New Year, New Thoughts, New You

Welcome to 2012 and to your new beginning! We may not have had a great beginning, but the good news is that we can begin again. A new year is the perfect time to begin again.

Remember as a child there were do-overs? Well, you can do over what you want. Leave those things that no longer serve you, or those people and things that are toxic to your spirit. Take whatever lessons and blessings they were put into your life to teach, then let them go. Easier said than done? Of course, everything is. But remember, this is your “one wild and precious life,” as the poet Mary Oliver wrote, and if you work it right, one life is all you need. You don’t get a do-over in this arena. So create the life you want now.

One of the things that many struggle with every new year are those resolutions. New Year’s resolutions. Who thought that up, anyway? It might not be such a terrible idea, if they worked properly, or, were taught properly. First of all, I am one who redefines things that just don’t work for me. So, I do not make New Year’s resolutions, I create new intentions for the year. I also make it fun, not as if it were a chore or drudgery. This is not conducive to the manifestation of those intentions. I choose the feeling I want to feel for this year. Mine is peaceful. How and why a feeling?

“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.”—Benjamin Disreali

What are your intentions? What would be your resolutions, if you will? Okay, got it? Now, how would you feel if you accomplished those intentions? Elated? Joyous? Proud? Loved? Exhilarated? Play out that feeling. Feel it in all its passion and intensity. This is the feeling you want to stay with this year. When you begin from that feeling, your actions will follow.

Do whatever you need to do to get and keep that feeling. You also want this feeling in all areas of your life, not merely your business, or just your finances, or just your spiritual life. You are one integrated being. You are not split into many different parts that will feel elated in your business, but miserable in your relationships. Bring that feeling into your whole life.

Set your intention around that feeling. In order to maintain your chosen feeling, you must think the thoughts that are in alignment with the feeling. Remember, happy thoughts bring happy feelings, peaceful thoughts bring peaceful feelings, and in turn happy and peaceful results in your life. This is where you must exercise your most powerful tool—your power to choose. You do not have to think every thought that pops into your head. Yes, you cannot help the thoughts that come in, but you can control the ones that stay and set up house. Which thoughts are you entertaining on a regular basis? Your mind is your most valuable piece of real estate; what are you allowing to take up residence there?

I am a self-professed “re” person. I redefine my terms, I refresh my soul, I renew my mind, I recharge my body, I reignite my passion. It is my version of the “do-over.” I dare say that most of us are “re” people. I find that I cannot settle for less than I deserve. Yes, there will be times when I have to be in the wilderness to recharge and relearn some things. But I don’t make it my permanent home. I take the lessons and the blessings, pick up my makeshift bed and move on. This has been one of the most difficult, yet most valuable lessons I have had to learn. When it is time to let things and people go, we must let them go. They only came to teach or be taught something of value. We don’t really lose people or things; we receive the blessing from them, then they must go. But we have gained.

“The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“You want to control your life? Control the only thing you can control: the meaning you give something.”—Anthony Robbins

One of the things to redo in our lives is the way we make meaning of things. We are meaning-making machines to be sure, but how do we assign meaning? Remember the meaning you assign a situation is what will give it life. Yes, read that line again. The meaning you assign a situation is what will give it life, thus showing up as the results in your life. If I assign a certain meaning to money, for instance; my personal favorite is money and spirituality cannot mix or co-exist.

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard this one. So, of course, ministers, preachers and other spiritual-preneurs are supposed to be dirt poor. I grew up on this one, and although I didn’t originally assign the meaning to this one, I adopted it and made it my own. This was one I chose to keep and continue to assign the same unserving meaning to it.
This year, I have reassigned the meaning of money and spirituality: money is energy to use in the service of spiritual-preneurs to accomplish their divine purpose. Money is not this precious green stuff to be admired and hoarded only by the chosen few. I love the line from Hello, Dolly! where Dolly quotes her late husband Ephraim: “Money is like manure; it is to be spread around and used to make things grow!” This is one of the redefinitions I am adopting this new year.

