Just before the night sets in I sit down on a bed with my little boy, we surround ourselves with a number of picture books and we look through the images and I read to him. Depending on how busy our day was and how alert we both are this little ritual of ours lasts from 15 minutes up to an hour. I love this daily encounter with different adventures, poems and stories but most of all I love this very peaceful time with my child and the feeling of unity that it creates.
Years ago I was wondering what it is about reading or rather following a particular story which creates this feeling of togetherness. I decided that the answer partially is held in our gaze. We look in the same direction. We see things together.
When we go about our days with my son I try to follow his gaze. I try to look where he looks so that I get to know him better, so that I learn what his interests are. I hope that through this he will find courage to stay true to his interests later on in life and to be sure that whichever direction he will turn to, I will be watching this with interest too.
As part of my own development I often listen to podcasts and interviews on creativity, curiosity and calling in adult life and I like to link them to how I see childhood. Over these very first years of my son’s life I have formulated a very firm conviction that at the moment, at the very moment of being and becoming, curiosity is his only calling.
Last week I was fervently campaigning for lighting a candle in support of asylum seekers and refugees. The idea was warmly embraced by a number of friends and acquaintances and so on Sunday evening, at 9pm, in front of our houses, we lit up the dark and prayed for the refugees’ peaceful journeys to safety and remembered those who have perished at sea. We looked back in our ancestries and saw how each and every family had members who sought refuge and those who sheltered others.
When we gathered I thus realised that we share much more than we think. There is nothing more reassuring than seeing people who are close to you link together in this most crucial of ways. That what it means to be a human being for you means to be a human being for them. That to be respectful and mindful of others means to be a humanitarian. That to be a community means to be a humanitarian community. Nothing else builds trust as much as this.
Activism is not my strength. I am only learning to speak my mind firmly. Last week taught me one thing: that it’s only when you stop sitting on the fence and position yourself that you can seek practical solutions to problems. It’s only then that your mind starts to generate ideas that are worth implementing.
I know that last Sunday at 9pm we created a tiny little piece of history. History for our few families that decided to light a candle. History for our little toddlers who could not contain the joy of lighting candles in the darkness, who could not stop jumping up and down and laughing loudly and being totally in awe of the light and warmth. This event ignited not only the flame of the candle but also the flames of joy in these children. I am pleased and contented for myself and my friends that we’ve started creating the basis of stories to tell our children later in life. Stories of practised compassion, sympathy and connectedness. Thank you for your support Lovely People.
“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” John Bunyan
There is a bridge close to my house where tantrums melt and calm proceeds. I’m not quite sure what it is in that place that pacifies difficult feelings and makes more reassuring communication possible. Maybe it’s the joy of reaching a destination that does it or the task of feeding ducks or just being surrounded by nature or maybe all of these things taken together. Life just seems to float there. Just like the water under the bridge.
It’s not only the toddler who needs the bridge. I need it too, to quieten my internal communication with myself. August has been quite intense for me as the next few months are likely to be. When the pressure is high, I really appreciate open spaces more than anything. Perhaps I also have got a kicking and screaming toddler in myself who can only collect herself when out in the wild.
When I used to work in my dad’s orchard, my sister and I would spend a lot of time just looking into the sky, watching the passing clouds, connecting with the heavens. I noticed that my son loves doing it too. Looking up, breathing deeply. It’s reassuring, isn’t it? That under the clouds we are all small people.
Have you ever heard about the philosophy of edible cities? In the name of this ideal, owners of small flats and houses fill their windowsills with pots of chives and parsley, change their lawns into vegetable patches and fill their hanging baskets with tomato vines. It’s a great and straightforward way of bringing back THE REAL FOOD to your doorstep. No foil. No plastic. No packaging. Just the pure food produce pulled from the soil, your soil, and as organic as you can make it.
To me, a girl who grew up in a village with a big vegetable garden in the backyard, orchards and cold stores full of plums, apples and cherries, there is no other way of living in a city than making its surroundings edible. I need nature to feel grounded and I need contact with soil. It’s humbling and enabling at the same time. Humbling because the growth does not always happen, enabling because often it does and then you feel that you are more than just the manager of your pantry.
