Thankful Tuesday: Being flamboyant about my gratitudes

Irrespective if you are someone flamboyant about your gratitudes or modest in expressing them, Tuesdays seem to be the right day to create a list of blessings and positive experiences. To ward off the anxieties that might be resurfacing midweek and to keep our mind calm and to make our heart palpitate gladly.

The Life with The Crew started The Thankful Tuesdays. I want to cultivate this blogging custom. I believe it serves us all well. Do you want to join in?

Here I go with mine. Today I am grateful for:

– the snow, the snow, the snow… that did not melt too quickly and the fox that appeared in our garden just after midday

– my friend’s successful knee operation and his quick recovery and our chat over a cup of coffee and his sharing of insights and wisdom from life

– for a very considerate friend who dropped Castor oil at my doorstep to improve blood circulation in the shoulders

– a husband who made a lovely Mediterranean style lentil dish with leek and green pumpkin and parsley (on the blog soon)

– translators who translate children’s stories and allow us to move between languages but within the same storytelling sphere: Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, La Strega Rosella – translated by the incredbly skilled Laura Pelaschiar, and the Polish version entitled ‘Miejsce na Miotle’ by translated by the excellent Michał Rusinek

– Jodie Wilson from Practising Simplicity for encouraging Yoga as a gentle exercise for busy lives, very useful for frozen shoulders too and any problems with posture that result from attached monkeys to our hips (be it kids or cameras) and also for her indirect encouragement to contact blog readers

– for Adam Phillips’ book On Getting Better and his ability to put into words what we tend to hide from ourselves, i.e. that our transferences and regressions intensify with our resistance :)

– for our daughter who said today that she wants to do her homework on her own and allowed me to load the dishwasher in the meantime

– for the recent Outdoor Photography Magazine and the glorious portfolio review by Massimo Leotardi and their reminder that we are soon going into a National Tree Week that is uniting all the tree lovers in the UK (see treecouncil.org.uk). This is one of our favourite magazines at home and we like to have a conversation over the photographs in the morning either by exiling tensions over the landscape photographs or by giggling and wowing over aquatic creatures or mice hiding in a hollow apple

– our morning routine that has just greatly improved due to a managerial trick, i.e. a checklist with all that needs to be taken to schools. Seriously, we need it. Our working memory is only capable of remembering six items at once. Everything else is an excess. We also use a simple linguistic change of words. Instead of saying ‘Speed up’, we say ‘Focus on buttoning up your shirt’, etc. So we focus on the actual activity that we want the children to complete and use the verb ‘focus on’. In that way, the morning routine is smoother for all of us and we have nicer starts to the day.

– for a glorious Journey Through Time and Light event at Crich Tramway Village that has put us in a festive mood and brought a huge anticipation of joy for the coming Christmas season

– for finding ways of preparing our son for his weekly Polish dictation tests at his Saturday School.. gosh this was a hard nut to crack..

What would you put on your list?

At Crich Tramway Village, A Journey Through Time and Light, Derbyshire, 2024

A walk with The Gita for Children by Roopa Pai

If you’ve got a child aged 12 or around, you would most likely have enough data on their likes and interests and you would probably see that some subjects always prick their ears and they like discussing them. Among football, biology, history and Minecraft, religious studies are my son’s favourite. He is very keen on learning and discussing different religious wisdoms, beliefs, traditions, and customs. When I was sent The Gita for Children by Roopa Pai by IBBY (International Board of Books for Young People) two years ago, I was thrilled. I knew that we could have a good time together.

The Gita for Children written by Roopa Pai and it is an introduction to The Gita, the sacred scripture of the Hindus. The book has a very intriguing purple, golden and dark blue cover and beautifully drafted drawings inside by Sayan Mukherjee and the elements of script that I could not recognize or comprehend. The elements of script used in the book are shlokas, otherwise understood as stanzas of Bhaghavad Gita.

