May Hamdan May Hamdan

magical let go

When you have memorized a poem, or when you have practiced a piece of music perfectly, and you are about to start performing, you have to let go of your brain and its questions, and let your gut and memory take over.. the strange thing is that it took brain power to memorize… but the brain must retire after a while, and give the stage to gut and recitation powers… away from reason and thinking… like  when reciting a prayer, Or singing a very familiar song, just as well, or playing a piece of music we have been playing over and over…

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

bursting sea

As I was looking at the composition in my fabric patchwork, I spotted an isolated out of the way segment… I eyed it… and decided to inspect it later. They next day I gave it my ear and knew it had a lot of hidden stories that wanted to burst but the seam was too tight… AS soon as I undid it, an sea of untold stories burst out.

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

form to content

I am not sure if the actual piece of paper I constructed was  the composition all by itself. The form and the content are confusingly close. I am not sure if I sprinkled the content into the papermaking and lost the content or blended the subject with the matter making it. Is this a birth or a rehash of a lifetime.. Is it the frame or the actual piece containing the frame? It is so complete and ornamented that the meaning got blended into the paper making. I am loving what I see but there is an innate pulsating pressure to spell out the content in the standard way. But I believe the content is there… or the separation is outmoded. or the question itself is totally irrelevant…

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

neutralizing trauma

In order to neutralize the traumatic shade of a place, invite to it a newly discovered lovely light person dear to your heart to see it through their beautiful eyes… 

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

birth of a novella

ON a cold day, she decided to change her life. She said I know I don’t have much to live. So I need to finally start planning for my retirement. This will make the next 5 years pass in peace.. and in case I don’t make it till then, at least I would have imagined it. She sat down and started to collect the thoughts she had put on hold. She removed one of the notebooks she had stitched with love and she wrote on a it a big title in large font:

My Novella

The first thought that came to her mind is the possession of the thought itself. Am I the creator of my thoughts? Are they all cothaught? Aren’t theorems sothaught? Maybe even dreams are a collaboration, a work in progress?

The train driver could be a coauthor of my thesis? He must have Contributed to my one and only big bomb thought? Isn’t music collective.. why collect awards individually put them on an individual wall in a private non communal residence? Or on a clinic wall, or in an office? Why the need to claim?

But in labs work us collectively fine

What about dreams?

It’s a continuous weave…  A great title for her café ??? interesting.

But awards are individual.. parents… but their parents? Where to stop? Circumstances?

Intuition?

Idiosyncresies?

A great name for her cafe

Collective/ Communal

Share pain and award and mental illness

Distribute

She decided to go trough her saved thoughts in a big attic she had named potentials for a rainy living.. lots of boxes… unfinished serenades.. babies of ideas… waiting to be finished. She saw RK’s novella, sitting ina corner.. waiting to see the light.. she held the key to its encryption. When I retire I will finish them all. The boxes were many. She said I am sure if I picked one item from each collection, I will be able to get a set, according to the axiom of choice. I will work on that…

 

Also just as some coffee shops only serve breakfasts, or starters.. my novel might include a lot of intros to novels..

I decided that my novel will have a menu option:

Starters, Soups, Entrees, and desserts.

One can click.. make your own novel as you go along..

I select this starter and then annex an ending… etc

Each person will make their own story,

I have so much material..

I want to have every chapter carry a scent.. a thread.. I want all the threads in the conclusion to make the nicest quilt of living.. when the thread of today gives way to the thread of tomorrow, it emanates from its predecessor’s fabric and still writes it sown story,, unaware of its past.. like an automatic, Organic emancipation..

Like the unawareness of a pen of what was written with it in the previous chapter…

I have collected all the material and all the skills,, All I have to do is breathe my current makeup into the parts and watch the sparks blowing them colors and shades of existence..

I even prepared the different paper material at different thicknesses and absorption rates to accommodate to all the needed huffs and puffs of ink…

In a way, I am done, yet I have not started.

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

airport stories

That sun was yellower in a country i only landed and hopped from. I could decide if it’s an afternoon or a morning. You could choose, as if it were an interactive film.

Will it be breakfast? Or lunch? Some people joined in a happy hour, other invented an imaginary afternoon tea. A young woman stopped for coffee and started writing her first memoir, another one was crying over a final goodbye and another waiting antsily to meet her lover…. You can get to write your imaginary story

No need to hide or encrypt.. the language you transcribe your emotions into is a concoction of all the languages present

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

all your might

Some feelings need to be named because they are common… like for instance, when your child is writing or reading for the first times, you are pushing him or her with your brain, when you see the letters spilling on the paper, you want to push them to fall correctly with all you‘ve got.  It is a test of everything you have till that point in time..

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

daily rebirth

Every morning we are born again, and we are young all over when we ask ourselves, what shall I be today? when we give the day all the potentials of a lifetime.. today  can be a dancer,..

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

hand happiness

Happiness is when you discover that something you used to do since you were little in hiding, has a name, and is a skill and that you can repeat forever in your life, and is appreciated and sometimes lies in museums and behind secured windows and magazines. That crafts are not a waste of time, and that as soon as you finish this project there will be more, and that when you run out of material there will be a well of more material to choose from, and the idea you are executing will give birth to many more and that the shelves you are displaying the pieces on will emptied by collectors and that you will be able to make more.. and that working with hands is not a trivial task and it is applauded and soothing and can become a day career .. that it is self generating and perpetual and can be eternally giving more and more and more… for ever… and that it is a CHOICE

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

editing

Editing is the art of removing all invisibles once a graphic design is done, more like an encryption, just to make believe that it is natural. Now to read that edited passage, the receiver has to relocate those invisibles and sort of decrypt the message.

