Today Lalu, James, Pel, and I spent the large part of the day and evening in my garden, luxuriating in this Arabic-style cushion fest. It was the most beautiful day and the sun shone through my favourite birch tree in dapples. (Pel is dappled, too. A dappled dachshund.)

We gorged ourselves on Camemzola (a hybrid of Camembert and Gorgonzola), fresh bakery bagels, and pepper jelly in the afternoon and feasted on Indian deliciousness in the evening. Arabic culture has got it right: there is nothing like lounging and eating.

The secret garden was a little piece of heaven today.

We've misunderstood growth. How did it happen? How did we end up misprojecting growth onto the material? Somehow we've built this collective engine to generate external growth, fueling it with ambition, desperately seeking recognition, and ultimately feeling empty and hungry in the end.

We need and thrive off growth -- internal growth, growth in wisdom, growth in the openness of hearts, in relationships. When and how did this get sidetracked to growing cars, economies, and perfectly sculpted lawns and bodies?

We know all this, of course. But, it doesn't matter because we need first to learn a collective lesson through experience. Somewhere someone wise said that knowledge will become wisdom only if we've emotionally experienced/understood (felt, tasted, sensed, etc.) it. This is probably why we learn so well from mistakes--they're only born in retrospect.

My friend Paul was telling me today about circular theories and how special they are. I love circular theories. They're never what they seem on the surface. Kelly, just like this tree!

It's amazing how long I can cry sometimes. I cannot understand how I don't completely dehydrate myself and shrivel into a prune. Sometimes I'm crying so hard it feels as though my heart is going to slowly slide up my throat and be squeezed out of my mouth. I hold my head in my hands and I just cannot stop crying. The knot in my throat, that starts the whole thing off, spreads through my chest to my gut, until my whole body is essentially curled up in a big fat squeezing feeling, shaking with the cough-like sobs. Squeezing all the tears and sobs that are in my entire being out like a citrus juicer. My face squishes into a grimace and tears flood down my cheeks, purging and spewing out the hurt. Afterwards, my heart feels like it weighs a million tons while I feel so relieved and exhausted at the same time. Being heartbroken sucks ass, but I feel f-ing alive.

David Sedaris kills me sometimes. He makes me laugh so hard about the most inappropriate and unfortunate things. That's talent if you can evoke in your reader feelings that rarely occur simultaneously. For example, completely giddy with mirth + feeling like an asshole. It's pretty special.

Semi-non sequitur. I was reading through some old entries and was reminded of a few nuggets from West Africa: Back then and there, there was no wrinkle-free fabric laced with Teflon. People starched and ironed their shirts to have them stay stiff and wrinkle-free.

There were no genetically modified crops (too expensive), so the fruits and vegetables were a quarter the size of those in our supermarkets. Supermarket fruits would have to go on taste steroids, though, to compete with the deliciousness of their mini Togolese cousins.

When something broke, you repaired it because buying a new one still cost a zillion times more.

Yet, you needed a beautiful dress no matter how poor you were to go to church on Sundays. Completely lovely + dogmatically f-ed.