Thinking About Love

Valentine's Day is and its connection to romantic love is celebrated worldwide in February. It is not a particularly Egyptian tradition, and in fact November 4 is celebrated as well as the Egyptian holiday of love. Rather cynically, one could easily suggest that the cute stuffed animals, the roses, the chocolates, the cards, and the rush on intimate dining spots are all a ploy by the commercial interests to get us all spending more money after we've recovered from the giddy rush of the Christmas season, especially since there is no real historical evidence that either the day or the saint have anything to do with romantic love. But the ease with which many cultures have adopted the day of thinking of one's loved one suggests that this is something important to us all.

If you examine the day and the relationships that it celebrates, it is indeed important to us all, for without the bonds of friendship and love between partners it would truly be difficult for us to renew the human race...a fact any single parent will attest to. It is always a good thing to remind ourselves that we are not alone in our daily struggle to survive. As a widow for ten years, it's been rather a long time since I got a Valentine's Day bouquet or card, and I have friends who are just entering the long period of adjustment to this state. It's hard to lose a partner and Valentine's Day can be especially painful in the first years. Those of us who have survived that first traumatic year take care of our friends who are struggling through. We call, visit, email and try to be there to help keep their heads above the waters of loneliness.

So what is this love we are celebrating? Is it only the feelings of warmth engendered by the sight of a smile, the warmth of physical contact, the wish to spend more time together and perhaps marry? When thought of in this fashion, this love that we celebrate on Valentine's Day is not just romantic love ("Oh my, look at that gorgeous one! Wouldn't I love to be the number one for that!) but it is truly love in general.

We love many things and people. We love our husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, and children. We love our pets, our gardens, our neighbours (hopefully), our friends and so on as well. Are they truly different kinds of love? From the vantage point of my early 60's, I'm not really sure that they are. Truly, I'm not interested in marrying my terrier who might wake me at night with his barking, nor most of my friends. At the same time, my husband was both loved by me and was my best friend. I knew I could count on him when the chips were down and we shared many secrets that were known only to us. But just as chocolate comes in many flavours that appeal to many sorts of people, or even to any one person at different times, love also comes in many flavours.

Too often we look for love as if it were a beacon or spotlight that might shine on us through the eyes of a loved one. We think of it as a gift that another person or being might bestow upon us if we are worthy, and far too many people feel that they have no hope of being worthy of such a gift. Does love sail out of the moonlit sky like a flying saucer, does it suddenly drench us like an unforseen rainstorm, or fall splat on our forehead like the gift of a passing bird? It certainly feels like that sometimes.

When my husband died, I was devastated, bereft, lost in a number of worlds that seemed completely unfriendly to me. I went through my days in a haze, expecting to see him walk through the door just returned from a business trip that took too long, listening for the sound of him sneezing as he got up in the morning. It was a terrible period for me. One evening, I went out to the farm where I was boarding my horses and took my old mare out for a walk in the summer night. We were alone in the darkness listening to sleepy birds, hearing snatches of music from distant village weddings, noting our time by the call to prayer in the night. My mare walked along the darkened paths calmly, responding to my random comments with a flick of her ear, and I thought to myself how good it was to be alone with someone who cared about me and not about my late husband's businesses. I realised just how much I loved this creature who trusted me to guide her and who offered to guide me when the way was too dark for my feeble human vision. With this realisation, an extraordinary sense flooded through me of the warmth of my mare, the beauty of the trees against the night sky, the softness of the air moving slowly across the fields.

With the loss of my husband, I thought that I had also lost the love that we had shared and that lit our world and warmed our children. Alone with my mare in the night, I realised that nothing outside of us can either take or give us love. The love is within us waiting to come out to touch other living things, whether human, animal, or vegetable. As I passed a village home, a woman called out to me inviting me to tea. I wasn't willing to stop or break the spell, but I found myself able to smile with real warmth at her to thank her. Her answering smile washed over me, leaving me comforted again to the center of my soul. That night, I knew that I would survive my loss and that I would in fact thrive.

When we think of the holiday of love, we must remember this fact. Love is not given to us; we give it and then receive the warmth of our gift. When we cook with love, the food is more delicious and nourishing; when we care for our plants with love, they flourish; when we spread our love and joy among our friends and family, it shines back at us as the sun is reflected in the moonlight. And the more you give, the more you get.








copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Song For The New Egypt

The Sound of Freedom

This was posted on YouTube just last night. When I first saw it there had been about 300 viewers. Tonight there are over 33 thousand.