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

involuntary indoctrination

It is funny when I hear my students saying my own words that I made up just to facilitate the communication. I hear them saying: it is the same meaning but in a different language.. when you see extensions of you around you, creatures that YOU created, sort of in a lab, it is humanly scary and alarming.. indoctrination to some level..

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

proper terms?

As soon as they corrected me, I became one of them.. I knew the difference between a squash and a pumpkin… so there I was, correcting other people that made the same mistake, mistaking squash for a pumpkin. With the same surprise in my face.. as if I have always known the difference myself..  I was as appalled.. then disturbed later when I watched myself.. the time between not knowing and knowing is so long.. as if in a different era.. how did I live before I knew?

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

encapsulation into words

Has it happened to you that after you describe an experience in detail with a lot of passion carefully carving terms, your listener interrupts you in a matter of fact tone by saying: “you mean xyz?” One single term that describes it all and sums it all up? Does this mean you were immature, and have been re-inventing the wheel? The process you have been passionately describing and swimming in the thesaurus of words to try to express had been objectified while you were playing, into one single term in a current dictionary

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

palettes of words

I can tell where you have been by the very frequently used terms you have been using. As for me, I have been using the term “palette” constantly in my sentences.. It finds a place for itself within my tableaux of expressions. Does this mean I am constantly composing? I say palette of words, palette of fabrics. 

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

on trendiness

I am so proud, among other things that while growing up I looked down, or was asked to look down at trendy things, one of which is trendy terms in language. 

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

erratic awareness

If I were to find an explanation for this sudden puzzlement, I would either say that I am starting not to listen, or when reading, to look only for the meaning and overlook the structure, or that this confusion is due to mixing three languages, or that I am too tired and my brain cells are erratically fizzling out and I need a serious brain de-fragmentation; or that I lost touch with the sense of capturing the correct beat of what sounds right, or I have suddenly developed this urge to justify things and box things into rules; But most probably, since I recently started teaching “words” to my kids, I developed this new rapport with language: it is no more just a tool to be utilized for communication purposes; but also to be explained, and therefore consciously re-engineered for others to learn with a different clear awareness.

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

grammatical scenarios

I often see myself forgetting how words should be connected together, and I get terrified. I see myself asking whether to follow the term “purpose” with the preposition “of” or “from”; so I compose several illustarctive scenarios and listen to what sounds correct; and whether the terms “promote” and “motivate” are always exchangeable for one another? That is, “we promote a certain topic” by “motivating a person to understand it.” Such questions leave me perplexed when I think about them. I never learned the rules corresponding to all this; I just picked them along the way as I matured, like anyone would do, the way you could naturally tell if a musical note is off. However, when it is time to teach them and consequently you try to focus on them, you start contemplating bizarre options. What happened to those natural automatic choices? In fact we never had to make a choice. If we asked a natural writer that had acquired her writing skills the way a musician plays music without learning the notes, then she would, like me, wonder about those rules, and will try to simply listen to what sounds right. Probably she will compose the rules after that, in retrospect.

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

fabric store charm

The eyes of the customers at the fabric shop were of all degrees of enthusiasm and excitement with a full spectrum of projects running through their multi chambered complex brains: the regular middle aged tailor was a regular at that shop: today she was there for a yard of beige organza and lining material to finish that dress for a local customer; it was obvious by the lack of any enthusiasm that she had made already made several copies of that same dress; in the aisle next to her was the very gay artist: he was here today to pick happy fabric for his new collection of screaming art furniture; the old lady was there for just half a meter of cotton material to make her probably last nightgown that will definitely outlive her; the stay home mom trying was there to get the necessary material to mimic a Pinterest style birthday party for her kid, and trying to pull off a crafty celebration; then I saw HER: a bit older, as enchanted as a kid at a toy store. She was slightly limping between aisles. So happy to be there, checking the time to make sure her time was long in Eldorado Island. She was running from project to another in her colorful head.. mixing turquoise happiness with brown serenity; always so excited. A young man spotted her; he was helping the customers as part of his summer internship at the store. He serenaded behind her, intending to help her while fishing for a story behind this radiant drive, to add enthusiasm to his long days. He let his imagination run, trying to figure her out: could she be a patient on a 24 hour break out of a rest home? Probably she had just discovered in the asylum she calls home an aged sewing machine, left in a corner by the previous dead tenant. Could she have come to this store on her break to select project material to color the curtains of the asylum and ease time passage? Could she be there to add color to her fuzzy evading memory… Or could she be a professor on a summer break who came there to get material for an experiment? She was planning to use her hands to the tune of an appeasing lullaby that would quiet down her annoying ever so busy brain.. or was she just a normal person, easily excitable by colors and satin and cotton and linen, visiting the store to prepare the coming of color and life and age of a long awaited project?

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

magic ilter

I made a filter to change events into stories. it’s like a pair of glasses, …except that I cannot turn it off

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May Hamdan May Hamdan

light in passing

As I was driving, I noticed the light from the sun hit the tree and toss its shade onto two passing cars ahead of me, enveloping simultaneously a 2018 jaguar and a broken 1978 Peugeot. The light emanating from one common source fell onto the treetop and then touched the roof of that Peugeot, allowing its end to nonchalantly stroke the edge of the Jaguar… My car was next in line waiting to receive the blessings of the last dim remnant of this light-and-shadow episode. With the seemingly passive awaiting of a voyeur I watched the game slowly transcribing into a story gradually unfolding.

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