gratitude

Day 271

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Right across the road from my place of work is a fancy little bunch of shops which are collectively known as Borough Market. It lives in the shadow of London Bridge and Southwark Cathedral. It is popular with tourists although I have been a regular visitor for the last 9 years. Once you get to know the place, repeat visits cannot be helped. It has a friendly and informal vibe although the prices are a bit unfriendly.

It boasts of fresh produce from all over Europe. It sells things like special organic fruit and veg, cheeses and wines, artisan breads and chocolates, exotic coffees and ice creams, pesto and harissa, unusual meats like zebra, ostrich and kangaroo, juicy olives and oysters, real parma ham and mozzarella, sausages made of venison and wild boar, drinks with acai berry and wheat germ shots . The staff are fresh too – youthful, talkative and smiley, in colourful aprons wearing headscarves that keep dreadlocks and other forms of untidy but trendy hair in control.

Unlike the rest of London, here everyone has time. People wander around mostly aimlessly, sipping Prosecco from plastic wine glasses, looking closely at the wares, asking questions, tasting samples and discussing options in great details. Even when it is completely packed, the atmosphere is chilled.

For many years we went there every other Friday afternoon. I often had empanadas filled with spinach and ricotta and he had a French duck sandwich. One year my son bought me 2 pots of Jasmine for Mother’s day from the flower shop there. Fragrant and beautiful. As the front of the house gets more sunlight, I put one pot in front of the house and one behind. I also thought it would be nice each time we returned home, and for passers by, to enjoy the fragrance of the tiny white flowers.

The next morning, the pot in front of the house was gone.

Well. I hope whoever took it loves it and looks after it well.

I hope they’re happy wherever they are.

Day 269

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Everything resides in the ‘isness’ of the present moment.
It’s my choice to either accept it or agonise over it.

When I use my body and all my senses to focus my attention on this moment right here, inside which I exist, everything else ceases to be.

I am where I am. I look around. Just look, not interpret. See the light, shapes, colours and textures. Aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listening to the sounds and then to the silence underneath them. Feeling the warmth of the water dripping over me from my scalp all the way to under the soles of my feet in the shower, standing completely still. Observing the rhythm of my breath. Feeling the flow of air inside my nostrils. I feel the subtle life energy flowing inside me. Anything I touch, a curtain, a scarf or a pencil, I feel it and acknowledge its Being. Becoming one with smells and tastes that I experience. Feeling the stretch in my hamstrings as I bend forward. Allowing the smile on my lips to spread to my eyes and heart.

I narrow my life down to this moment.

“Leave the abstraction of time behind. Get out of the insane mind and awaken out of the dream of time into the present. Break the mind patterns that have dominated human life for eons.
Nothing is anything but what it is.
Everything is to be honoured, but nothing matters.
Forms are born and die yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms.”

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Day 259

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As days go by, time just gets away from us. It turns into distance, assuming various elastic shapes like an amoeba.

As I go through his clothes, his fragrance seeps through the veil of a delicate detergent into my frontal cortex, radiating to the rest of my brain, giving rise to a catalogue of emotions. The loudest one being – I miss him! It is unbearable, unquantifiable but so palpable! It is not like anything I have ever felt before. Each time it is new. Saying it feels like a hole in my heart would be a gross understatement.

”The best advice I ever got was to just forget about them.” , said a colleague whose daughter had sadly died in a road accident a few years ago. It’s true. Everyone deals with it differently.

Lime green is the colour of his trainers. Penguin is the motif on his hoody. Lavender are most of his t-shirts. Pink is his drum-kit. ‘Egg Flied Lie’ is one of his favourite Chinese rice dishes. When the moon is full, it is his. Badger is the role he played in ‘Wind in the Willows’ at primary school. The sun pouring its warmth through a curtain of clouds is him. His mother is me. The smile on my face, the tears in my eyes and the love in my heart are his too.

He is the embellishment woven into the fabric of my life.

Forget?
How?
Why?

Day 256

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Just as the quietest spot in a tornado is its centre, so is mine.

Everyday I access that peaceful place for a little while as the world and all my emotions whirl around me at a ferocious pace. This is where there is no ache of being two, no grappling with the inadequacy of words, no helplessness. Just love.

As Rumi would say, that despite being hit by the tip of the love arrow, I the martyr am grateful to the hunter, The Almighty. He is the earthen bowl, the potter, the wet clay, the buyer and He is also the one to break the bowl.

Don’t grieve. Everything you lose comes round
in another form.
The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s love flows from unmarked box
to unmarked box….

On the day I die, don’t say she’s gone, he’s gone.
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets and the moon sets,
but they’re not gone. Death is a coming together.
The human seed goes down into the ground
like a bucket,
and comes up with some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here,
and immediately opens with a shout of joy there!

One of Rumi’s great teachings is that celebrating our pain and loss leads ultimately to joy. It’s difficult for us to grasp the idea that whatever we most resist and fear, whatever seemingly unbearable pain we must face, is actually our doorway to freedom and happiness.

Rumi teaches us that even the prospect of the reality of death can inspire courage and serenity. He says:

Take care dear Visitor.
Look for the glints of treasure in the dirt.
Blessings to you on this day!

Day 250

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The Law of Attraction says ‘Like attracts like’.

On the one hand I don’t know how I could have attracted this event into my life, but on the other hand, now, 9 times out of 10, whenever I turn on the radio or the TV, something related to mental health is on. It’s spooky!

I read slowly as if I am reading the text aloud. So it takes me a long time to finish a book. As a result I am particularly selective about what I read. Recently I randomly picked a book, the reason being that I had met the author, Manu Joseph on one occasion and the title of the book made me smile – “The Illicit Happiness of Other People”.

It so turned out that the protagonist of this book is a bright young boy of 17 who ends his own life. The Law of Attraction was at work again. The book was very artfully, insightfully and sensitively written. Without giving away too much, here are a few quotes:

“He had an insight that the world is a charade created by a combination of senses. The reality kept changing depending on what was turned on and turned off inside his brain. He could see more clearly than others that reality is merely a myth of the senses.

He begins to believe that what has happened to him is a glitch in the subterranean process of nature. He believes that he has either seen far into the past of human evolution or deep into the future.

According to him, all of nature is a timeless contest between absolute reality, which is the true state of all matter, and the ’syndicate of life’, which does not want its organisms to see the truth. Because, if you see the truth, you will be in a perpetual state of ecstatic trance, you won’t be desperate to live inside a carbon body. If you see reality you will not want to be a part of the syndicate of life. The purpose of the syndicate is to sustain itself, to exist forever in the minds of its organisms. Therefore, from the beginning of conscience, it has eliminated any neurological network that has the potential to see nature in its true form.”