing creature, not made of human flesh or blood, but of paper and printer's ink.....and a human's voice. You almost scream when you come to realize that your wife is nowhere to be found. Yes, you have the magical ability to bring the characters from a book into life! But here is the thing: you could never control what would leap off those pages and into our mortal world, nor who or what goes in.

Mo, a father, a book binder, a master of his own art.......his voice as if a beautiful melody, a gentle calling perhaps, brings out the colors, the scents, the words, the letters.....and the magic of every page in a single book. And then comes the night when fate decides all.....Mo, tragically has been left without a wife and his 3-year-old daughter, Meggie, mother-less. Days, like rushing liquid, seep through the thin fabric of time; years have passed and nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened in the farm Mo and Meggie live in. However, their simple lives are shattered....changed once and for all when Capricorn and his men break into their sheltered bubble. Meggie is now on a quest to save her father's life, with some help from a motley crew- Dustfinger, Elinor and Farid as the young girl, who also possesses the same extraordinary gift as her father's, has been thrust into an enchanting but perilous world of magic, destiny and power.

Readers, you'll be spellbound, transported, moved, touched, awed, amazed.........a lot like Harry Potter, but.....never have I experienced the utter joy of reading a story, within a story; a book, within a book.

See what happens if you READ THE BOOK ALOUD!!!

Lavender rocks, painted twigs, iridescent wings of a blue butterfly, scarlet poppies and little trickles of dew kissing their delicate petals, drops of rain that tap against my windowpane like the tiny fingers of a dwarf, gushing waters, books of all sorts, swan feathers................
These are the things I have always loved.

Let the rocks share their color with the flowers in the cornfield.
Let the twigs gather themselves into an arch, bridging the gap between the worthy and unworthy; mending the broken and healing the pain.
Let the wings of a butterfly be the wings of pursuit and freedom......
Fly my butterfly! Fly!

Let the scarlet poppies be the eyes of nature and the hearts of people. Listen......listen to their gentle whispers, listen to their songs of joy.
Let the rain, like a simple instrument, shower the cold nights with music, from the first reverberating peal to the final note that slowly dies away as another drop of ice-cold rain falls gracefully on my windowpane and begins its waltz among the others.
 Let the waves of righteousness flow into the souls of the malevolent; let the rivers of compassion flow into the vessels of the heartless and cruel.
Flow my waters! Flow!

Let the books, like a wizard's magic casements, open their doors for people like me, through which I look out to other worlds.....some enchanting, some perilous, some beautiful, some wicked; worlds of  stirring fantasies and epic adventure, worlds of prose and poetry.
Let the swan feathers taste the glass lakes and weave through the mortals' selfish reflections - they could see no one but themselves.
Weave my feathers! Weave!

Let these wonders guide us through the journey we all have to embark on - the journey of life.
Let the heavy garment of mist be torn apart.
Let the beauty of our world be revealed; let the warmth of the human heart be liberated; let the love we once had for others be freed from the leaden caskets and cages......

These are the things I have always loved, and I hope you would love them too!