Wish

At the beginning of last year I had a number of ideas that I was wanting to explore in my research. I dismissed them, a whole bunch of them. Throughout the year they were reappearing, in my conversations,in my (sub-) consciousness, in my Fb feed. Some ideas just do not want to leave us, a bit like that jacket that you really liked and talked yourself out of buying but keep on visualizing wearing it. Certain visions just do sincerely like us and perhaps the fact that they haunt us really means that they are for us. That it’s time to answer them.

I am in the process of gathering all my crazy visions and ideas of the last year into a draft for my supervisor. Of course, I am afraid of being criticized and rejected but I think that I came to realise that at this stage I cannot offer anything else – as these are the ideas and the truths that I am in possession of right now and my consciousness cannot venture further without those truths being explained and captured.

If there is one thing that I would wish for myself for this year, it would be to become more courageous. To not wait for a year for my ideas to reappear to trust them to be good, to accept them quicker and to just work with them as they are. I think I was quite courageous in my early 20s, by coming to the UK on my own and creating my own life here, but somewhere during that journey I got a little disillusioned with things and courage ceased to be one of my top-cherished values. This I intend to change this year.

I often think how to encourage my son to be perseverant. What should I say? What should I do? It only occurred to me recently that it’s courage that I should be imparting on him. That I need to teach him that he should be courageous because perseverant people are courageous and they know that failure is just a call for redirection. To embrace courage, we must embrace failure for “The physics of courage is such that if you brave enough, often enough, you will fail.” ~ Brené Brown. Perhaps, that is why my mother was always so insistent on us being courageous. On being courageous all the time.

Photography makes a difference

Lily-Lou & Oscar too

Most photographers would tell you that they actually like photographing their own friends and family most and I am no exception to this. Above are photographs that I took of people who are very dear to me and have been part of my life for sometime. Some of the photographs I also took as part of my PhotoFundraising Project (here) that involved swapping my photographing skills for funds to Doctors Without Borders. It was a wonderful project to carry out as it made many people happy and also helped me develop my own photographing skills. The beautiful bespoke children garments featured are hand-made by Claire at Lily-Lou & Oscar too (here). It was the first time I photographed clothing and it was great to have this opportunity.

All in all, through your support and thanks to the beautiful people who asked me to snap a photo of them, I managed to raise £480 (here) and I have one more job lined up in the next month which will further contribute to the fund. It has been a pleasure to take every single one of the photographs above and a big thank you to all of you who have agreed for your photographs to be taken, placed and posted here.

Thank you all of you who contributed to the PhotoFundraising Project. Together we make a difference.

“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For indeed that’s all who ever have. ” Margaret Mead

Have a wonderful year!

Beauty equals…

“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.

Losing sleep and buying presents for new-to-parenthood adults

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

The universe got it right by giving us the seasons

The wind has started blowing a bit harder and the sun escapes from view much earlier these days. But home feels so cosy and just right for staying in. I like our home. I love the books scattered around the house, the remains of our toddlers’ adventures that need scooping up towards the end of each day, the fruit and vegetables in the baskets in our kitchen, even the sink still filled with pots from today’s cooking episodes. I think the universe got it right by giving us the seasons. The late autumn and winter and the cosiness that we experience of our own homes – doesn’t it support one view? That where we are is home. That where we are now we should be now, at this given moment in time. That everything is as it should be.

I will be using this winter to grow the same level of cosiness in my heart and look for every feeling in me that sends this warmth to the world and back to myself and my family.

What do you do to cultivate warm feelings?

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“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For indeed that’s all who ever have. ” Margaret Mead

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