By: Laura Finlay

Laura Finlay — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:30:18 +0000

It is my first day back in work after two weeks in Albania, five days of which was spent in the truly amazing Valbona. I have just come back from lunch with colleagues during which i was trying to explain to them the fun and intimacy of the ‘bus’ journey from Bajram Curri to Rilindja. They all looked at me as if i had two heads and had told told them i went to the moon for my holiday.
I love your description of the journey Catherine – it truly sums it up and helps restore my faith that i dont have two heads afterall and that other people enjoy such ‘authentic’ experiences too.
Im already looking forward to the next time we get to make that journey and come back to you all at Rilindja.
x

By: Catherine

Catherine — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:14:11 +0000

Good Grief! Thank you Mom — I love you too.

By: Mom

Mom — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:54:45 +0000

I am Catherine’s mother. When I read her, I see that everything we consciously taught her–to love literature, to hoe a garden, to keep her voice low in public places, to build a bookshelf, to sit at dinner with grown-up guests, to eat her scone with her father’s strawberry jam, to expect the marvellous and see it in the ordinary, “to connect the mind to the heart,” to believe in science and value beauty–everything we thought we were teaching her was merely details. Perhaps they are threads she’s weaving into the tapestry of her life. But no more. To read her is to be a parent whose creature is both familiar and strange. How did we produce a being so in love with life? How did her father’s stoicism and my tenuous trust in the permanence of things produce a fearless being? I sometimes think we should have been more sensible. I often rue the fact that we made her unsuited to the world into which she was born. But even then, when she was born–when it was a much more hope-infused world–even then, the poisons that now fester and corrode were there: a world devoid of custom and bonds, at war, soiled by the imperatives of the self, aching to be felt and yet cold to the touch among the steel and the glass of the urban desolation, where individuals learned to be alone, cut off from each other. We fled New York City. We built a garden. We made up a world–a handful of space in rural Pennsylvania, unglamorous–no church, no television, no to-ing-and-fro-ing to socializing swimming and tennis-ing lessons. I don’t know how she survived. She says it was a happy childhood. The rules were never fanatical: in fact, there was an absence of belief or theory. We just wanted to stave off the discomfort of a fakely communal life, the insult of numbing conformity, the banal consolation of non-conformity displayed then in superficial oddities of life-style or dress. We were nay-sayers; and we produced a yes-sayer. How did that happen.

I’m thinking of the closing lines of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”–perhaps the most humble, the most beautifully expressed ending of the story of the human condition in all of all our glittering, our marvellous literary hoard. “The world was all before them, where to choose/their place of rest, and Providence their guide:/They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,/Through Eden took their solitary way.”

She’s an exile, our daughter. Like we were. Like we all are. Fallen. Bereft. Looking for peace and love, denied to us by the our guilty knowledge of the world, which frightens us. Whereas we stuck to the idea of Eden, the shelter from the world, she makes her way . We didn’t plan it that way. Or perhaps we did.

By: skender selimaj

skender selimaj — Wed, 26 May 2010 22:35:27 +0000

hi catherine
i like the way you love valbona

Comments on: More Wordy Ramblings from Yours Truly

By: Laura Finlay

By: Catherine

By: Mom

By: skender selimaj