LOVE BUTTERFLY - Love is like a butterfly | Podcast by Neha's Notebook

Time and time again, people have wondered what love is. Sometimes we think that love is romance, sometimes we think that love is devotion and loyalty and faith. Sometimes we think love is sacrifice while sometimes we think love is eroticism. Everyone has a different definition of love.

 

Sometimes we believe that love is about our relationship with another person and sometimes we believe that love is about befriending ourselves and our deepest shadows.

 

In my opinion, love is like a butterfly that flies from flower to flower. These flowers are our thoughts and butterfly is our point of attention. Our point of attention travels from thought to thought throughout the day and all the time.

 

Love is also what causes the butterfly to fly from flower to flower, what causes it to select a flower and then move on to another flower and so on.

 

Just like a butterfly is born from the metamorphosis of a caterpillar, love is born out of a series of metamorphosis processes. A caterpillar, once ready, starts getting encapsulated in a gooey cocoon. Nobody knows what happens inside this cocoon. Its one of the greatest mysteries of life. Similarly, no one can decipher what’s happening inside of us while we are encapsulated in a series of challenges and struggles. We struggle, we evolve and out of this series of evolutions, emerges the energy of love. Like the cocoon of caterpillar bursts open into a butterfly, our cocoon bursts open with the roaring energy of love that is calm and intense at the same time.

 

Like a butterfly, love has wings. It flies and spreads like an ocean. It roars like a majestic tiger. It is like a mighty hero.

 

It is that which connects one thing to the other. It is the secret thread of connection between one and two. It is the pigment behind every color. It is also the canvas on which the colors are painted.

 

Love is the insight and also the stream of thoughts which led to this insight. It is beauty and also the emotion which causes us to feel the beauty.

 

Wrapping it all up,

 

Love is a butterfly

she needs to grow her wings

she needs to fly

atop the crayon-dusted flowers

and gardens and meadows

So let love grow its wings

in the cocoon of your mind

Let it emerge, fly and soar

like an eagle butterfly!

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Book Review: The Lost Apothecary | Neha's Notebook

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

As I closed the book after reading it, the book left me with a lonely feeling. The world presented in the book was so immersive and intriguing that it had such an effect on me. I did not want to leave this world once dived into it.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner is a bestselling historical fiction novel based in the setting of London. It is a story of 3 women, and countless other women who desired to take control of their lives.

The novel presents the story of three protagonist women character named Nella, Eliza and Caroline. While Nella is a 17th century apothecary, Caroline is a present-day aspiring historical researcher.

Nella has a shop in which she secretly sells poisons to the women who want to get rid of the men who have betrayed or wronged them. She works hard to brew every poison working day and night in the disguised corner of her shop. She has only two rules – that her poisons will never be used against any woman, and second, the names of all her women customers will be recorded in her apothecary register.

One day Nella has a customer, who she expects to be a woman, but who turns out to be 12-year old girl named Eliza. Eliza works as a maid in the house of a woman who wants to get rid of her husband, and who has sent Eliza to get some poison for her purpose. Over time, Nella, a forty-year old woman and Eliza began to form a close bond of friendship. Nella shares some of her buried secrets with her.

Whereas in the present day, Caroline, a middle-aged woman is experiencing betrayal and infidelity from her husband James. She sets out on a solo trip to London to process her emotions and have some alone time. There, while on a mudlarking tour near a river, she discovers a blue-colored vial with an etching of bear. Upon researching in the library and on the internet, she comes across the story of Nella and Eliza, only discovering much more than what the world knows about them.

The novel beautifully blends the flavours of a contemporary fictional world and intriguing historical ingredients with a tinge of mystery concocted into it. The Lost Apothecary is a captivating read both for a reader’s mind and for a writer’s mind. The language is simple yet weaving an engrossing world of storytelling. So, if you are a fiction lover, do add this book to your reading list. It’s absolutely worth it, and therefore, a bestselling hit!

 
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AUTUMN COFFEE - Lessons Learned From Autumn Season by Neha's Notebook

AUTUMN COFFEE

 

Its October.

Autumn is brewing…

Leaves are falling down from the trees like flakes of gold.

It is that time of the year when you want to slip in a cosy blanket and read a fiction book while sipping a hot cup of coffee and eating fresh cookies.

In addition to this feeling of cosiness, autumn brings with it a set of lessons that we can learn from this season.

First and foremost, autumn teaches us to let go. It is like a last lovely smile that trees display before letting go of the leaves from their branches.

