We didn’t have much time for sight-seeing in Poland but seeing my family was actually what I mainly wanted out of our short visit there. Everything else was an additional treat. So today I am grateful for my family in Poland and all the places of heart-warming indulgence that I like to visit there. :)
Every so often I’d like to find out what great spiritual leaders have to say about families. A while ago I came across a quote from a sermon of Pope Francis in which he urged families to cultivate a habit of dreaming together. I thought that it was a wonderful message to send to both parents and children. Dreaming together – we’ve got to find the time and the opportunity to do it.
In our house, dreaming together sometimes means planning our trips and holidays, organising our week or saving money for a house-improvement project, but other times it actually means sharing our enthusiasm or crazy needs, reaffirming who we are and what we want to do and who we want to be. How otherwise are we to learn who our family members actually are? How otherwise are they going to learn who we are?
This is to some extent how I see love.
Loving someone is to love their dreams.
My dream for this coming week is to fly safely to Poland (and back) to find out what my family over there dreams about. Although I do not have a white beard or red outfit, I might still be able to make things happen.
Now I’m off to pack and quiz my husband about his dreams. Hopefully, he’ll say that I’m still one of them. ;)
Do zobaczenia! (‘See you soon’ in Polish)
We’ve made an early start in our preparation towards Christmas. My little elf and I decorated our living Christmas tree last Sunday and we made the house smell of oranges, cinnamon and cloves with our very simple house ornaments. I’ve been having a very strong need of embracing peace in this very last month of the year – to counterbalance the madness that’s reported daily in the news but also to create a distance towards all the imposed deadlines and obligations that we have towards the end of year.
There is nothing worse than getting ourselves wound-up and exhausted during the time when our hearts are supposed to be expanding with peace, love and kindness, during the time when we should be filling ourselves up with all the goodness of the world that allows us to give and love fully in the year to come.
A while ago my husband and I promised to each other that we will live with the seasons, that we will allow ourselves to experience every month as nature wants us, with the goodness that each month brings. December with its candle-lit evenings, warm blankets and the purity of snow, invites peace. Early darkness frees us from disturbances – it is almost as if we’ve been encouraged to go a little deeper into ourselves to look for peace and remove the noise from our heads and hearts.
What I found, however, is that recently I have been coming home with some odd Christmas jingels in my head or snippets of disturbing news and conversations and I’ve been struggling to quieten these earworms in my head, but Thank God for good music. Music brings me to life and balance. The magical music that sends me where I want to be… into the cosy arms of the magical peaceful world of love and hope (and a little bit of nostalgia to complete it all).
If, just as me, you are a seeker of mellow contentedness and you love soulful, heart-opening (sometimes acoustic and instrumental but often also lyrical) music, here are my recommendations for you (click to open them in You Tube). I cannot have enough of these albums – my life would be emptier without them. Who knows… it might be the same for you.
Peace.
I’ve been thinking many times this year about quitting blogging or quitting photography or quitting my research or one of the three languages that we speak at home – this one was initiated by someone’s suggestion rather than personal doubt – but anyhow…
This year has been a struggle – a continuous ping-pong of rejecting and accepting of who I am and what I do. When I tried to quit any of the things above, I felt terribly unsettled, I felt that I was betraying someone and this someone was me. Fortunately, what I was rejecting was coming back – so now I am wiser and I’ve accepted that if what we reject somehow comes back and it brings joy, it’s a signal that this is who we are and that perhaps – Could this be true? – that we have found ourselves. So this is who I am and this is what I do and there is no further story to it. Just acceptance of it all.
I think it’s the joy that makes it ours – it’s this quiet emotion that puts a spring in our steps, the emotion that should not go unnoticed.
If you feel joyful about something, it’s yours. If you feel joyful about returning to something, it’s yours. If you feel joyful about commencing something, it’s yours.
Never underestimate the power of joy for joy is what you are meant to be.
“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own – even more one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.” Katherine Anne Porter, journalist and author
I’ve been trying to position myself towards the topic of beauty for a long time now. I have been brought up in a home that did not celebrate beauty. “Beauty is only skin-deep” was probably the most often used statement about beauty that I heard as a child. It was of course used in order to show that assigning importance to looks is superficial but I think that more often than not we were quite confused about the statement. Because if it was superficial and we generally should not care about it, why did we have to look good when we were visiting relatives?
Anyhow, ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’ was a saying that many liked to sing when we were growing up and, to be honest, I see it now as more damaging to children’s understanding and appreciation of beauty than helpful in building their characters. What I do not like about this saying is that it discredits beauty per se, it discredits the need for looking after it, it discredits the need for creating it and if said too often, it basically stops us from looking after the beauty that we are surrounded with and the beautiful people that we are.
Beauty requires effort. It takes work and purposeful, regular practice to create it. It also takes knowledge and dedication. I only truly understood this through my life experiences over the last few years: growing a child, making things for our house and garden, writing and photographing. What I have learnt is that beauty thrives with care and creativity and care and creativity entail effort. Creativity is effort, it’s seeing details, it’s being able to mould materials until they take the shape that we want them to take, it’s also about learning how beauty is made and about practice. It’s about spending time and often exerting ourselves to reach the outcome that we want to have, and finally it’s about tending to it regularly, taming it’s wildness. Beauty can be shallow but usually it is not. Usually beauty is work. It’s a lot of work nurtured with love and affection.
Shouldn’t we therefore teach our children that beauty should be respected rather than disparaged?
The more affection we have towards who we are, what is within us and what is around us, the more beautiful…
everything becomes.
Postcards Without Stamps 