Removing shoes (and fear)

On August 20, 2019August 20, 2019 By bumblebee3londonIn Everything!!!, lightLeave a comment

Living without fear

I wrote Barefoot In The City – Raising Happy, Strong Kids whilst living in the middle of a busy city, where the skyline had been replaced by skyscrapers and trees cut down to make way for developments – schools, shopping malls, towering condominium blocks. People who knew this place before ‘progress’ came often talked about the monkeys swinging on the trees and butterflies dancing in the still afternoon air. On weekends when we drove out of the city into the receding rainforest, we used to see families of monkeys migrating, sometimes walking single-file along the sides of the motorway, in search of a new home. Once, we witnessed something rather distressing – a baby monkey had been run over by the savage traffic and its mother was howling in despair whilst trying to retrieve her child’s corpse as juggernauts and cars thundered uncaringly by.

My children’s father stopped the car and risked his life to help the monkey. Many years on, I still berate him for dicing with death in front of his children.

“It’s precisely because my children were watching that I did what I did,” he said with his usual confidence.

He wanted to show them another way of being, namely one where we are all part of the same existence and are somehow connected to everyone and everything. And crucially, we cannot afford to lose that connection, because it is, quite simply, fundamental to life. Children know this wisdom instinctively – this is why they are fearless until we teach them fear from a misguided and skewed perspective. Behind our concrete walls, metallic cages and certificates of achievements, we live fearful of nature and fearful of our true nature, becoming more and more estranged each year.

Being connected again

When we moved to the city from a sleepy seaside town in southern England, my youngest daughter refused to wear shoes for months. She would insist on going barefooted everywhere (hence the title of my parenting book), to the chagrin of most people. Her father just laughed and rejoiced in his daughter’s fight to walk barefoot in a world peopled by folks wearing shoes. We couldn’t figure this out for the longest time, until a wise person told us that 4-year-old Georgina was struggling to stay connected to nature. He complimented us for not forcing her to go against her inner knowing, because after all, dirty feet can easily be washed clean.

In the light of this understanding, we set out to make our city home as close to nature as we possibly could, and it was the best thing we could do for Georgina. She grew strong and fearless, with compassion and a surprising soft spot for animals and vulnerable beings. Though she claims she can’t swim, she was happy enough as a child to swim for miles out in the Javanese sea without any buoyancy aid and she understood sea life as taught by the visionary Roderick des Tombes, the first of her many life teachers. We realised that indeed, she couldn’t swim in the school swimming pool, but she was fine in the open ocean. I think she has the ocean and the earth and the stars within her, even though she now lives in grey and concrete south London.

Last Sunday, at a convention held at the University of Greenwich, London, I listened to a Cree woman from Canada speak about her people. “My people are very sick,” were the words she began her lecture with. She talked about the sickness of her people that came from losing their connection to the land as they became a marginalised population, pushed out by ‘civilisation’. Jazmin Pirozek is an ethnobotanist and had studied phytochemistry, amongst her many deeply spiritual, mystical learnings. She travelled far, to the depths of South America, to find a cure for her people. There, she met her teacher, Juan Flores Salazaar, who taught her many things about healing.

This is Jazmin’s story:

The Legend of Miskwedo

Once upon a time, there were two brothers. Their parents were killed during the Great Migration and they only had each other. One day, because they were hungry, the younger brother ran with abandon into a field of amanita that people were fearful of. To the older brother’s horror, the younger brother began changing form – he was slowly changing into an amanita.

The older brother sought help from the villagers, who told him that to change his younger brother back into a boy again, he (the older brother) had to gather some special sand and put it in a deerskin pouch. And then he had to get three eagle feathers from the largest eagle (known as thunderbird, because it was so huge and fearsome). The thunderbird’s nest was perched on the branches of the highest tree, and the base of the tree was a minefield of vicious stinging nettles. But for the love of his younger brother, the older brother completed his herculean tasks and restored his younger brother back into his boy form.

One night, in the middle of the night, the older brother woke up and discovered that his younger brother was not in the wigwam. In panic, he rushed out and looked for his younger brother. He finally found his younger brother in the middle of a field covered with amanita. His younger brother had one hand on the amanita and slowly changing form again. And as he was changing form, he was speaking to a large gathering of people.

“I am happy,” he said.