Before summer goes to sleep into the winter season, we can also let go of the past – the hurts, the failures, the regrets, the mistakes, and all before settling into a season of stillness and peace.

Autumn is also the season of homecoming and nurturing the energy of presence. Just like leaves return to the soil from where they were first born, autumn teaches us to heal our emotions and return to the home of our hearts where there is an eternal bliss waiting for us. Through this heart emerges a calm yet intense energy of awareness.

Autumn is also a call to hibernation. Animals start collecting nuts and settling in their cosy caves. Similarly, it is a call for us to hibernate into meditation and self reflect on the lessons learned, on insights gained and on feelings felt from our experiences.

While the sky is painted in shades of orange, maple, purple, gold and brown, autumn is also the season when days start getting shorter and nights longer. The entire landscape seems like a work of art. Similarly, autumn is the time to nurture our creativity and start learning something new. Draw, doodle, paint, journal, cook or do scrapbooking.

Above and beyond all things, autumn brings festive season on the cards. So, its also the time to celebrate yourself, your life and today. Nourish your enthusiasm and do something to fill yourself with gusto!

So, as your autumn coffee brews in the cup, brew yourself into celebration, knowledge, enthusiasm and creativity.

 

Thank you!

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WHAT IS TAUTOLOGY?

TAUTOLOGY

The saying of the same thing twice over in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style; a phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words; a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form. Derived from the Greek word tautologos which means ‘repeating what has been said’, from tauto- (same) + -logy (explanation, account., narrative).

Examples : I personally crafted this painting for you. 

The hot summer sun was scorching. 

Single bachelor 

"Discovered by Pooh, Pooh found it ." - Winnie the Pooh

"To be or not to be, that is the question." - Hamlet

In my opinion, I think he is wrong.

She started her speech with a short summary. 

He is always making predictions about the future

I heard it with my own ears.

Walk carefully because there is frozen ice on the road.

She cautioned her son against slipping. 

The evening sunset was beautiful.

Either the fox is brown or the fox is not brown.

"Our nation must come together to unite." - George W. Bush

I'm sorry to hear about your sad misfortune.

I wake up at 6am in the morning.

Tautology in abbreviations 

ISBN number, 

ATM machine, 

VIP person, 

DVD disc 

Although considered as a fault in logic, language and writing due to redundancy, tautology is employed in writing to add rhythmic composition and humorous style - ex: it is what it is, boys will be boys. In Mathematics, a tautology is a logical compound statement, which results in a true statement, regardless of individual statements. The opposite of tautology is called contradiction or fallacy.

THE BLACK CRAYON - Poetry & Short Story by Neha's Notebook

THE BLACK CRAYON

 

Once upon a time

there was a girl named Gold.

Her eyes like bright sapphires

her cheeks like blossoms red and bold.

 

Gold had a box of crayons.

With which she painted dusks and dawns.

Colouring mornings bright golden

with crayon yellow

and with green crayons

sketching blades of grass, soothing mellow…

 

With her box of crayons

Gold coloured the sky and the bluebells,

Lost in the sketchbook of her life

Gold carved herself a sparkling rainbow shell,

Reds of roses, and pinks of sunsets,

orange of marigolds, and creamy white of jasmines,

Oceans of emerald blues dripping from her dance

As she played with winds, fire, moon and earth’s skin

With a palette full of sparkles and colours,

She painted her laughter and playfulness

 

Until one day,

 

when she came across

a crayon

the black crayon,

 

As she picked it up,

and scrubbed it against her sketchbook’s paper,

her laughter turned to dismay,

a look of terror clawed over her face,

Sitting atop a cloud, she starting falling down

down and down into some dark alley

she shrunk and shrunk

but she kept colouring

as if a giant bucket of black paint had spilled itself

and now her fingers couldn’t stop

using this black crayon,

 

the yellow golden sky smudged into darkness

bluebells and marigolds drained of their colours

Nothing remained,

except for a gigantic dark blackness

and some slivers of white and grey spaces scattered hither-tither

 

Her joyful and playful world

had been engulfed under a giant shadow of black

Her box of crayons

nowhere to be seen or found

Everywhere she saw

there was only darkness,

a grim gloomy terrifying darkness

a cold hauntedness

there was quiet even though, but no silence

unlike in the worlds she drew with

her box of crayons…

 

Gold didn’t know what to do.