The words to the song are:

"I went down and I said I am not coming back, and I wrote on every street wall that I am not coming back.

"All barriers have been broken down, our weapon was our dream, and the future is crystal clear to us, we have been waiting for a long time, we are still searching for our place, we keep searching for a place we belong too, in every corner in our country.

"The sound of freedom is calling, in every street corner in our country, the sound of freedom is calling..

"We will re-write history, if you are one of us, join us and don't stop us from fulfilling our dream.





copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

I Trust 80 Million Egyptians!

Like everyone else in Egypt, I've been totally caught up in the amazing revolution in Egypt. I can only say that I have never been so impressed and proud in my life as I am right now at the patience, restraint and stubbornness of the Egyptian people. I've been out here in the countryside taking care of the farm, rather than in Tahrir....at the direct orders of my children in New York. So I've been doing research on the news from here and forwarding it to friends abroad to publish to make sure that the world knew about what was happening here.

In 17 days I've seen the protesters pushed to defend themselves when attacked by the Mubarak thugs, but they have not initiated violence and they've done a brilliant job of running the tent city at Tahrir. I have seen so much strength, ingenuity, and humour that I have been in awe. For people who think that they need guns to defend themselves, this is a real lesson. The Egyptian people accomplished a miracle with only their strength of purpose and hope.

And one of the most impressive things I've seen in the aftermath was the interview with Wael Ghonim and CNN. When asked if he wanted a place in the new government, he laughed and said absolutely not...he wants to go back to his job. Asked later if he was worried that future politicians might not be up to standards, he said that while he didn't entirely trust politicians he knew that he could surely trust 80 million Egyptians. No one will ever be able to boss them around again...they've learned their power!





copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

The Language of War and Peace

I find myself very subdued these days, and not simply from the aftereffects of the ubiquitous flu virus that has apparently engulfed most of the world. Being forced to "take it easy" and to stay indoors for a while to get rid of the pernicious bug, I've had more time to read the news online and think about things that are going on in the world. This is not very cheering. I was horrified to read of the bombing outside the church in Alexandria just before the Coptic Christmas. There have been incidences of violence before that have had aspects of religious issues, but the idea that a suicide bomber might want to target a church was never really considered by anyone, I suspect. News that Muslims went to the churches at Christmas to show solidarity and in hopes of deterring further violence helped quite a bit to restore my sense of the Egypt that I have always loved.

But the problem of religious divisions is not new and it isn't going away any time soon. Various members of the Egyptian community have been thinking, speaking and writing about what is ailing our country in this regard. A blog on Arabic literature summarized the thoughts of Egyptian writers on the topic, and Global Voices posted a translation of an Egypian blogger's thoughts on the subject. He notes that he is soon to become a father and vows that his son will not grow up in a country with the same issues of distrust between Muslims and Christians. BikyaMasr posted a report of governmental and society support for the Christian community, but notes that many issues of contention are not likely to be addressed or solved any time soon.

With the recent shooting of a US Congresswoman and a judge, among others, in Tucson, Arizona, discussions of who and what is to blame for such an action have flown over the internet. I find myself seeing far too many similarities between the founding issues of the killings in the US and in Egypt in the use of language. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC called everyone in the US to task for the ease with which people use words and images of violence in political discussion these days, the prevailing culture of violence expressed on television shows, in the news media, and even in games for children. I've never been one for strict prohibition of games with guns (especially when having refused to buy them for my son, I found him "shooting" one of his buddies with a sneaker as a four year old) and I don't think that my kids' fondness for shooting zombies on an XBox during their odd bit of free time has made them into potential mass murderers. But I do have to wonder about the current fondness for zombies, vampires and other ordinarily rather frightening topics as entertainment on television. A bit of a thrill is one thing but hour after hour of being chased by the undead week after week....am I the only one who finds this a bit odd? I'm highly relieved to note that the previously mentioned offspring prefer such things as Dr. Who.