So, for this new year, renew your mind, redefine your terms, and reinvent your assigned meanings, especially the ones that just aren’t working anymore. Reexamine what isn’t working for you and reset your scales. You will find that it does bring new life into those damp and dark crevices without completely having to spend a fortune on an entire body overhaul. Feel your chosen feeling, make new meanings, reignite your passion, and create your best life. A blessed and purposeful New Year to you!

“Your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.”—Raymond Charles Barber

CAIRO - amazing every day (part one)

In Arabic, CAIRO means "The Vanquisher" or "The Winner" and if you take a close look at the bustle of Africa's largest metropolis, you can easily understand why. Every day, Cairo survives the changes it is subjected to and greets tourists straight into the very heart of Arabian culture.

Even if from home, Cairo might seem an unsafe realm, things are different once you set foot in the Egyptian capital. Tourists remain respected guests regardless of time or season, so the Giza pyramids, the Egyptian Museum or the 500 mosques must stay on the list of architectural wonders you must see at any cost. And if it's during the fall, temperatures in the land of Egypt drop bellow 30 degrees and Cairo gladly lay its beauties at your feet, ready to fill you up with history, to present its traditions and lure you with its local cuisine. So step right up for a journey through the fabric of history and modernity!

A stroll through the realm of pharaohs

As soon as you land at Heliopolis Airport, you are greeted by the Egyptians' merchant skills, as they are used to take joy in tourists' wish to know as much as possible of the pharaohs lands' cultural richness. The offer is unmatched from souvenirs and hookahs with apple, peach and melon flavored tobacco to trips on the Nile on  board a felucca, a small, narrow ship with sails and oars, that the Egyptians have been using since the time of the pyramids. Moreover, you might also get an offer for a trip to the pyramids.

But take your time. Cairo must be enjoyed at leisure, one fascinating detail at a time. And any trip in the Egyptian capital must begin with a visit to the Egyptian Museum, the place where Ancient Egypt's treasures sit in state in glass window, carefully placed next to nine mummies of the most recent royal figures, including the one of Queen Hatshepsut, discovered by archeologists only in  the 1980s.

The ground floor of the museum hosts a vas collection of papyruses with fragments in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Ancient Egyptian. Right next to them unfolds a bit of Ancient Egypt's economy, with an entire series of gold, silver and bronze coins of Greek, Roman, Islamic and Egyptian origin. Be sure not to miss the large - scale artifacts of the New Kingdom (1550 - 1069 BC), which includes statues, tables and sarcophags of the Egyptian society's upper class.

Up on the first floor, the museum hosts artifacts dating back to the last two dynasties of Ancient Egypt, including treasures retrieved from the tombs of the Pharaohs Thutmosis III and IV, Queen Hatshepsut and the courtier Maiherpri. But the most important riches of the Egyptian Museum are revealed only now: the famous mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, made of 11 kilos of pure gold, alabaster vases and jewels of ivory and gold, all are part of the over 3500 artifacts found in the tomb of the famous Egyptian Pharaoh.

Built by the Egyptian government in 1835 near Ezbekeyah Garden, the museum was moved on the shore of the Nile, at Boulaq, 30 years later, because the initial building was no longer big enough to host so many artifacts. In 1878 however, the new building of the museum suffered permanent damage after the river overflowed. This is why the authorities had to move the exhibits to another museum in Giza. The artifacts stayed there until 1902, when they were moved, for the last time, in the current museum in Tahrir Square.

Travel through the desert

A scientist went on a journey through the desert of Sahara. He was accompanied by several Muslim Bedouin guides to not be lost in the middle of the desert.

Every night, the Bedouin who attended him, laid a rug on the sand and began to pray to Allah/ God.  

One evening, the researcher asks:
- What do you do, why you put your face on the sand?
- We pray to Almighty Allah (God).
- But did you ever met Him?  Did you spoke with Him? you have achieved Him?
- No.
- Then that is silly to pray to someone who you do not know!

