Skip to main content

What is the story behind the broken kite?

Image
By
This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns

The broken kite by Hassan Voyeau

I had this idea. I would open the pen-up app and close my eyes and just draw random lines and then fill the random shapes formed with color. But what does my new art piece represent? I used Google lens and found that the closest match pointed to a gallery with a mixture of kites and vector art. Then it occured to me that it looks just like a broken kite. A kite that had gotten stuck in a tree and was pulled down but got broken and damaged in the process. It also kinda looks like a fish that got damaged too. Maybe it is a fish kite. I was reading about the history of the kite. The exact origin is unknown but it is believed that they were flown in China more than 1000 years ago. One suggestion is that a Chinese farmer tied a string to his hat to prevent it from flying off and that is how the first kite was born. In Japan they celebrate Children's Day with fish shaped kites called koinobori. Koi is a Carp type of fish. Legend has it that a Carp fish swam upstream to turn into a dragon. Because Carp fish can swim upstream they represent strength and courage. This has me thinking. What is the highest a kite could fly? According to the Guinness Book of World Records the highest kite was flown by Robert Moore over a sheep farm in Australia. The height reached was 16,009 feet.

I like this quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, "A broken kite teaches you more about the wind than a whole one ever could." Friedrich was a German philosopher. He started as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. I had no idea that philology was a thing before today. I read that a philologist is a type of linguist who studies the history of languages, especially by looking closely at literature. They are also known as collectors of words and their etymologies. I found another Friedrich quote. "The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly." I asked my friend Gemini to explain this quote to me. Gemini tells me that you should not be discouraged if others don't understand your ambitions. Keep striving for your goals. He goes on to caution that just because you have achieved more doesn't mean you should look down on others. I think everyone will experience the highs and lows of life. We learn ambition and humility in the process. One day we are flying high and one day we are the broken kite. Life is a test that is full of questions. We may ask why? We aim for the sky only to one day return to the ground when we say our last goodbye. The higher a kite flies, the more it feels the pull of the string. Even with great heights and ambitions, we are still connected to something that keeps us grounded.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Below the surface

By
This is a chapter from my eleventh book called Quotation Marks Sparks . __________ "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn __________ I was looking at quotes that hit hard and this quote stood out to me. It seems mundane and obvious and often repeated. Life is about how we respond to the inevitable. It is not what happens to us but how we respond. I had to ask myself to dig deeper and look below the surface. Then I saw that when we surf we really become the waves. We become friends with the waves. The waves and us are the same. Further, the waves are created by us and in our heads. We can control the waves because who can surf all the time? Sometimes we just have to come to shore and build sand castles on shore. I asked my friend Gemini for feedback and he said that I was right, the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote initially seems like a simple call for resilience, but my deeper dive reveals profound layers. The idea that we can move beyond merely rea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thankful

By
It is 617pm and I have decided to write. Right now I am thankful. The cool of the evening has replaced the heat of the day. I took a bath and changed and now I am just relaxing. Sometimes I complain. Not often. But I feel bad afterwards because there is so much to be thankful for. There is always room for improvement and we have to identify the things for improvement and change is often good but we do not have to make it into complaints. Yeah I get it. Life is hard and none of us has it easy. Look on the bright side of things. And sometimes it is the little things that remind us that life is good. Things that we take for granted. Like I was coming in the maxi taxi today and heard a gospel song that was about gratitude. God does appreciate a grateful heart. Trinidad and Tobago celebrated sixty four years of independence yesterday and if we stop and listen to the many complaints we would swear we are living in the worst country in the world. That is not the case. We do get a lot of thing...
Post a Comment
Read more

Installing NodeBB using Termux

By
This is the ChatGPT prompt I used to be guided Guide me through installing NodeBB using Termux (This took some time and patience to troubleshoot errors and implement workaround) pkg update && pkg upgrade -y pkg install proot-distro git curl wget nano -y proot-distro install debian proot-distro login debian apt update && apt upgrade -y apt install -y curl git build-essential ca-certificates gnupg apt update apt install -y imagemagick apt install -y redis-server redis-server --daemonize yes redis-cli ping mkdir -p /opt git clone https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB.git /opt/nodebb cd /opt/nodebb ./nodebb setup warn: NodeBB Setup Aborted.  Error: Could not load the "sharp" module using the android-arm64 runtime Possible solutions: - Manually install libvips >= 8.18.3 Force node to report platform as linux to get sharp to install curl -LO https://nodejs.org/dist/v22.23.1/node-v22.23.1-linux-arm64.tar.xz tar -xJf node-v22.23.1-linux-arm64.tar.xz mv node-v22.23.1-lin...
Post a Comment
Read more