I had a lovely Coptic family here at the farm last week. They had come from Australia, Germany, and the US for a famly reunion in Egypt. As one might expect among a group of sixty-somethings, conversation naturally ran to comparisons of the Egypt that they had left about the same time I moved here and the Egypt of today. While there were things that we could agree on that seemed to be improvements, discussion of the recent bombing found us all agreeing that there was a greatly heightened sense of differences among Egyptian communities and extremist stances than we had been accustomed to in the past. But, then again, we all agreed that we noticed this in communities in other parts of the world. I found myself realising that I simply didn't categorise my friends by their religious beliefs or affiliations. For me, it isn't relevant information, and my guests noted that this had been the case in their relationships in Egypt before they left. They were quite saddened to think that it had become relevant for people.

Five years ago I wrote about Dr. Leila Ahmed's autobiography, A Border Passage, in my blog. Aside from it being a marvelous book, I was struck by the difference in Egyptian society that she described before and after Nasser's revolution in Egypt. Many people I've spoken to have commented on the multilingual, multinational, multireligious nature of the old Egypt. Could some of the changes be due to the introduction of new words that were brought in to describe this country and the concepts that they suggested? During Nasser's rule, the name of Egypt (at least in English) was changed to The Arab Republic of Egypt (after the United Arab Republic of Egypt, Syria, and Libya sort of fell apart). I find the term "Arab Republic of Egypt" to be something of a conundrum. In the first place, Egyptians aren't Arabs. They never have been and probably never will be. They are Arabic speaking natives of North Africa...not the same. They are Egyptians. And then you have that magic word "Republic"....that sort of still remains to be seen. But by using words like "Arab Republic", my sense is that it makes a fertile ground for some divisive qualifications to be made. It's sort of a chicken and egg question, I guess and I don't pretend to have any brilliant answers, only questions.

I honestly don't know if we can roll back the violence of language to stem the violence of action. I hope that we can. I think that the world now is too complex for most of us to comprehend in its entirety, but at the same time seems often to be so small as to be encroaching on our back porches. Finally, I suspect that our Egyptian blogger has the right idea. We must each do the best that we can to make our part of the world right for our children and our neighbours. Speak softly and with love.
copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Living in Colour

When I was building my house I decided that I wanted the house to blend in with the trees and the fields around me, so I asked for a stucco roughly the colour of the cabbages and palms in the fields nearby. After rejecting mint green, sea green, turquoise green, kelly green, forest green, and a dozen other shades, the plasterer finally got the colour right, to his great disgust. "But, madame, this is not a bright colour!", he complained. That's right. It's a grey green that is very easy on the eyes. I love the colour and am happy with it, but the neighbours have decided that this is simply another example of my eccentricity.

Local tastes in house colour are a tad stronger than mine. Sometimes I wonder if the colours are conscious choices or whether someone simply had a sale on a certain shade of paint. I remember a number of years ago when there was a sudden outbreak in lavender painted balconies in certain parts of town. We decided that a huge truckload of lavender paint had been highjacked, but it may have simply become fashionable. Riding through the villages, I notice the house painting fashions change over the years. Just recently it has become popular to paint balconies and houses and then make flower-like prints over the brighter or darker colours of the base.
The interiors of the houses are often equally strongly coloured and bright. I was also scolded for having such subdued tastes as painting my living room a dusty rose rather than a bright yellow or pink. To each his own, I guess. But then I have a collection of prints, photographs and paintings collected over the years that decorate my walls and the village houses are generally more bare of decor. Farmers save their money for schooling for children, new animals, repairs to machinery or buildings or such. Paintings are less practical.

While I choose to live in subdued tones, I really enjoy seeing the bright patterns that people paint on the balconies and walls. Cities are far too much grey cement and red brick in my mind and the colours brighten spirits as well as they brighten the view. Sometimes they are geometric patterns and some of the paint jobs provide optical illusions of texture and space.

I'm sure that in many of our more regulated communities, the local authorities would be having fits at some of these paint jobs. But that is one of the wonderful advantages of a fairly uncontrolled building code.





copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Waiting For Lunch

A flock of cattle egrets patiently await a farmer who is harvesting berseem clover for his animals. They know that they will have some choice pickings from the insects, grubs, and flies disturbed by the farmer's work and he gets his field cleaned.




copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Full Service

They were closed so I couldn't see who was doing what but the concept is brilliant. I just want to know if you do the tatoo after the taxi or after the destination or the internet. Could get busy.

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani