Five Star Friday's 191st Edition Is Brought to You By Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by the gift of origami, grief and oneness, recognizing and growing your beauty, the humanity behind data analysis, the reality behind the student protests in Québec, understanding a relationship after loss, the safest way, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:

I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.
— Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Happy Friday!

"One Thousand Cranes" from Good Day, Regular People:

With his thumbnail, he drew a sharp crease in the shiny gold foil, allowing time in between each fold for our son to imitate the precise movements with his own piece. I saw something in our peaceful son's eyes come alive with that very first time of paper folding. As he watched his father, I remember him breathlessly saying, "It's so cool that I can make my own toys." He had found his thing; through my husband, he has learned the art of origami.

Our son has been folding origami for nine years now.

"The Desert Within" from KathyRoberts's Posterous:

Zen master Suzuki Roshi speaks about human existence and death by using a waterfall metaphor. As the water tumbles over the edge of a mountain, it goes from stream to droplets. The droplets represent our time in life as individuals. The length of time it takes for the droplets to fall is our lifespan. When we make it to the bottom, we rejoin the stream. Nothing is lost. The droplet simply expands to become part of the whole.

"Visualizing Emptiness: Reflections on a Preoccupation with Missing Values" from Datatelling:

I want to harness the power of whitespace in real life — I imagine diving into that picture and putting empty chairs around the table for all the people who are missing from the conversation. I want to create physical empty spaces to visualize the missing values. To force us to see who is missing.

"Getting Bigger to Get Beautiful..." from Last Mom On Earth:

Here's to getting bigger, any way we can, and leaving the size of our bodies out of it. Here's to wandering far and wide, to gardens and greens and sweat and health and holiness. Here's to dissolving obsession, to seeing the world, to making beauty with our guts and teeth and hands. Here's to being human, to growing and changing taking care of ourselves. Here's to beauty, because we know what beauty really is, and it doesn't have anything to do with getting smaller.

"Québec! What Is Going On Up There?" by Michelle Dean at The Awl:

I assure you that the need to know a second language becomes rather unobjectionable if the trade-off is free access to health care and cheap education. (And actually, I would daringly suggest that knowing a second language can be valuable and enjoyable!) I don't know what a Québec without those things will look like, and I wish I wasn't about to find out. If I could I'd bang a pot for you tonight, la patrie, but my neighbours here in New York have children and a seriously annoying little yappy dog. I'll have to make do with a salute to the moon and a dinner of pizza-ghetti. I hope you'll understand.

"Grief" from Be Gay About It:

That's what propagates the catch in my throat — that I picture her hobbling around her apartment, the TV on too loud, the dust settled onto things as she applies lipstick and taps her cigarette against the side of her porcelain dish just as clearly as I picture her carried on the wind, sinking into blue or kneading herself into the dirt and roots of a flowering new life.

"What Lasts and the Earth of Forever" from Jen Lemen:

Of course, in the end the safest way is to give and give and give some more, because the days are passing and we won’t always be here. In the end, the only things that outlast us are beauty, truth, freedom and love. That and our stories about how we gave our hearts like seeds, planted in ways that can only live and die and live again into the earth of forever.

Please come back and share good writing with us over the coming week to be featured on the next Five Star Friday. If you have read a really good piece on someone else's weblog, submit it by Thursday at midnight CST to have it featured on Five Star Friday.

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Comments

[alexandra]

Honored by you in so many ways, Schmutzie. By your writing, by your friendship, by your acknowledgement. Thank you.

[schmutzie]

Alexandra: Of course! And you're welcome.

[Marie Nicole]

What an education piece by Michelle Dean! I grew up in Montreal's West Island in the 70s and this explained more than I ever could understand. Thanks so much for sharing the link.