MONDAY, JULY 11, 2022
““Mary arose and went with haste” (Lk 1:39). After receiving the message of the angel and saying “yes” to her vocation to become the mother of the Saviour, Mary immediately went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy. Mary did not stay home and think about the great privilege she had received or the many problems it would bring. No! Mary did not allow herself to be paralyzed by pride or fear. She was not one of those people for whom all it takes to be comfortable and secure is a good sofa: “couch potatoes”. If her elderly relative needed a helping hand, she was ready to set out immediately to be there for her.”
Pope Francis
the Writer’s Almanac Jul 11,2011
The Modesty of Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri had no idea that The Interpreter of Maladies was a contender for any prizes, and then one day she got a phone call. She said: “I was in my apartment. We had just come back from a short trip to Boston and I was heating up some soup for my lunch. My suitcases were still not unpacked. And the phone rang. It was one or two in the afternoon. The person who called me was from Houghton Mifflin, my publisher, but no one I knew, and she said, ‘I need to know what year you were born.’ And then she asked some other fact like where I was born. I just told her. Sometimes people need some information for a reading, for a flyer or something. And then she said, ‘You don’t know why I am calling, do you?’ And I said, ‘No, why are you calling?’ And she said, ‘You just won the Pulitzer.'” It was the first time a paperback had ever won the Pulitzer. The Interpreter of Maladies became an immediate best-seller. Lahiri was uncomfortable with her new fame — she said, “If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It’s like staring at the mirror all day.” So she doesn’t read reviews, and she keeps her Pulitzer wrapped in bubble wrap.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 