Her colourful world had shattered apart

Tears rolled down her icy white cheeks,

but the black crayon didn’t wash away

It was sticky, a wax crayon after all.

 

Gold spent days and days

weeks and months and years

crying and yelling

trying to smudge away the black crayon

from her sketchbook

and once again see the world

she had drawn with her

box of crayons…

 

but nowhere to be seen

was either her colourful world

nor her box of crayons…

 

Everywhere she saw

was only

a giant shadow

smudged everywhere around her

with black crayon

 

She slapped herself

she wailed

And regretted

why did she ever use

the black crayon…

 

But what else could she do

she didn’t know

what colour this black was…

she was an explorer

she explored all the colours

she had received

in her box of crayons…

but this one crayon

had smudged her entire world

into a blackening darkness,

a darkness she couldn’t escape from…

 

everything she drew

anything she painted

now got stained with

the colour of black…

 

She felt claustrophobic,

and immensely sad,

She wanted more than anything else

to get back her world

her vibrant playful blissful world

of colours,

her lovely box of crayons…

but all she could see

was the black crayon

which didn’t seem to finish,

only magnified and magnified

shattering every other colour

staining with black,

her box of colourful crayons…

 

She felt disgust,

She felt choked,

And shackled

 

She felt every moment

getting shrunk and shrunk

into tinier and tinier and tinier

her entire being

getting swallowed up

by the black crayon

 

She wanted to throw away

this black crayon

and free herself clean

 

But the black crayon had smudged

not only the colourful worlds in her sketchbooks

but her entire self

her hands her cheeks

every pore of her seemed to be

getting coloured by this

spooky curselike black crayon

 

She stood in front of a mirror

and shrieked a cry of horror

because now she herself

was turning bit by bit, pore by pore,

into

a black crayon.

Her teeth growing into giant pointy triangles

Her nails into pinny paws

She was getting covered from her foot to her scalp

in the colour

of the black crayon

 

She screamed

she kicked her feet

Her breath seemed to be getting choked out of her throat

 

But the black crayon

was now spiralling around her

spreading like giant branches

of a poisonous tree

wrapping rolling snaking around her

covering her pore to pore

into the colour

of the black crayon.

 

She used her will and might,

she used her power, and all her sight

but she was unable to get free,

from the serpentine grip of

this black crayon….

 

Losing her breath bit by bit,

she slumped down exhausted,

she had lost all her will,

but the memories were still

rolling down her black smudged eyes,

the memories of her colourful bright worlds

and the memory of her

box of crayons.

 

She had lost all hope

of even surviving,

let alone get back

her box of crayons….

 

Gold was not Gold anymore.

She wasn’t the same girl

as she was before.

Losing her box of crayons

she was now turning into a giant monster,

a monster, darker than the colour of black,

a monster, named as Black.

 

Her box of crayons

was now

but only

a giant black crayon,

and, Gold,

Gold was now,

Black.

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📖17 Writing Prompts from Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down The Bones ...

17 Writing Prompts from Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down The Bones 

#1 Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don’t worry if it is night and your curtains are closed – just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half hour.

#2 Begin with “I remember”. Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago. Everything that isn’t this moment is memory coming alive again as you write. If you get stuck, just repeat the phrase “I remember” again and keep going.

#3 Take something you feel strongly about, whether it is positive or negative, and write about it as though you love it. Go as far as you can, writing as though as you love it, then flip over and write about the same thing as though you hate it. Then write about it perfectly neutral.

#4 Choose a colour – for instance, pink – and take a fifteen minute walk. On your walk, notice wherever there is pink. Come back to your notebook and write for fifteen minutes.

#5 Write in different places – for example, in a laundromat and pick up on the rhythms of the washing machines. Write at bus stops, in cafes. Write what is going on around you

#6 Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop (or metro station). Be as specific as possible. Slow down in your mind and go over the details of the morning.

#7 Visualize a place that you really love, be there, see the details. Now write about it. It could be a corner of your bedroom, an old tree you sat under one whole summer, a table at McDonalds in your neighbourhood, a place by a river. What colors, sounds smells? When someone slse reads it, she should know what it is like to be there. She should feel how you love it, not by your saying you love it, but by your handling of the details.

#8 Write about “leaving”. Approach it any way you want.

#9 What is your first memory?

#10                    Who are the people you have loved?

#11                    Write about the streets of your city.

#12                    Describe a grandparent.