(Note: this is a brief retelling of Jazmin’s magical tale. You can get the full version here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.1979.10472089?needAccess=true&journalCode=ujpd19).

The field of amanita

In The Legend of Miskwedo, the field of amanita was described so beautifully, “handsome wajashkwedeg they were – turning and revolving, buzzing and murmuring, singing a strange song of happiness under the brilliantly sunny sky”.

We dream of finding such a field as we carry on with our daily lives. “It does not exist,” we tell ourselves, not daring to believe in the improbable.

But let me share a secret with you – pieces of this field do exist in yourworld. You only have to open your eyes and rid the fear in your heart to see it, the true nature of the universe in every grain of sand.

Photo: The beauty of small things, Singapore 2016

Photo: Teaching the next generation about the world we live in – edible plants, London 2017

About Jazmin: https://www.breakingconvention.co.uk/speaker-JazminPirozek.html

Photo of amanita mascara: public domain image Albin Schmalfuß – Führer für Pilzfreunde : die am häufigsten vorkommenden essbaren, verdächtigen und giftigen Pilze / von Edmund Michael ; mit 68 Pilzgruppen, nach der Natur von A. Schmalfuss [1] https://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.3898

Main photo: author’s copyright Phuket 2018

Pint of milk – a lesson in love

On February 19, 2018 By bumblebee3londonIn Everything!!!, LoveLeave a comment

We live at the top of a steep hill, and when the sun is high in the sky, you’d be drenched in sweat by the time you climb to the top.

Yesterday, my daughter opened the fridge and there was no milk. She wanted to make a smoothie.

Immediately, her father said, “I’ll walk down the hill to get some.”

“She can do it herself,” the Asian tiger mum in me chipped in automatically. “She is a big strong girl.”

He waved me off. “No, I will,” in a tone that brooked no argument.

When he came back with the two bottles of milk, he was sweating profusely and slightly out of breath.

“You should’ve let her walk down for the milk,” I grumbled. “Look at you.”

He beamed at me. “No, no, I needed the walk. Good cardio exercise and I sweated out the alcohol from last night as well.”

I know he was just saying this, for who on earth would go walking up steep hills at the height of the midday in the tropics?

Except if it is for love of the purest kind. One without conditions or resentment.

And so, this reminds me of something beautiful in my favourite book that I read on Valentine’s day,

Let all that you do be done in love.

Especially in parenting ❤

When do we stop teaching our children?

On February 11, 2017 By bumblebee3londonIn Everything!!!, lightLeave a comment

We teach our children how to walk, to use a spoon, to cross roads. We teach them to lock doors, to know about money, to plan their future. For me, the teaching never stops, because it represents a transmission of family history and values from one generation to the next. Parenting is indeed a lifelong labour of love.

I feel extremely fortunate that I am able to devote myself fully into teaching my youngest child. I teach her the physical sciences, though her mathematical brain is superior to mine. Indeed, I wrote a book for her, a novella that builds the bridge between the world of theoretical physics and the one we live in.

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I also teach her ‘school’ subjects, but with heart and soul woven into the endeavour. After all, history has shown us that scientific theories come and go with new discoveries. What remains is the beautiful lesson embedded within them.

I put my teaching resources on The Times Education Supplement. Until Sunday 12th February, you can obtain £3 credit off my Physics Relativity Option for 16-18 year olds, which includes an e-version of the book mentioned above. To redeem, enter code SUNDAY3 at tes.com/redeem. The link to the resource is:

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/ib-physics-option-a-relativity-powerpoint-lesson-prompts-handouts-and-reading-material-11411922

You will find much here, lots of physics and love ❤

Photo: lesson plan for Chemistry that extends beyond the syllabus.

Our Supermoon

On November 15, 2016 By bumblebee3londonIn Everything!!!, lightLeave a comment

Last night was supposed to be a special night. The moon was supposed to be the largest it has ever been for decades. Our friends had booked romantic dinners with their partners at various beachside locales, poised to be in the right place to get the best view of the Supermoon.

My sixteen-year-old daughter G wasn’t particularly fussed about the Supermoon. She was more concerned about the piles of homework yet to be done for the next day. But her father insisted that she walked up a little hill with us to look at the Supermoon. She protested whilst he insisted. “Homework is just homework, whereas you will remember this moment forever,” he had told her. “Something that you can tell my grandchildren about, you seeing the Supermoon with your parents on Andaman Hill in Phuket when you were sixteen.”

