when I die

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flat rabbit - oh man i love this

The Flat Rabbit: A Minimalist Scandinavian Children’s Book about Making Sense of Death and the Mysteries of Life

by Maria Popova

Neil Gaiman, in discussing his gorgeous new adaptation of Hansel and Gretel, asserted that we shouldn’t protect ourselves and children from the dark. But when the thickest darkness comes, in childhood as much as in adulthood, it brings with it not the monsters and witches of fairy tales but the tragedies of life itself — nowhere more acutely than in confronting death and its ghouls of grief. And when it does come, as Joan Didion memorably put it, it’s “nothing like we expect it to be.” What we need isn’t so much protection as the shaky comfort of understanding — a sensemaking mechanism for the messiness of loss.

That’s precisely what Faroese children’s book author and artist Bárður Oskarsson does in The Flat Rabbit (public library | IndieBound) — a masterwork of minimalist storytelling that speaks volumes about our eternal tussle with our own impermanence.

The book, translated by Faroese language-lover Marita Thomsen, comes from a long tradition of Scandinavian children’s books with singular sensitivity to such difficult subjects — from Tove Jansson’s vintage parables of uncertainty to Stein Erik Lunde’s Norwegian tale of grief to Øyvind Torseter’s existential meditation on the meaning of something and nothing.

The story, full of quiet wit and wistful wonder, begins with a carefree dog walking down the street. Suddenly, he comes upon a rabbit, lying silently flattened on the road. As the dog, saddened by the sight, wonders what to do, his friend the rat comes by.

“She is totally flat,” said the rat. For a while they just stood there looking at her.

“Do you know her?”

“Well,” said the dog, “I think she’s from number 34. I’ve never talked to her, but I peed on the gate a couple of times, so we’ve definitely met.”

The two agree that “lying there can’t be any fun” and decide to move her, but don’t know where to take her and head to the park to think.
The dog was now so deep in thought that, had you put your ear to his skull, you would have actually heard him racking his brain.





 

Exclaiming that he has a plan, the dog returns to the scene with the rat. They take the rabbit from the road and work all night on the plan, hammering away in the doghouse.

In the next scene, we see the rabbit lovingly taped to the frame of a kite, which takes the dog and the rat forty-two attempts to fly.

 

With great simplicity and sensitivity, the story lifts off into a subtle meditation on the spiritual question of an afterlife — there is even the spatial alignment of a proverbial heaven “above.” It suggests — to my mind, at least — that all such notions exist solely for the comfort of the living, for those who survive the dead and who confront their own mortality in that survival, and yet there is peace to be found in such illusory consolations anyway, which alone is reason enough to have them.

Mostly, the story serves as a gentle reminder that we simply don’t have all the answers and that, as John Updike put it, “the mystery of being is a permanent mystery.”


Once the kite was flying, they watched it in silence for a long time.

“Do you think she is having a good time?” the rat finally asked, without looking at the dog.

The dog tried to imagine what the world would look like from up there.

“I don’t know…” he replied slowly. “I don’t know.”

Complement The Flat Rabbit with Love Is Forever, a more literal but no less lovely take on helping young hearts deal with loss, then revisit Meghan O’Rourke’s magnificent grownup memoir of navigating mourning.


Illustrations courtesy of Owlkids Books

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great site, go here
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from the Tempest, Act IV

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'One of 25 video poems in Four Seasons Productions Moving Poetry Series - Three innovative new films - RANT * RAVE * RIFF. We have chosen a selection from with William Shakespeare's One from the Tempest, Act IV written in 1612 which is recited by Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan. 

All of those smiling faces, those spirits are gone -- melted into thin air -- we are such stuff as dreams are made of. But what is on the other side of our sleep?

Learn more about this provocative new series, featured poems, poets and readers at 4SeasonsProductions'

Evening Hymn by Patrick Hawes

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妈妈 (Child)

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A poem, 'simultaneously unbearable and exquisite,'

in Chinese with English translation by Alex Tang,

a Toronto-based earthquake engineer.

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孩子（Mom)

快 (Hurry up)

抓紧妈妈的手 (Tightly hold your Mom’s hand)

去天堂的路 (The road to heaven)

太黑了 (is too dark)

妈妈怕你 (Mom is afraid that)

碰了头 (you hit your head)

快 (Hurry up)

抓紧妈妈的手 (Tightly hold your Mom’s hand)

让妈妈陪你走 (Let Mom keep you company)

妈妈 (Child)

怕 (I am afraid)

天堂的路 (The road to heaven)

太黑 (is too dark)

我看不见你的手 (I cannot see your hand)

自从 (since)

倒塌的墙 (the wall collapsed)

把阳光夺走 (it took the sun light away)

我再也看不见 (I cannot see )

你柔情的眸 (your lovely eyes again)

孩子 (Mom)

你走吧 (You can go)

前面的路 (the road in front of you)

再也没有忧愁 (has no sorrow any more)

没有读不完的课本 (there are no books that you cannot finish reading)

和爸爸的拳头 (and your father’s fist)

你要记住 (you have to remember)

我和爸爸的摸样 (my face and your father’s face)

来生还要一起走 (let’s finish walking this road together in our next life)

妈妈 (Child)

别担忧 (do not worry)

天堂的路有些挤 (the road to heaven is a bit crowded)

有很多同学朋友 (I have a lot classmates and friends)

我们说 (we all say)

不哭 (don’t cry)

哪一个人的妈妈都是我们的妈妈 (anyone’s Mom is our Mom)

哪一个孩子都是妈妈的孩子 (any child is Mom’s child)

没有我的日子 (the days without me)

你把爱给活的孩子吧 (give your love to the children alive)

妈妈 (Mom)

你别哭 (don’t cry)

泪光照亮不了 (tears cannot light up the road)

我们的路 (our road)

让我们自己 (let us)

慢慢的走 (walk slowly)

妈妈 (Child)

我会记住你和爸爸的模样 (I will remember your face and father’s face)

记住我们的约定 (remember our appointment)
来生一起走 (of walking together in our next life)

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via Andrew C. Revkin,
the NY Times Earth Blog
May 22, 2008

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Sequoia

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 All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
 Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
 Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
 And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
 Of an old year coming to an end.

 In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-
 An olive or a fig tree-a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
 I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's
 orchard,
 A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
 A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

 But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
 Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
 Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord,
 All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
 A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

 We will give you what we can-our labor and our soil,
 Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
 Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
 We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
 A slender shoot against the sunset.

 And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
 Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
 His mother's beauty ashes in the air,
 I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
 Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

 
–Dana Gioia 

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we are that

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No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

–Hermann Hesse

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saturnrising
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make a beginning

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... stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on.

Just try, make a beginning – it is not as hard as you think.


–Nisargadatta Maharaj

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