A life of endured pain and loneliness, experiences of all tastes and being a vitness to changes around you.
A brief life of sole peacefulness, satisfaction and modesty, in a perfect world without sadness.
Which has a better worth?
What would you have chosen if you had been given a choice?
OR should we look at it this way –
How does 50 years of a full life compare to 3-day sampler of it all?
Dear Mili makes you wonder what is the worth of life.
Like a lot of Maurice Sendak’s books – you love it as a kid, and you love it as an adult for very different reasons.
Dear Mili, originally a Wilhelm Grimm’s story, is like a cough drop to me.
I love it for the bright cosmetic sugar coat of Sendak’s drawing it comes in.
I taste the sweetness and the bitterness.
And though it becomes hard to keep in my mouth later, it heals me somehow without me knowing it.
The week has been difficult for me. I have only myself to run the 5 accounts that are all active with deadlines due tomorrow. I think I’m more nervous about the fact that I’m doing this all by myself without a backup, than the physical fatique of it all. Though both are equally wearing me down on the inside and outside.
I guess I need Dear Mili afterall to remind me other things in life. And see my messy and miserable work week in a different light.
So I’ll share the story with you here. This is the prelude to the story. I’ll post bit by bit later this week. Enjoy.
Dear Mili,
I’m sure you have gone walking in the woods or in green meadows, and passed a clear, flowing brook. And you’ve tossed a flower into the brook, a red one, a blue one, or a snow-white one. It drifted away, and you followed it with your eyes as far as you could. And it went quietly away with the little waves, farther and farther, all day long and all night too, by the light of the moon or the stars. It didn’t need much light, for it knew the way and it didn’t get lost.
When it had traveled for three days without stopping to rest, another flower came along on another brook.
A child like you, but far far away from here, had tossed it into a brook at the same time. The two flowers kissed, and went their way together and stayed together until they both sank to the bottom.
You have also seen a little bird flying away over the mountain in the evening. Perhaps you thought it was going to bed; not at all, another little bird was flying over other mountains, and when all was dark on the earth, the two of them met in the last ray of sunshine.
The sun shone brightly on their feathers, and as they flew back and forth in the light they told each other many things that we on the earth below could not hear.
You see, the brooks and the flowers and the birds come together, but people do not; great mountains and rivers, forests and meadows, cities and villages lie in between, they have their set places and cannot be moved, and humans cannot fly.
But one human heart goes out to another, undeterred by what lies between. Thus does my heart go out to you, and though my eyes have not seen you yet, it loves you and thinks it is sitting beside you.
And you say: "Tell me a story." And it replies: "Yes, dear Mili, just listen."
(more to come stay tuned)
Nikisha 