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. ;)
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.
“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…
A new era has started in our house – an era of no afternoon sleep for our toddler (and no cat naps for me by the same token). It’s been on and off for the last three months but it looks like he has decided to drop it for good now. Every transition phase in a family life, even as small as this one, is challenging and tiring at the same time. A lot of miscommunication happens in transition phases – what I once understood as a sign of tiredness on the part of our little boy, now becomes a request for extra entertainment and I must admit it took me a while to grasp it, perhaps a tinge of denial clouded my parental perception, but it looks like I am now a mum of a small boy rather than a toddler. Could this be the case? So soon?
I suspect that our son is also confused by this new wave of energy that embraces him in the middle of each day. So when today, just after midday, my little companion turned into a roaring dinosaur and then into a savage shark that ferociously dived into the tormented sea of our duvet with no intention of reverting into a sweet and sleepy baby-boy the shark once was, I thought to myself that it’s probably a sign that we’re done with afternoon naps and it’s time for something else now…
More serious mothering… maybe? I noticed that there are many no’s to exchange now, more boundaries to set, new negotiations to engage in and I am slowly finding myself within this new parental landscape. But ‘slowly’ is not a word that goes well with being a mum of a 3 year-old. I have a very curious and a very fast son and I love this about him but recently I just find it really hard to keep his pace and you know, as a parent, it’s actually better if you’re a bit quicker than your child, a millisecond will suffice as long as that millisecond is there… And if you are as big a dreamer as I am, you are probably more than one zillion milliseconds behind.
There are two books that mainly helped me (and are still helping) with developing good communication habits with my son. I would not have any qualms in presenting these books as Christmas presents to new-to-parenthood adults. So if you have anyone around you with small children, do not hesitate investing in these two sources as they are really helpful and enlightening.
The first book is by Jesper Juul (2011) entitled Your Competent Child.
The second is by Janet Lansbury (2014) and is called No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline without Shame.
Two wonderful and helpful guides. They are really kind and understanding in tone and message and I cannot help but love what they recommend and how they explain the role of parenting and honest communication between children and parents. Of course, I do not necessarily read them as gospel, but I feel that they came to my life just at the right time.
Let me know if they do the trick for you and your loved-ones too. x
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.
Postcards Without Stamps 