 
The next morning, the scientist noticed some footprints in the sand. After making some research, he told the Bedouins accompanying him: 

 

- There has been a camel passing!
- Have you seen it? Have you heard? You put your hand on it? asked him the Bedouins.
- No, but left some traces and or sure it was a camel.
- And we too we see an oasis and we are happy to find it in our way because we drink water and we cool ourselves from the heat of the desert. We are happy when in our way we find one tree that we can rest under its shadow. We are glad when the sun rises and begins a new day. All these are tracks left by Allah, the Almighty.

Blessed are those who believe without seeing Him with their own eyes. Allah leaves us new signs every day, and we must learn to recognize and enjoy them when they come in our way.

Egyptian jewelries

 

Before the beginning of the 1st Dynasty in 3100 BC, the Egyptians already had access to precious metals, and throughout the Dynastic Period they acquired it in ever increasing quantities, at first from the Eastern Desert and Nubia, later too as tribute and spoils of war from Syria and the north.

The Egyptian craftsmen used these enormous amounts of gold in many and varied ways - to gild lesser materials, to plate wood and stone, solid casting it into small statuary, hammering and cutting sheets of it into elements of religious and ceremonial furniture and funerary equipment. However, its most widespread use was in the production of jewelry, both that worn by the living and, in particular, that made expressly for the adornment of the corpse. Egyptian funerary beliefs required that the mummified body be bedecked with the finest products of the jewelry- maker's art and, whether for amulet or collar, pectoral or diadem, the first choice of material, indeed the prescribed material according to some of the funerary texts, was gold.

Materials used in Ancient Egyptian Jewelry:

  

The Egyptian jewelry-maker did not use precious stone; what he held the most valuable the modern world would consider at best only semiprecious. It is, perhaps, even more surprising that some of the most characteristic and pleasing effects were obtained using man-made materials, such as glazed composition and glass in imitation of semi-precious stones. Furthermore, most of the materials used were chosen not just because their colors created a particular effect, but because colors for the Egyptians had an underlying symbolism or amulet significance. Indeed, in the case of funerary jewelry, certain materials were strictly prescribed for the magical properties of their coloring. Thus Chapter 156 of the Book of the Dead required the amulet in the form of the Girdle Tie of Isis, placed at the throat of the mummy, to be made of red jasper, whose blood-like coloring would enhance the words of the spell: ‘You have your blood, Isis; you have your power.’ 

Green was the color of new vegetation, growing crops and fertility, hence of new life, resurrection even. It was, in particular, the color of the papyrus plant, which in hieroglyphs actually wrote the word wadj, meaning 'to flourish' or 'be healthy'. Wadj was also the name for the emerald-green mineral malachite when it was employed as Egypt's principal green pigment for painting and as the main constituent of green eye make-up. But the green stone most favored by the Egyptians was turquoise -mefkat- whose Egyptian name in the Late Dynastic Period was used as a synonym for 'joy' and 'delight'. Apart from turquoise (and green glazed composition and glass in imitation of it), the principal green stones employed by Egyptian lapidaries were green jasper, green feldspar (also known as Amazon stone), prase, chrysoprase, olivine, serpentine and, in the Graeco-Roman Period, beryl and peridot.

Dark blue was the color of the all-embracing, protective night sky, of lapis lazuli- and of the deep-blue glazed composition and glass made to imitate it. Curiously enough, khesbed (hsbd), the principal word for lapis lazuli, was used in the Late Dynastic Period, like the word for turquoise, as a synonym for 'joy' or 'delight'. It is difficult to believe that the Egyptians could not really distinguish between blue and green, yet the suggestion that the usage arose because of the linking over a long period of the materials turquoise and lapis lazuli is not very convincing.

