My Natal Day Quotes

My love for peanut butter is so deep that I can't look at a jar without devouring it!

I am the only being whose doom No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn; I never caused a thought of gloom, A smile of joy, since I was born. In secret pleasure, secret tears, This changeful life has slipped away, As friendless after eighteen years, As lone as on my natal day. There have been times I cannot hide, There have been times when this was drear, When my sad soul forgot its pride And longed for one to love me here. But those were in the early glow Of feelings since subdued by care; And they have died so long ago, I hardly now believe they were. First melted off the hope of youth, Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew; And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew. ’Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow, servile, insincere; But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

In other words, women were not born with a wedding gown gene or a neo-natal craving for a diamond engagement ring! They were taught to want these things. Women didn’t enter the world with a desire to practice something called dating or a desire to play with a “My Size Bride Barbie,” they were rewarded for desiring these things. Likewise, men did not exit the womb knowing they would one day buy a date a bunch of flowers or spend two months’ income to buy an engagement ring. These are all products that have been sold to consumers interested in taking part in a culturally established ritual that works to organize and institutionalize heterosexuality and reward those who participate.

I am like that to most people, an ear to listen, a shoulder to cry on, someone to ask a favour, Rock of Gibraltar. I called her back. I listened to her rant. I repeated these four words i saw somewhere earlier this week, they had become a sort of mantra for me. LIVE ABOVE THE NOISE I told her that I'd noticed something about most gossipmongers. They are stagnant. I remember i hadn't been to my natal community in two years. As the sun riseth, i guaranteed when i stepped foot into there that i would find the same set of bingo playing all day women, who knew everybody's business and thought sleeping with someone's man was some sort of achievement:gathered at the same spot. I did. People who chat people rarely are good at anything else. They are focused so much on what's going on around them and less on self improvement. They so busy watching people's business, they miss opportunities for advancement. Instead of working on their faults and deficiencies, they highlight the flaws of another to detract from their shitty lives. You cannot live your life at the mercies of another's opinions. Opinions are like assholes everyone has one. Yes from time to time we will become rattled by mindless chatter, remember to live above the noise...

As I began to connect back to myself and hear my thoughts instead of other people´s, I started seeing the connection we have with nature, and how it shows us every day, in every season, how to live in our own world. Upon my walks, I watched how Mother Nature changes, how each day she rises—every day, every season, every year, nature rises, time and time again. If she is broken, she will rise. She will break through the concrete to grow her roots if she needs to, but she does it her way and in her time and it´s only other people who break her, she never breaks herself. When I watched this, I knew that I could rise too. I was going to rise up through the years of mental destruction and break through.

I found it strange not doing anything to improve myself. Not focussing on writing my goals for the day, not reading a chapter of a book to expand my never-ending need for knowledge, and not being a part of any self-help, goal-setting groups. All of that had stopped and I was just being me, and that’s where I got stuck because I couldn’t remember who that was. Who was I when I wasn’t hiding behind improving my business or becoming a better, more positive version of myself? I had become a stranger.

We may love our daughters with all our hearts, but we must train them through pain. We love our sons most of all, but we can never be a part of their world, the outer realm of men. We are expected to love our husbands from the day of Contracting a Kin, though we will not see their faces for another six years. We are told to love our in-laws, but we enter those families as strangers, as the lowest person in the household, just one step on the ladder above a servant. We are ordered to love and honor our husbands’ ancestors, so we perform the proper duties, even if our hearts quietly call out gratitude to our natal ancestors. We love our parents because they take care of us, but we are considered worthless branches on the family tree. We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another. As happy as we are in our natal families, we all know that parting is inevitable. So we love our families, but we understand that this love will end in the sadness of departure. All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality.

Family, Today I pick up a brush, and my heart flies away home. To my family I write—regards to dear parents, aunt, and uncle. When I think of past days, my tears cannot stop falling down. I still feel sad to have left home. My stomach is big with baby and I am so hot in this weather. My in-laws are spiteful. I do all the household work. In this heat it is impossible to please. Sister, cousin, take care of Mama and Baba. We women can only hope that our parents will live many years. That way we will have a place to return for festivals. In our natal home, we will always have people who treasure us. Please be good to our parents. Your daughter, sister, and cousin

As girls we are told that we are useless branches, because we will not carry on our natal family names but only the names of the families we marry out to, if we are lucky enough to bear sons. In this way, a woman belongs to her husband’s family forever, whether she is alive or dead. All of this is true, and yet these days my contentment comes from knowing that Snow Flower’s and my blood will soon rule the house of Lu.

To wrench Ignèz from life he doth design, better his captured son from her to wrench; deeming that only blood of death indign the living lowe of such true Love can quench. What Fury willed it that the steel so fine, which from the mighty weight would never flinch of the dread Moorman, should be drawn in hate to work that hapless delicate Ladye's fate? The horr'ible Hangmen hurried her before the King, now moved to spare her innocence; but still her cruel murther urged the more, the People swayed by fierce and false pretence. She with her pleadings pitiful and sore, that told her sorrows and her care immense for her Prince-spouse and babes, whom more to leave than her own death the mother's heart did grieve: And heav'enwards to the clear and chryst'alline skies, raising her eyne with piteous tears bestained; her eyne, because her hands with cruel ties one of the wicked Ministers constrainèd: And gazing on her babes in wistful guise, whose pretty forms she loved with love unfeigned, whose orphan'd lot the Mother filled with dread, unto their cruel grandsire thus she said,— If the brute-creatures, which from natal day on cruel ways by Nature's will were bent; or feral birds whose only thought is prey, upon aërial rapine all intent; if men such salvage be'ings have seen display to little children loving sentiment, e'en as to Ninus' mother did befall, and to the twain who rear'd the Roman wall: O thou, who bear'st of man the gest and breast, (an it be manlike thus to draw the sword on a weak girl, because her love imprest his heart, who took her heart and love in ward); respect for these her babes preserve, at least! since it may not her obscure death retard: Moved be thy pitying soul for them and me, although my faultless fault unmoved thou see! And if thou know'est to deal in direful fight the doom of brand and blade to Moorish host, know also thou to deal of life the light to one who ne'er deserved her life be lost: But an thou wouldst mine inn'ocence thus requite, place me for aye on sad exiled coast, in Scythian sleet, on seething Libyan shore, with life-long tears to linger evermore. Place me where beasts with fiercest rage abound, Lyons and Tygers,-there, ah! let me find if in their hearts of flint be pity found, denied to me by heart of humankind. there with intrinsic love and will so fond for him whose love is death, there will I tend these tender pledges whom thou see'st; and so shall the sad mother cool her burning woe.