For the sake of self explanation and for the sake of this pointless story let me explain why I choose church instead of mosque, and Priest instead of Imam. If I had chosen the later over the former I bet you things will have looked boring to you. You will never have paid that much energy in reading it. Now that I mentioned something about a church you are all up in the arms how dare I say something about Christianity? I guess my stealth trap door worked. This pointless story about the church and the priest hatched in my mind while I was walking beside a church. I live right beside a church. I hear the church bell every morning. I am a member of YMCA. I see the priest every day not that I have a business to see him as I don’t have the leisure to look beyond the immediacy of my life. Now do I subscribe to the teaching of the religion? No I don’t. Do I think there are parallel similarity between Islamic mannerism teaching and Christianity? I think the sermon from the walls every morning testifies their aklaq teaching. Are we that easy to be beguiled by the mere mentioning of some other religion?

Modesty Pardon the crying wind.I think you guys didn't get the theme of the story.Can't you guys notice the theme beneath the story? I hope some one does.Even though I have used the first persona I am trying to convey a message here.Its a story.Read between the lines.Pick some lessons along the way.

I am sitting in a room, next to a chapel. I can hear the sermon of the pastor reach my ears like pleasant words you try to pay close attention. This sermon which I am hearing from the next room aroused my curiosity. I am awed by the remarkable words the pastor is imbuing on a group of young teenagers. This is the period in their young life when parents, friends, and church/mosque are helping in forming these young minds. The creature in us is too complex to be entirely consistent. When I was sunny and pleasant boy I remember how family acquaintances will try to correct any wrong doing in their presence. I wasn’t the perfect kid on the block. It was the people in the community which searched out the true substance of the man in me. It is the true guidance of those folks which still guides me to deal wisely with the phenomena of the daily life. We constantly find the core of maturity in us. We all have these cores of maturity; we only need to find them. We all must be capable to deal constructively with reality of the daily life. We don’t need to direct our creative and constructive energy into a negative force. One of the hard realities of life is to find the maturity in us. The measure in our life maturity is to find out how ready we are to accept the bad in life and be ready to put it behind while concentrating on the good that might be ahead. Lately I have been thinking about whence the charming princess will wake me up from the doldrums of my dream of finding the perfect woman. Is there a perfect princess out there waiting to exhale me or fill the other half in me? Why not I am a good looking young Farah with a modest education. The reality dictates though that there is nothing as such thing as a perfect person out there or is there another half waiting to fill me into a full. I am full as people might see me today. Many years ago I jotted down all that I wanted to see in a woman; a patient woman,a beautiful smile, good set of teeth, a good family, same Qabiil, a hopeful woman and at least a woman with some college education, and a good personality. Now I know the Qabiil line might have thrown some eyebrows around. Perhaps many of you might saying under your breath How naïve can you be Stoic? Man is a gregarious animal, not only in our physical sense but also our social life. We all come from different family backgrounds. To be accepted into our community we all wanted to be aligning with the liking of our kinsmen. We feel that the only way we can increase our belonging to our circles of family ties is by joining ourselves to them. This is where maturity comes to play. I battled with the choices of my future wife for quite some times. I have dated women, but only got disappointed whenever she can’t pass one of my bias pointers. To desire that which is hurtful to others can be sinful and cruel in its sense. I have lied to women when they didn’t make through my selection bias. Of all the points I have made above are true in its sense. I am not convinced that I am right. They all are unreasonable demands. A large part of my answer lies in the priest’s sermon that I heard this morning; Maturity.undeniably we are all influenced by matters that are not of our liking, but we can still make mature decision as the priest put it to the kids. Maturity. Maturity. And Maturity!

Maf Keese, the graduation picture you linked to my name is disqualified.I personally did not took the picture.A family member did took the picture during the graduation walk.I will kindly ask the respected voters to consider the second picture I posted yesterday.My banner is "One vote...One call...thats all" .

I took the trouble of developing these pictures.I need your votes ladies and gentlemen.The location of the picture is the magnificient city of Savannah, Georgia.It is a southern style with a southern hospitality taste in it.I took these pictures two saturdays ago while driving around the city........One Vote....One call....Thats all....