Two years ago the book however was a bit too dense and difficult for our son to delve into with my help and on his own, but as we know, children mature and their mind’s abstract conceptual maps grow with them and what was a bit early to access two years ago, may find fertile ground in a boy who has just started his secondary school and is mature enough to admit: ‘Mum, I need your guidance. I need a lot of it.’ Now, this is a terrifying request for most of us, adults, these days as we seem to be navigating without a compass through the obstacles and challenges of our era, unsure which ways lead to greater good and less internal turmoil. If you read the backside cover of The Gita for Children, you are already presented with some answers, as the publisher, Swift, chose the following extract from the book:

‘The truth is, Partha,’ Krishna said, ‘there is no “better” path. Both paths – the path of knowledge and the path of action – work just as well. It is up to you to pick the one that you are suited to.”

This permission to choose a path encourages you to read on and learn more about The Gita and delve into this introduction to the sacred scripture of the Hindus and to slow down a bit to learn and reflect on wisdoms that we are surrounded with but we do not access. I took Roopa Pai’s book for a walk in Derby around our local canal to breathe in its wisdom with fresh air and I thought I’ll share with you here some of my favourite quotes as they may speak to you too.

“… the soul goes to that which the mind has been thinking about in its last moments.” p. 118

“ God does not belong to the privileged. (…)

All He needs is love.”

“Think of me as infinite space, the space around and above me below you – the grand theatre of the suns and the stars and the might wind; which holds the seed of everything in the Universe” p.132

“I do not favour one being over another; they are all the same to me…”

“Go(o)d will find a way.” p.65

“From goodness is born knowledge, and the fruit of the action is joy; from passion arises greed, and the fruit of passionate action is pain; from dullness arises negligent and wrong action, and its fruit is ignorance.” p. 194

I hope you enjoyed the walk with The Gita.

P.S.1. As if by chance ‘gita’ in Italian means ‘a walk’ while the holy scripture ‘Gita’ means ‘a song’.

P.S.2. For all those who love to walk, this walk started at Stenson Marina in Derby, walk towards Willington Marina (to the right while facing the canal).

(in the next post I will share with you some photographs from the celebration of Diwali that took place in Derby. It does not happen too often when Diwali is celebrated on the same day as Halloween and a day before the Catholic celebration of All Saints (in Poland also knows as the Day of the Deceased when we place candles and wreathes on our ancestor’s graves and reminisce about them).

Trust

When I started writing Postcards Without Stamps I was following Inked in Colour and I was very inspired by Sash’s letters to her daughter that create a beautiful and thoughtful dialogue with Bo. Some of Sash’s photographs also stick in my mind till this day, especially the one of her daughter holding a feather as if giving a challenge to her mum to write for her (link to her post here). Of course, this is most likely my own projection onto the photo and a reveal of my own sub-conscious need to express love through writing which wants to be met here.

The post below is not a letter as such but perhaps a poem or a lyric to a song and it is just one of those things that wanted to be written.

There I will be

There are moments in life when past and present collapse into one.

When the future is impossible to predict and days impossible to plan,

when tomorrow seems too distant to arrive – in those days, my Princess,

there I will be

your Trust.

When your life will seem too much to handle, there I will be, my Princess, your Trust.

When the pain of regrets will swallow your courage, there I will be, my Princess, your Trust.

When your joys will dissipate and where the hopes will turn into ash, there I will stay my Princess,

your Trust.

In the cities of angels

Someone always keeps an eye on you.

Trust.

The sweet cloud

There is a very old poem written by a Polish author Julian Tuwim called ‘Dyzio Marzyciel’ – ‘Dyzio, the dreamer’. It is about a boy who imagines that clouds are different types of sweets and that he is able to reach for them while lying down on the grass. While I was reading it to my son the other day, he enthusistically exclaimed: ‘Mummy, I want to get inside this book!’ I laughed and I agreed with him that this would indeed be a pleasant state of affairs. I then forgot about this little conversation until I came across this thought put together by Barbara Kingsolver:

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

I really like this idea of ‘living inside our hope… under its roof’, about being surrounded with it. Perhaps, just like Dyzio was dreaming of clouds of sweets, we could imagine the clouds of hope that we could reach to just when the going gets a bit too hard. I know that clouds tend to signify oncoming gloom, but maybe they shouldn’t? Maybe next time when we look outside the window, when it will get darker, and cloudier, we could say ‘hope is coming.’

Hope is coming.