After some screeching on her part, she reluctantly came outdoors with us. The moon was tiny! And it was clouded over! I waited for her to jeer at her father, but instead, she said kindly, “I bet it was larger earlier on, Daaad. Remember the huge one we saw in Devon last summer whilst we were camping? Do you remember? We have seen some amazing ones, haven’t we, Daaad?”

At that moment, I thought she was the most magical child, the way she could transform herself instantaneously from a grumpy teen to a human being wise beyond her years, who has the capability of creating enchantment for her father with her words. For her words had taken him someplace special, to a place where the moon was huge and luminous and studded with love.

And so, we stood there on this magical night, just three of us, chatting about basketball, school, the weekend, standing in the glow of a very small, weak moon. But for us, it was magic all the same, if not more. Magic and Supermoon exist every night, if you have the eyes to see them. It is indeed a postulate of physics that things come into being only when we are here to witness their existence.

As for the three of us, we will certainly remember this November night in the year G was sixteen, standing on Andaman Hill, watching our Supermoon. The moon was shining magnificently in us that night ❤

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Light begets light

On June 25, 2015June 25, 2015 By bumblebee3londonIn blessings, Everything!!!Leave a comment

“It’s ispirazione, not inspirazione, or do you mean inalare?” The man called Antonio Castellano said. I think he was smiling at the thought of my poor mastery of his mother tongue, though scarily enough, most of my outpourings in Italian are about him.

Whatever it is, he is my inspiration (ah, the English language is so much simpler!). And inspiration comes in many forms, at surprising stages of your life. I was a doctor, lacking passion for my job, when I met Antonio on an enchanted tropical island in the Javanese sea, sleeping in little eco-huts under mosquito nets. He had come to the island on his own, to ponder about life’s big questions but ended up inspiring me instead. He inspired me to go back to school to train as a surgeon, to discover my passion again.

He did it with his beautiful writings over the following months. He would type in his Blackberry, or scrawl on a piece of paper, and later, he would read his writings back to me. His writings are self-deprecatory, soul-searching and always honest, and they touched me ever so deeply. I loved the cadence and the silences in his words. Later, in Milan over a couple of winter evenings, he read to me the manuscript that his friend Ambrogio wrote about a war-time love story in Monte Rosa (or maybe Arosa). And in a sense, this is why I write a lot these days, even on my busy days – to continue the magic that I once discovered in faraway Jakarta. His writings certainly changed my life.

There is something about Antonio that struck a chord deep in me, not least because he is Italian, and I am 25% Italiana. That Italiana side of me never achieved full expression until Antonio. But more than that, it is the silence we both share that created something special between us – as young children, we both began speaking later compared to ‘normal’ children. As adults, we still do not speak much, but we began building a bridge into each other. He had always been more adept than I with words, so I began writing ‘Ten Most Beautiful Equations in the World’ for him. Those ten equations now form the basis of the novel I am writing.

Years later, I often asked myself, “Why am I continued to be inspired by Antonio, why could I not get his words out of my mind?” I miss him. I miss his light. And therein lies the answer. His light.

Before I knew him deeply, I wondered where his light came from. I found the answer when I visited him in Milan. On the first evening I arrived, I met all his childhood friends except one (we went to Verona a few days later to meet him). I was jetlagged and ever so slightly intimidated to be faced by a wall of Italian men who had known each other all their lives. But they were grinning at Antonio and I as soon as we walked into the restaurant.

I told them I suggested to Antonio that he coaches football at my children’s school on weekends. I told them that he began going for Ashtanga Yoga in Jakarta. I told them he cooked traditional Sicilian food for me from his uncle’s recipes. They roared with laughter. “What are you doing to our Tony?” One of them said, eyes sparkling, merriness pulling at his lips.

And then I saw it all at once. Antonio gets his light from his friends, from this band of brothers sitting in a closed circle which embraced me, warm and generous, and suddenly, I could picture the boys that they had once been, all innocent and a bit cheeky maybe, but full of openness, generosity and light nonetheless.

Light begets light, and my post today is about wishing you the opportunity to absorb light, so that you radiate it, touching other lives.

raisinghappystrongkids

Tag: inspiration