There was a Harvard professor who once said, I can't trace his name for now, "If you think education is expensive try ignoranceâ€. Sixteen years of schooling convinces me that there is no a world of sharing and hospitality out there. Neither is there a promising job of a lifetime out there. But I will tell you this; the value of your education will always guide you against ignorance. Few of us realize how education is a leveler of the cruel world we live in. Before you think of becoming the dominant female that apportions vegetables to her family, I will advice you, like the rest did before me, to give yourself some time to think over your thoughts. No one is continually aware of his thoughts until he reflects back on them quite some time.Aqoon Laan Wa Iftiin Laan.

The subject of manners can injure feelings or cause misunderstandings. One doesn’t need an anthropologist to tell him/her that if he was done a favor by a co-worker he should thank the co-worker who happened to help him/her. The word “thank you†is a frame for reference of all that is good. The word is unwritten law of all mankind to show courtesy! Lately I have often found myself to want to coach some thoughtless individuals about the importance of being appreciative when Stoic helps him/her to accomplish to meet an end of the month deadline. To get a vivid idea of my rant, picture yourself being “Mr/Mrs nice†helping co-workers meet their monthly goals. And then to the surprise of it all, the person won’t acknowledge or even say thank you! It is an insult for the person to not acknowledge your effort. Values are an important part of human experience. Value laden relationship legitimizes your actions. During the past few months I have been working temporarily in company X. I have been given the responsibility of helping two people meet their goals. I will call them Jason and Susan. I tend to pay special attention to individual reactions closely without saying much. I stay mentally alert though. I have lately recognized the power of the word “Thank Youâ€. Whenever I help Jason I always get the services of the word. But things are different when I help Susan. She is too demanding and unappreciative fishwife! I have decided to place myself as Mr. Manners around the cubicle. To set standards that will create acceptable values around me I have decided to teach Susan a lesson! I pondered on the thought for weeks while I was minding my business around the laboratory. I become a proactive focuser of what will happen if I say “Thank You†every time I handed a report to Susan. She will realize how my replies will break one of the exactions of the taste of the word. Now every time I email her or hand over a report I say the word "thank you" until she now jumps before me with a limpid eye and a mouth gasping with a quick "thank you"! Few of us realize the importance of the word. Before the day is over look over to your side and say "thank you" to your wife/husband/ children whenever they hand you that remote control.

I am inviting Xiin and Baashi to attend the Somaliland conference in Washington. Atleast the organizers thought of the East Coast this time. Perhaps we will all wade through the knee-deep noisome swamps of the “Secessionist campâ€. I promise there will be no pernicious habit of SOL name calling. I am excited to attend the conference for the first time hopefully if it all works out. I can’t guarantee that we might not need to spend several halcyon days by the shores after the conference . *As for the article, it is a terse response with gargantuan dream buttressed with some reasonable arguments*.

Letter Eight Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden August 12, 1904 I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they ill also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space. How could it not be difficult for us? And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. but only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. for if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else. Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has become a part of your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow. And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words. Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

I doubt if we live in an era where women have no recourse, but to follow men orders. Women today have the power to filter through the social and cultural ceiling. Somali women are no exception. You should stand up for the values of pluralism and equalities whenever you happen to experience one of those setbacks you mentioned. By Golly, you might as well have stormed out of that restaurant when they shuffled you to a dim lighted corner. I have never ever allowed someone to choose a sitting setting for my female company. I always sit with her anywhere we decided to occupy. Yes I have seen restaurants with separate settings, but I have never seen a sitting regulations stacked on the walls of the restaurant. You can’t be enraged without being engaged sister. Start the revolution next time you are looking for the bariiska qaraxaa ah! Damn I am oppressed by the Somali woman .

Fire is a dangerous thing. You will not know this until you witness it or experience it happen. I have often seen my Somali community taking the precaution of fire lightly. Pardon me for gearing away from your questions by addressing some important factors that may one day be helpful to your life. There are four elements of fire; heat, oxygen, fuel and chemical reactions. If these four elements are combined you will have fire ready anytime. Fire is normally divided into four categories; class A (solid materials), class B (flammable liquids, gasoline), class C (electrical), and class D (metals). You need to put fire extinguishers in your house and your car. This is an important factor. Different fire extinguishers are used for different purpose. You must know what type to use when the occasion arises. For flammable liquids like gas and cooking oil try to use class B carbon dioxide extinguishers. For electrical equipments use class C fire extinguishers, and for solid materials use Air pressurized water extinguishers. Please remember never ever use water when electric is involved because water is a good conductor. I have often seen Somali families using spark prone equipment near combustible materials-this is a no no situation. And please check once in a while if your fire extinguisher works. You may never know when the firefighters will arrive in time to save your wallet. If you live in the United States where most of the houses are made of wood materials please do keep a full face respirator for emergency exit. Have a safe day, won’t you? PS Pardon my safety talk.