Red was the colour of blood with all its connotations of energy, dynamism, power, even life itself. But it was also the colour of the evil-tempered desert-god Set, patron of disorder, storms and aridity, and murderer of his brother Osiris. This curious dichotomy is reflected in the fact that khenmet (hnmt), the word for red jasper, was derived from the verb hnm, 'to delight', but cornelain, with its orange-red hue, was considered an ill-omened stone and in the Late Dynastic Period its name, herset (hrst), also meant 'sadness'. Sard was the third red stone employed by the Egyptian lapidary, and from the New Kingdom onwards all three could be imitated by red glass and glazed composition.

The Egyptian jewelry-maker made use of an amazing variety of stones, minerals, metals, man-made materials and animal products. Most were obtained locally in the hills and deserts within Egypt's boundaries and from creatures which inhabited the Nile Valley and surrounding areas, but some, most notably lapis lazuli and silver, always had to be imported from beyond Egypt's farthest frontiers.

Examples from the Materials used by Egyptian jewelry makers:

• Alabaster

• Amethyst (a translucent quartz (silicon dioxide)),

• Beryl:a transparent or translucent yellowish-green aluminum- beryllium-silicate with a glassy sheen;

• Breccia is a sedimentary rock in which angular white fragments are set irregularly into a red-colored matrix.

• Feldspar or Amazon Stone is an opaque, green or blue-green potassium-aluminum-silicate,

• Garnet is a transluent red iron- or magnesium-aluminum-silicate with a violet or brown tint.

• Lapis Lazuli is an opaque dark-blue

• Quartz (Mtlky) is a hard, opaque white variety of silicon dioxide.

• Turquoise is an opaque, pale sky-blue or blue-green copper-containing basic aluminum phosphate which the Egyptians obtained alongside copper ore at Wadi Maghara and Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai.

• Gold production of jewelry of every description: amulets, pendants, diadems, pectorals, bangles, earrings, finger-rings, anklets, torques, elements of collars, girdles and bracelets were all manufactured from the precious metal. Indeed, certain chapters of the Book of the Dead demanded that prescribed amulets and funerary jewelry be made of gold.

• Silver was at first called by the Egyptians nub hedj (nbw hd), later just hedj, which means literally 'white gold',

• Copper was the first metal known to the Egyptians and as early as the Badarian Period it was being made into beads. Bangles and finger-rings

Egyptian Craftsmen

Egyptian Craftsmen

In Egypt the great workshops attached to the temples and palaces where fine-quality jewelry was produced were under the control of high officials; it is their names which have survived and in their tombs that the manufacture of jewelry was depicted. Far less often are known the names of the craftsmen who actually shaped semi-precious stones into inlays, delicately tapped and chased precious metal into jewelry elements or strung beads into intricate collars, and most of those named are goldsmiths - the Egyptian term is neby. 

Although part at least of the jewelry-maker's art involved working with precious metal (indeed, it is no accident that the activities of precious-metal workers and jewelry-makers are always depicted side by side), still remarkably few of the skilled craftsmen who called themselves neshdy, earlier mesneshdy, are known. This word is best translated as 'jewelry-maker', although it actually means something more like 'worker in semi-precious stones'. However, the ability to shape a hard stone into an inlay to fit snugly within a cloison or to form an intricately detailed amulet from a pebble was the essence of the Egyptian jewelry-maker's art, far more than the craft of the 'bead-maker' - iru weshbet - or 'stringer together of a collar' - seti nub. 

Nevertheless, a recent study has identified less than thirty named men who bore the title over a period of fifteen hundred years, from the early New Kingdom to the end of the Ptolemaic Period, and no tomb of a neshdy has ever been discovered.

Bracelets and bangles

 

The Egyptians used the same term, menefret (mnfrt), for bracelets and anklets but by adding the words 'for the arms' - net awy (nt'wy) - they were able to distinguish quite clearly the functions of these ornaments, which often came in matching sets. Another even less informative term, 'appurtenance of the arms' - iryt awy ('ryt 'wy) - was employed in the same dual way. 

