40

 

Don't just stand there. Come on in. It's open.

Banana Pin-ups

 

Aren't they just perfect?

Produce Market

 
Nothing is as powerful as food bringing people together.
Nothing is as powerful as money tearing them apart.

My Reason

 

I wonder what irrepressible forces stop us from wanting or accepting to be indefinitely alone, even when entirely self-sustaining and independent. Love, maybe. Fear. Runaway time. Or is it a projection, a proof that we exist, and that the day we go, we will be more than a void leaving a void, that someone will maybe remember. And someone will care.

Someone does care. My reason not to be alone.

Used...

  

Late Morning

  

This one was done after a short and relatively intimate tour of the shouf area. It has been a few years, but this sight still touches me as much as it did on the day I experienced it for the first time.

The Garbage Side

  

The garbage side of Lebanon. One that will not make me love it less, but love it even more. For this is the time to make things better, when things are rotten. Not when they're impeccable and clean.

Meager Old Door

 


Needless to say, I've always fostered a deep fascination for old houses and old doors. What was it that first ignited the passion. Serenity maybe, warmth, magic. Pure organic beauty. Or some old door with a homegrown story that somehow got lost in the dimly lit alleys of my childhood memory. Who knows.

The inciting reason was gone but the object remained with me nonetheless. Each door to my mind had become a gateway to a universe waiting, and a passage to a wonderful place called home.

Each door was also hiding a story. At least one story that I constantly thought about, dreamt of, and delicately wove of my imagination. How could I not imagine when not once had I really found the courage to knock, get inside and find out.

I did, though, ask my father about one. One that looked so old and so torn it was almost human. My father who spent most of his life in Beirut and knew its shadiest corners, said he knew the owners well. An octagenarian man who used to work at the ministry of agriculture, and his wife, both left alone in their two-thirds of a century old house by a son and a daughter who married, and left to Canada and the Emirates.

I kept listening, eager for more. But that was it. An aged couple and a simple story of them raising their kids and letting them sail through oceans of their own. Nothing else. No mysteries. No beautiful girls, no fairytales, no dreams. At least none that I would accept as such. Just an old couple abandoned to their nearing fate.

I regretted asking him. Because of him, I suddenly lost one of my stories to reality. My consolation was to later understand that my father just happened to know about the one door with no secrets and no fairytales. He knew about the exception. And there were so many other ones which he certainly knew nothing about. Those were the ones I would hang onto, and diligently recreate. And so I did.

Though sometimes I would get my doors and my stories mixed up, I never stopped dreaming about old doors and hidden legends. As I grew older, I started painting them also, and writing some of what I created in my thriving, still juvenile imagination.

Many years have passed since then. Today, as I post a new picture of a new meager old door and its dark green tiara, I take a quick peek inside the door that opens onto my aging young soul, and realize this much. That this is one journey I won't be abandoning anytime soon.

Ooooo!

 

On my Balcony

  


A few handfuls of grain and bread crumbs... the grey feathered visitors of our balcony in Beirut will hopefully visit again.

White Hibiscus

  

Yellow Curtain

 

Yellow curtain, red window, white sky. Sober and bright. A painting waiting to happen.

My Teta and a Prayer

 

With the ill wind of suffering and death falling upon too many innocent lives, I don't know that I could have posted anything else tonight.

Pauline I call her. My teta. You see it in her eyes. Weak. Yet hopeful. Old and happy to be alive.

Through those eyes of my teta I try to see the world. But tonight I can't.

Tonight, and for all those who've earned it, I just pray that there be a ruthless god, hell, and a long, long judgement day.

Climbing

 

Thirty-One

That's it. It's done. Thirty-one turns around the sun. Can you imagine. Thirty-one. I'm thirty-one. Yes thirty-one. Funny thing is I still feel like my teenage years have just begun.

Poem

In the green shadow of a tree
I lay my life
Down with a story
Waiting for glory
Longing to be
Ever so slightly bigger than me

In the white shadow of a cloud
I lay my days
At loss for meaning
As I am leaning
Broken but proud
Sand castle by a careless sea

In the blue shadow of a song
Able to sing
Not to belong
Trying to dream of
How to be free
Weaving a future
With made up pictures I can't foresee

In the grey shadows of my lot
I look for heaven
But find it not
Thirty one years
And searching where I shouldn't be
Around me, not inside of me

In the green shadow of a tree
I lay my life
Down with a story
And all its glory
For now I see
Heaven's much closer
Than 'round the corner
It's been here waiting
For you and me
In the green shadow of a tree

Heaven is Closer

 

Around the Corner

 

In the Green Shadow of a Tree

 

Samak

 

House of a Thousand Windows