Having insured the safety of Mogadishu I was happy with the “Islamist†took over of Mogadishu. I am still happy with their achievements. What I am not in agreement with is their style of no negotiations, accommodation, and conciliation of diverse interest of the Somali citizens. Sooner or later the public will get tired of their policing tactics. The disheartening fact will be to have a couple of young gunmen with power to question your every private action. Individuals may misperceive the goal of policing even though they maybe mistaking good for the bad. Nothing I am saying is meant to imply that what these sheikhs are advocating for is evil. Individuals should have the right to their private life whether that is choosing to watch a movie at the theater or having a circle of Quraanic classes. Individuals should be able to decide matters bearing to their conduct freely without the policing of authority in power. I will draw on A bit of simple example of my early schooling in Kenya. The brain of my beloved parent hatched an idea of schooling me under an Islamic environment even though the school was not an Islamic one, but majority of the student were Muslims. For all its advantage of learning under Islamic environment, the system of the student body governing was of a Taliban style. We had to wake up by force whether we liked it or not in the morning for Fajr prayer. I appreciate up until today for that discipline. If any of the students had his pants dragging he was jeered or looked in a funny way. The majority of the students had no choice, but to comply. Until this day I wonder how many of the kids that were praying the morning prayers did it for the sake of Allah including me! There was no bargaining as to what the individual wanted. In all most all, perhaps all the things I did during those school years were due to conformity. The system was so rigidly constructed that no one could question the Islamic authority. Although these were immense training for the better of the students and the community, I wonder if any of the majority of my circle knew what they were doing was not for the sake of Allah, but for the fear of mere human. I am seeing some similarities between my old school and the new Somali Islamic authority. Yes what they are doing is compatible with the traditional norm of the Islamic society. Yes the Islamic courts may view certain things too crucial for compromise, but where is the privacy? The future of Somalia will be uncertain with this kind of policing.

I will miss this guy two years down the road.Was it not in China that he couldn't find the exit door? Who else can be as frank and honest with his opinion as the Bushwack does? The moment he steps out of the Air Force one helicopter, the man is ready to answer any question without second guessing himself.The man sticks to his "principles". This is the guy that laughs off with his shoulders shaking at the same time(will be on Guiness book record ).The GOP are not that concern with the president for now as every second term president is.He can do as many blunders.

Ahura.I am like the new anchor man who hasn’t bought his first suit yet because he can’t afford it (first "big" pay check didn’t come through after college).You could only hear his voice, but no Picture. I am planning to spend an arm and a leg on a digital camera in the next few months (IA).For now I have to use my CVS one time camera. Sorry for breaking the rules!

I was so taken aback. Beautiful she said, beautiful. I am blooming like a red rose. I cause a ripple on a still water .Great Pictures Amiga!! The closest I ever got to a Vietnam is about two weeks ago when on a conference trip our traveling department booked a hotel for me with a Vietnamese dude. Habenki iyoiithiil baan gaad iskahaye amuubusaad imotha cawao ayan isiirri..I am kidding.

Letter Nine Furuborg, Jonsered, in Sweden November 4, 1904 My dear Mr. Kappus, During this time that has passed without a letter, I have been partly traveling, partly so busy that I couldn't write. And even today writing is difficult for me, because I have already had to write so many letters that my hand is tired. If I could dictate, I would have much more to say to you, but as it is, please accept these few words as an answer to your long letter. I think of you often, dear Mr. Kappus, and with such concentrated good wishes that somehow they ought to help you. Whether my letters really are a help, I often doubt. Don't say, "Yes, they are." Just accept them calmly and without many thanks, and let us wait for what wants to come. There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. And about feelings: All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean? And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers - perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life. That is all, dear Mr. Kappus, that I am able to tell you today. But I am sending you, along with this letter, the reprint of a small poem* that has just appeared in the Prague German Labor. In it I speak to you further of life and death and of how both are great and glorious. Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