The earliest bracelets are in some ways little more than shorter versions of the strings worn around the neck. The finest examples - four in all were found on a wrapped arm in the tomb of Djer at Abydos. The one nearest the wrist consists of lapis lazuli and hollow gold balls, flanking irregularly shaped turquoise beads and gold triple ring-bead spacers, with a single hollow gold rosette at the centre; these are strung on gold wires and animal hair plaited together and were originally closed by a loop-and-ball fastening. The best-known bracelet is composed of twenty-seven alternating turquoise and gold plaques, the latter apparently cast in an open mould in the form of an archaic crouched falcon atop a rectangular serekh, with its characteristic palace facade paneling. 

The serekh usually contained the Horus name of the king, associating him with the ancient falcon-form sky-god, and a series of dots on each bead may be a crude rendering of the serpent hieroglyph with which Djer's name was written. The beads are graduated in size, with markings on the back of each to indicate its position; a single pyramid-shaped bead of gold at each end acts as a terminal. A series of gold plaques embossed with the cartouche of Sety II surmounted by feathers, with suspension rings at each corner, came from the Gold Tomb in the Valley of Kings; although eighteen centuries later than Djer's serekhs, these plaques presumably formed a similar royal bracelet.

Finger-rings

In the Badarian Period simple rings of horn or stone were probably worn on the finger. That was certainly the function later of small strings of beads, gold-foil bands and wires of copper or silver closed by twisting the ends together. By hanging a scarab on the wire before twisting it shut the most popular form of Egyptian finger-ring came into being, although sometimes, as in the case of a 17th Dynasty woman buried at Qurna, it was merely held in place on the finger by a fiber cord. Two fine early examples of scarab finger-rings were owned by Sithathoriunet. 

In each the gold wire shank is twisted together opposite the gold scarab bezel; the scarab's wings are inlaid with strips of turquoise and lapis lazuli, its thorax with cornelian, its head with green stone and its legs with cornelian and blue and white composition. There were a number of finger-rings in Mereret's cache, of which two gold examples have an elongated oval rigid bezel, one patterned with tiny granulation lozenges, the other chased with four spirals. Her remaining gold rings have scarab bezels, one of them inlaid exactly like that of Sithathoriunet, the others made of lapis lazuli, turquoise, amethyst and glazed composition, some with texts, the others plain.

There is an Egyptian in everyone of us

Born Egyptian or married with an Egyptian, living in Egypt or just having connections and friends from Egypt - well it is absolutely impossible not to be "embraced" by the Egyptian influences.

Like this soon you will realize that in you is living an Egyptian too :). How you can discover this? We are about to find out :).

1.You know "1 minute" = 1 hour
2.You hear people around you saying "estubid" and "owet" for "stupid" and "out" and you find this so normal
3.You want to hit anyone who drives you crazy with anything that is near to you, anything from a shoe to a bowl
4.Your relatives brag about their kids even if they are bad and you approve them
5.Your favorite food is warah aneb (ma7shi), but you are embarrassed to tell your friends that you eat leaves for dinner
6.Your future 'taunt' asks you when she can dance at your wedding
7.You start to use more cologne than deodorant
8.You pronounce "the things" za sings", just because it is a "local Egyptian" way to say it
9.Your relatives swears at their kids with words that effect them and not the kids "ya ibn il kalb!!!"
10.You put tahina in and on everything and brag about how healthy it is because Egyptians are using it since thousand of years
11.You gossip about your own family...with members of your own family
12.You eat kofta at least 4 times a week
13.You cook a meal that lasts a week
14.You watch the hell out of the Arabic channel
15.You have billions of cousins
16.At weddings it takes the bride and groom 4 hours to hug and kiss all the guests and everybody hits their drink with their forks
17.You "get down" from the car instead of "getting out" of it
18.You love to laugh and smile :D
19.You have a gold necklace of your name written in Hieroglyphics or Arabic (coz it is a must since you are Egyptian)
20.You play cards till the break of dawn
21.Your friends usually say things like: put za sings in za sing
22.You can't have a meal without aish baladi (arabic bread)
23.You feel proud when someone famous or a celebrity has any Egyptian blood in them
24.You teach your European/ American friends Arabic words (mostly bad ones) and get happy when they use them in normal conversations
25.You have ten different foods at your dinner table
26.You get really happy and call the whole family to the room when there is a special or documentary on Egyptians or anything Arabic related on CNN or PBS
27.You have lefa hair...and if you don't, u have curly hair
28.You own a grocery store or a gas station or a shaorma store
29.You smoke as if it were your last day on earth...and you only smoke apple or manga sheesha
30.You own and/or play a tublah
31.Your middle name is your father's first name (the same applies for the kids when your husband is Egyptian - my husband has 9 names :D - K M M Y M I Y M I)
32. You’re probably pre-med or engineering and you want your kids the same
33. You could kill for some macarona bil- béchamel, mashi, and baba ghanouk 

