Amber Horizons. A beautiful sunset sky from Muweilah suburb in the Emirate of Sharjah, UAE
It’s one of the greatest privileges and reminiscences that I affirm with lot of gratitude is to have a balcony facing the West side without any major obstruction like buildings and other structures. With full realization that it won’t be forever, everyday, I’m always in awe of the beautiful compositions on the sky each day. It’s like having a customized subtle and private light show on your window every single day. Some days, it could be foggy and naive, whereas some days it would be a spectacularly vibrant and coruscating canvas on the sky. I captured this amber based theme on a beautiful evening. I wanted to test the night mode capabilities on Netta’s phone as well. I’m taking this moment to have a pause and appreciate what a beautiful blessing it is to just marvel at this scene. It’s one the key aspects of this interim and temporary home that I’m staying. Afterall, what’s permanent in this world ? Every moment, every aspect of our lives has intricacies in it that nudge you to remind of the transience of this world. Even this spectacular view isn’t permanent as well.
When your thoughts resonate well with someone else, that’s a beautiful moment. I was listening to the thoughts of a very famous singer’s view on privacy and how precious it is. Basically he was asked about his family, but he preferred to keep everything private, which is very hard these days, especially for public personalities. Along with his brilliant music, I admire him for his wisdom as well. I’ll quote his wise words on this.
"First of all I'm a very private person, and secondly because it'd be disrespectful to them. Privacy to me is precious and it saddens me that it has become devalued as people eagerly share details of every aspect of their lives online and feed the social media machine but I'll tell my young listeners especially something that my wise grandmother used to say. "Before you speak, cook your words". Think about the consequences of what you are sharing. You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Whatever you put out there about yourself and anyone else would be there for ever. Think carefully whether will you or others benefit from it. Do you think it'll represent you in five or let's say 10 years time. You'll change and grow throughout your life. Valuing your privacy will allow you to have second chances and reinvent yourself without being followed by regrettable things posted online. To me, questions about my family are absolutely connected to privacy and privacy is something that I want to protect not only for myself, but those close to me. Because I have a career that has a public face doesn't mean that I have the right to share information about people in my life nor do I want to. Actually, just the opposite, I beleive I have an obligation to protect their privacy. I rarely share personal details about my own life, let alone those of my family. It'll be disrespectful to disclose information about them. It'll violate boundaries of trust. I'm a composer, a musician and to the extent that I want to be known, I want to be known for my contributions to the field of music, especially to reviving and continuing the rich legacy of traditional music still existing in this world. Because, in the end, it's the work that matters, not the person behind it. As long as that person strives to develop a character worthy of his or her goal. So when I find misleading false statements about myself in various sources, I don't feel the need to rush out and correct them, thus revealing more about myself and my close ones than we would want and straying to the realm of celebrity. I keep in my mind by this quote from long before the information age by Ralph Waldo Emerson " “Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.” For those who have asked about my family and other personal aspects of my life, I hope you will now understand my reasons for remaining silent when it comes to this."
So long that I have worked on video projects here. While relishing the moments of little one around me, I made this with lots of love and gratitude to Almighty. Events unfolding always show me that there’s absolute goodness in everything happening. It’s like unwinding the reels of a movie that’s already shot. You’re the character of that movie, and the script is already written.
Full Moon
“The smile that flickers on a baby’s lips when he sleeps- does anyone know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.”
” No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire..”
– Orson F. Whitney
Subtle Trials – Original fine art from The Border of a Mind Studios.
I recently read about “human libraries” that is common in Denmark. The concept is interesting. There are libraries there where you can “borrow” a person instead of a book and listen to their life stories and experiences for 30 minutes. I came to know that this is available in several countries. Wealth of experience is a priceless resource.
Portrait – Libraries of People
..“Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink – it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. ”
..Whatever we hold at the level of thought, emotion, and spirit translates directly into experiences of either happiness and peace or chaos and dissatisfaction.
..Eiman Al Zaabi
“Level of Thought” – The Border of a Mind Studios Original Portraits
It’s philosophy time. I read this interesting exemplum recently. It’s the example of a coffee as outlined below. If we extend it to a broader realm, experiences work the same way. They can either catalyse us towards growth and improvement. They can also wear us down. It’s about channeling them and trying to cultivate a balanced frame of mind. God bless friends.
..“It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.”
That’s probably the longest hiatus that I might have taken after starting writing here. Mostly due to medical reasons, I was lacking the frame of mind that I need to be in this garden of thoughts. At the end of the road, there’s a bundle of joy around : ) Enjoying every bit of it, we are grateful to Almighty for helping us discover the purpose of why every little event happens the way it’s happening. We named him by name that means full moon in arabic.
..“Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience…”
““In the fear of creating something normal, he stared at that blank canvas for a very long time with a brush in his hand. He waited until all the paint dried up, his heart didn’t sing the songs anymore, the fire in his soul turned into ash, his flesh turned into bones, and until his dreams and thoughts faded into the oblivion.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams.”