Letter Six Rome December 23, 1903 My dear Mr. Kappus, I don't want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. . . . But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing. And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from. Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Who says that you have any attitude at all? - I know, your profession is hard and full of things that contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless note that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear Mr. Kappus, now have to experience as an officer, you would have felt in just the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in would not have been spared you. - It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way - and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, and the grown-ups are nothing, and their dignity has no value. And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere, when ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think that a child can hold him, him whom grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone? Or don't you think that someone who once had him could only be lost by him? - But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and Muhammad deceived by his pride - and if you are terrified to feel that even now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about him - what justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost? Why don't you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn't it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? - Must not he be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has already existed? As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit? Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order to being; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come. And be glad and confident. Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

Letter One Paris February 17, 1903 Dear Sir, Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. With this note as a preface, may I just tell you that your verses have no style of their own, although they do have silent and hidden beginnings of something personal. I feel this most clearly in the last poem, "My Soul." There, something of your own is trying to become word and melody. And in the lovely poem "To Leopardi" a kind of kinship with that great, solitary figure does perhaps appear. Nevertheless, the poems are not yet anything in themselves, not yet anything independent, even the last one and the one to Leopardi. Your kind letter, which accompanied them, managed to make clear to me various faults that I felt in reading your verses, though I am not able to name them specifically. You ask whether your verses are an y good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to inte4rest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted. But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn't write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I as of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer. It was a pleasure for me to find in your letter the name of Professor Horacek; I have great reverence for that kind, learned man, and a gratitude that has lasted through the years. Will you please tell him how I feel; it is very good of him to still think of me, and I appreciate it. The poems that you entrusted me with I am sending back to you. And I thank you once more for your questions and sincere trust, of which, by answering as honestly as I can, I have tried to make myself a little worthier than I, as a stranger, really am. Yours very truly, Rainer Maria Rilke

Time: May 2006 Place: No Stalkers Photographer:Family Member PS My graduation ceremony.Can you spot the big Somali headed dude and the blonde hair ?

Naden, you got 4/5.You are Smarter than most .Now go ahead and become the genius one by figuring that answer .

^^^Dude are you one of the newbies? You sure got a list of dos and don'ts.I am curious.

Ahura, I can tell you were conscious of your surrounding.It surely looks depresive with the rain.I bet you that road gives you uninviting looks when it rains.

So who wants to whet his intellectual curiosity? I know I am.I remembered this topic I started some time ago.One completely fascinating thing about litreture I have noticed lately in my readings is the magic that surrounds characters in a book.I am currently reading Victor Hugo's LE Miserable.The thing I like about my lately habit of reading litreture text is that there are no deadlines that are presing me unlike when I was in school.Sometimes I wonder why I never started reading this texts long time ago.I have found a great old bookstore that sells books far cheaper than Barnes and Nobles. Its time to test the incredible wisdom of SOL'ers. If all the questions I am asking to you is merely a review then excuse my mental handicap of the world of litreture. 1. Raisin in the sun by Hansberry was a play about what? 2. Despite his abusive nature toward his wife this poet was declared as an embodiement of romanticism. 3. What is the name of the heroine in Ibsens A "Doll House" 4. who was the Herlem Reinaissance poet who asked "What Happened to a dream defered" 5. What is the name of the main character (Who was jailed for stealing a loaf of bread) in Victor Hugo's Le Miserable ALOHA!!!

I used to be a big fun of the hip hop until these so called dirty south rappers (Yes including Ludacris and Little John) objectified women in a vile language. I am appalled by the enormity of their offense. I never liked either how the hip hop summit with Russell Simmons treat this serious matter with such levity. They are all men/women excited by the cupidity of their souls. They are doing this for the money. I will admit though during my days I have seen Nas, Usher, Little John (yeah ah!), Jermaine Dupree, Bow wow(when he was little) and one of the Outkast dude (the funny dressed dude not big Boi).

^^^Lol...His words are like apples of gold in pictures of silver .If I was to save my life with his words, I'd have offered myself as a victim long time ago.I never got any scope of what in the world the dude just said.