#13                    Write about:

swimming

the stars

the most frightened you have ever been

green places

how you learned about sex

your first sexual experience

the closest you ever felt to God or nature

reading and books that have changed your life

physical endurance

a teacher you had

Don’t be abstract. Be honest and write the details.

#14                    Take a poetry book, open to any page, grab a line, write it down and continue from there.

#15                    What kind of animal you are? Do you think you are really a cow, a chipmunk a horse underneath?

#16                    Write about a meal you love.

#17                    What are your deep dreams?

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FEELSTORA

FEELSTORA

= A story that revolves around and reflects the feelings and emotional states that the writer has at the time of writing it!

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Book Review: Story Alchemy: The Search for the Philosopher's Stone of Storytelling

Story Alchemy: The Search for the Philosopher's Stone of Storytelling by David Sheppard
Story Alchemy is a book that delves deep into the depths of the mechanism behind storytelling. With ideas like Plot Pentagon and Iris of Time, it digs deep into what makes up the fabric of a story. In this review, I share some insights I highlighted from the book.

Insights about storytelling 
#1 All storytelling is an imitation of life
#2 By staying on the right path to good storytelling, you become worthy
#3 the idea comes from the "chaos" of one's internal psychic state. It may be triggered by an external event or just pop into one's mind out of nowhere
#4 The way to come into closer contact with your idea is to close your eyes and see it as an image
#5 Conflict has many facets, and the storyteller should be student of the art of opposing wills.
#6 Any aspect of human nature and social interaction, when used properly, can be valuable and may even be indispensable in telling your story
#7 protagonist and antagonist are mirror images of each other (yin yang)
#8 the first thing your story should do is "lock the conflict."
#9 conflict is a mechanism for exploring theme And theme is the unifying idea behind the story - Themes speak to the human condition and unify the subject matter. Conflict puts the protagonist and antagonist under stress and reveals their strengths and weaknesses relative to the theme.
#10 A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves
#11 vivid images will always be of great assistance to your audience in remembering your story
#12 Story creation is a process of looking into a mirror
#13 Realize that the basics of your story already existed before you found it. You are simply dressing it up in new clothes. If you can come to the point where you realize that your storytelling is not your creation but your discovery, you'll begin to truly understand the process. give up the egotistical notion that you created the story. It is a gift, given to you by divine entities who reside within your Unconscious. They gave it to you because you are worthy.
#14 We experience life as story. We are mythical beings, and when confronted with something that seems so contradictory to our being, we have to experience it within the framework of story to fully resolve the internal conflict and emerge with a sense of meaning provided by this, the final event
#15 All the events of the story-unit you are investigating will have cause-and-effect relationships
#16 The sound-syllable Om represents the fundamental thought-form of all-pervading reality. With its associations with the universe in all its manifestation, Om is a complete alphabetical yantra in its own right and can be equated with the creative point, the bindu. It's a cosmic symbol that comes to life through character.

Insights About nature of mind 
#17 What is the Unconscious? It is the mind's processes, which are not available for introspection. Said another way, we are not aware of these mental processes. They go on, so to speak, without us. We normally do not realize the presence or understand the influence of the Unconscious on our thoughts. It appears spontaneously in dreams as a dark lake with lots of frightening creatures lurking within.

#18 [The Shadow] owes its existence to the simple fact that all the impulses, thoughts, wishes, and tendencies which run counter to the rational orientation of daily life are denied expression, thrust into the background, and finally fall into the unconscious. There all the things which we have repressed and suppressed, which we have deliberately ignored and devalued gradually accumulate and, in time, acquire such force that they begin to influence consciousness. 
#19 In itself, an archetype is neither good nor evil. It is morally neutral, like the gods of antiquity, and becomes good or evil only by contact with the conscious mind, or else a paradoxical mixture of both.
#20 Once we come to terms with the unconscious content through writing, we can deal with it internally without allowing its destructive effect to be projected onto the real world. The suppressed content then has expression within fiction and is not acted upon. At least that's the theory. Instead of mistakenly trying to resolve these internal issues in the real world, we are writing stories about them, just as the alchemist was perfecting himself while trying to create the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life.
#21 We are quite probably dreaming all the time, but consciousness makes so much noise that we no longer hear the dream when awake
#22 Journal and document your dreams and visions - dreams are bridges for the story material. This will also help you understand what is going in your psychic space.
#23 Be a passive observer of psychic darkness as if watching an animation
Look within and unfold the philosopher's stone of storytelling!

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