34. Your parents think Umm-Khalthoom IS what's hot (yes true :)))))) )
35. You invented and perfected the art of bellydancing
36. You’re probably the loudest in your circle of friends
37. You know a cup of tea is shai-bil laaban, not bil haleeb
38. You know Egypt’s got it down for movies, music, and clothes~
39. Whenever you meet a fellow Egyptian in a store, you get a discount.
40. You’re ALWAYS LATE….it’s a gene, ok?! (true again to me too)
41. The only maintenance you do to your car is a car wash, or not even.
42. Your wife is also your first cousin or from ur family (I saw this :D)

43. You are bald and fat and blame it on stress.
44. You got a lot of money and drive a BMW or a Benz and still can’t pick up any women.
45. After a family meal, the women fight to the death over who should wash the dishes while the men sit on their behinds and discuss politics, waiting for their tea (not my case :P)

46. Walk around the house in your underwear coz it is too hot
47. Watch the hell out of the ART channel and talk nonsense about the rest.
48. Ur only source of news is Aljazzera or neighbors
50. You got more than 4 kids (not my case again :P)

51. Your middle name is your father’s first name. (lol so true in my husband case :D)
52. U have about millions of cousins.
53. Act like you want to pay, but in reality you hate to pay.
54. You are standing next to the largest suitcases at the Airport. (tha't me :)))) )
55. Your Parents scream into the phone, and if u don’t answer your phone they leave about 200 messages on your voicemail. (happen to me too with my parents and now with my husband too, although he knows I m at work :)))) )
56. When u try to explain your Egyptian friends to your European/ American friends u say they r your cousins.
57. If you’re an Egyptian woman u always complain on how your fat u r…and how u always lose weights on fasts (yes, I know them very well :))))))))) )

58. If you’re an Egyptian woman you always have to bleach ur hair a color not normal and swear it's real (and wear the hijab not to cover the front part so that it can be seen the hair... otherwise, why to bleach it if nobody will see it? :))))))

59. Egyptian men have leefa hair
60. You have "fool” or “Koshary” for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
61. You say words like “ Ezayek”, “Eshtah”, “Gedan” and “Aywah”
62. You ask your relatives from Egypt a simple question and they tell you a story of how they had to walk miles just to get to school.
63. If you are 25 and not married yet, your relatives make you feel that you are getting too old.
64. Everyone is a family friend.
65. People are never happy with what you've achieved. If you graduated from school they'll tell you "3o2bal el Shehada el kebera", and when u get that "3o2bal el 3aroosa or 3areees", and when you get that "3o2bal ma nefra7 be awladkom", and when you get that "3o2bal ma tefra7 be shehadithum", etc...
66. When you FLY BACK home you find 20 people waiting for you at the airport
67. Every time you fly back home you meet relatives you never knew existed and they look nothing like your family.
68. Getting a visa to Europe or the States is like getting a baby, everybody tells you "mabrook" (u get a "mabrook" for everything, even if you just do your nails or buy a pair of socks :))))) )