Thyme in winter
We’ve made a few changes in our garden this year to grow food, we have made a raised bed out of a tree that had to be felled due to its trunk forking out and we planted two small apple trees and blackcurrant, raspberry and blueberry bushes. Cherry tomatoes and small chillies are reddening in the sunnier parts of our garden. Some of our beetroots and broad beans are ready for collection and consumption. Herbs are abundant.
We had our problems. Things dried when we were away. The cucumbers just refused to grow. More than a few leaves have been eaten by slugs but to me this is an insignificant obstacle. Living in a city is not a problem either. I don’t see myself as limited by location. It’s just about getting the timing right and then learning as it all grows.
Thyme in Summer
My son is a very eager grower and an absolute real food lover. He loves helping around the kitchen and the garden. He likes to play with food too, e.g. by taking broad beans out of their shell and then putting them back. And these broad beans… wow… once they are lightly cooked, they are divine. And the smell of the herbs in the kitchen is just wonderful. Just when we cooked some of our vegetables for dinner this evening I thought that one of the reasons for growing your own food is to remember what fresh produce should smell and taste like. It’s partially to have a benchmark against which you can assess the quality of food. Personally I am not enamored with supermarkets and I hardly ever shop there for food. Human contact is too precious for me and so we shop at the market or small independent stalls and stores. We rely on my greengrocer’s great fresh food produce.
It’s my greengrocer, some of you fellow bloggers, and my parents of course who remind me that we are not only consumers, but also growers and creators, capable of influencing our surroundings. If we always choose convenience, we become so one-dimensional, so plain and flat in knowledge and experiences that we are no longer… interesting.
Say no to convenience. There is always some space between flowers for some lovely food. I am happy that I didn’t get discouraged by last year’s garden failures. We’re definitely are going to grow more from now on. It’s just really really rewarding. I hope you’ll try too, will you?
We talk a lot about how to best bring up our children. We talk a lot about their diet, about their clothes, schooling, meaningful playtime and sleep patterns. We are continuously preoccupied with their self-esteem and skills development but we hardly ever address their spiritual side, hardly ever ask questions about it. I sometimes feel that it is almost a taboo to talk about spirituality for the fear of being recognised as a potential or practicing believer.
I am a practicing believer. I go to church. Once it was part of my cultural practice and upbringing (being brought up in a Catholic family with Catholic values), now it is my choice. I don’t feel constrained by my religion, I feel guided in some manner but not constrained. In fact I am often plagued with doubt but a few years ago a solid seed has been planted in me and now there is a tree growing there, a very healthy tree that supports my core and blossoms with my regular visits before God.
I belong to a gentle and a very balanced community built from people from all over the world: Europe, India, Nigeria, Brazil and the States, to name just a few. We are all there sitting in one church, connected before God, equal before God. It is a very powerful sensation. It is a very powerful understanding. I take my son to church and I think he sees what I am seeing. He sees and breathes this so powerful a statement of equality – for him there is no other world, no other world than the multicultural one, no other than the equal one.
I have got friends of all religions and persuasions, in fact my best friends are of different persuasions to mine but it does not prevent us valuing each other’s friendship or having deep conversations on the topics related to believing, disbelieving and non-believing. Our ability to develop different views and feelings related to the metaphysical is what makes us so wonderfully multidimensional. I want my son to be able to position himself towards the metaphysical with as much knowledge and experience as he can get himself, and as much understanding as I can offer him and so I take him to church (I know that there are other ways, but that is mine). Someone told me once that they stopped attending church because church should be for the people and not people for the church. The main message that I get from the place that I go to is not that people are for the church but that people are for the people. That people are for the people. This is what I would like my son to take with him.
We are very fortunate to live in a multicultural and multi-faith city. The city which totally overwhelmed me when I first arrived here, the city which I am totally indebted to for making me open-minded and curious of differences, and as many British cities this one is also great at coexistence but would definitely benefit from more face-to-face dialogue. I don’t know how it is in schools these days, but I know what it looks like in playgrounds and play spaces. Mums gravitate towards those that look like them. How about breaking that habit? How about initiating conversations that join us together? Getting to know that lonely-sitting, iphone-flicking everymama? Where she’s from, what she values and most importantly why she is alone.
