Gratitude

To the seven people that offered me and my son a place to stay, thank you.
To the friend that left a manic office and cancelled an entire day of appointments and arrangements to make sure we were not alone, thank you.
To the friends that travelled across London and stayed late into the night to offer quiet fortification, thank you.
To my family that checked on us nearly hourly - even when I couldn't answer all the calls, thank you.
To the attorneys and family lawyers that offered lucid and valuable advice, thank you.
To the lawyer that worked late on a Friday night to make sure my son's passage home would never be threatened, thank you.
To the friend that sacrificed a long-awaited holiday and instead navigated shock and turmoil with equanimity and levity, and patiently reminded me to feed myself and my child, thank you.
To the couple that hosted a tiny, meaningful satsang on my last night in London, thank you.
To the Art of Living teacher that quietly asked before offering her blessing - I don't want to give you blessings that you do not want - thank you.
To the friend that did not hesitate to take responsibility for my car and other practicalities, thank you.
To the Polish guy that sorted out the luggage with half a ton of plastic and a smile, thank you.
To the airline staff that quietly found us a place to lay down in the business class cabin, thank you.
To the acquaintance I barely knew who offered her warm and clear-eyed view to help clarify my own, thank you.
To my parents that never once said We warned you as they closed their arms around me, thank you.
To everyone in Cape Town that has reminded us that we are where we belong, thank you.
To my child for retaining his Buddha laugh, calming and charming, thank you.

Spring solstice

The length of day equals the length of night for only one night. After that, the light will grow and grow again in the south, and up north, days will darken.
Cape Town seas still stormy, but the whales are coming.
I didn't think I'd be back here this fast.
No time to say goodbye to the twisted purple beans at the allotment, weighing down the beanpoles with the heavy growth of two weeks.
No time to start the mum-and-baby salsa classes we signed up for in Blackheath.
Time only to zip two lives into three suitcases and a heap for fast shipping.
Time only for a short sharp shock to the heart and a change of direction.
Time only to keep a baby fed while winding down the vision of a shared home, a shared future, and excising ourselves from a small room of broken promises. It took a year and a half to grow all this, and less than an hour to shatter it. Sweeping away the pieces and preparing to leave was peculiarly simple.
Beware Greeks bearing gifts, said one friend.
Beware the dangerous cocktail of fickleness and conviction, said another.
Eat, said the third.
Look to the next thing, said a child with an unusual gift for clarity.

Allotment August 2008

Frilly lettuce, with some beets in the background, and several weeds peeking through...



Purple climbing french beans...


We harvested the first sweetcorn yesterday. YUM!!!



First few tomatoes are starting to go red..


Hundredweight pumpkin... about 2 weeks after fruit first appeared


Blue pumpkin... a gift from an allotment neighbour that's just started fruiting...

The pitfalls of self-obsessed parenting

For some reasons, parenting is the domain of horror stories. If you survive the pain of childbirth, the mythology goes, followed by the agony of constant sleep deprivation and the tedium of endless crying and peeing and pooing, what lies ahead is several years of monosyllabic conversation and unfettered expense. I have a friend, in fact, who declares that when her friends give birth, she refuses to see them for at least the next four years, as they are so unbearable to be around.

I recall once, when I was in my mid-20's, seeing a cluster of new mothers gathered and exchanging the arcana of motherhood at a braai. My boyfriend at the time attempted to get involved in the conversation. One of them turned to him and snapped: "Do you have kids?" He shook his head. "Then you can't possibly understand," she sighed, turning her back to him.

Determined not to be sucked in by a vortex of sighing and complaining, I set out to find likeminded mums-to-be, the ones that approached their children as fellow adventurers, not as energy-draining pets that required training. And, with gratitude, I discovered that in the universe of childcare, there are alternatives to everything. Just like there are alternatives to hospital birth (see here for the story of my lovely home birth), to prams and buggies (slings and baby carriers), to cots and cradles (co-sleeping and babywearing), there are alternatives to every parenting strategy under the sun. For those who have faith in routine and discipline, there are the Gina Fords of the world; for those of us that believe that you can treat children like humans (and friendly ones at that), there are the Sears books and Alfie Kohn and Jean Liedloff and the like.

A while ago I was around a lovely crowd of of what I'll call alternative parents. The ones that know all those alternatives and embrace them. They're cheerful and relaxed, as friendly to their children as they are to one another. You never hear them yelling "No!" or "Stop that!" We met in a lovely garden in the middle of a big, open park. The idea was to go for a walk, but the skies were filled with heavy clouds. Two three-year-olds ran around happily yelling at each other as they got themselves full of mud and rain. The mums found some shelter under an arbour at the edge of the garden. It all seemed idyllic. Well, except that I was a bit cold and wet, and a little anxious that Kolya was getting cold and wet. No one else seemed anxious in the least: it was as if their babies played delightedly in the rain every day. I had to suppress the urge to make a beeline back to the warm, dry car.

It was encouraging and reassuring to be around women that recognised the resilience of their children. Children don't melt in the rain, and there's a lot to be said for spending the afternoon tromping around in a muddy garden.

But something jarred, and badly. After about half an hour, I realised that these parents talk about little else besides... parenting. Don't get me wrong, it's a big and worthy topic. But not the only one, surely. The conversation was peppered with little morsels of code: "It's very CC"; "Oh, we're EC-ing"; "Yes, she's another carrier"; "I mean, you're aiming for NVC, but it's not always possible". After a while I was gasping inwardly for someone to mention, like, anything... be it the credit crisis or Revlon's latest nail polish colours... anything besides all this parenting jargon.

It reminded me of when I was 15, and used to make sure that in any conversation I mentioned that I was Vegetarian. God, did I ever want everyone to know. Later, when veggie food was simply part of the normal run of things in my life, I wished that I DIDN'T have to discuss or explain it every time I met someone new.

I'm proud of my parenting choices (so far so good, anyway), and I will happily discuss them and consider them at length. But justifying oneself over and over again is oh-so-tiring. The next T-shirt I get printed will say DON'T TRY SO HARD.

Allotment July 2008

Four months on, and it's all looking wonderful. Nikolai built me a shed, which you can see on the left of this photo:
Leafy greens (spinach, lettuce) in the foreground, potatoes behind them:
The corn is nearly as tall as me now, and it has tassels where the corn is forming:


We've been harvesting potatoes and onions. This was the very first potato plant we dug up, an early variety called Robinta. You plant one potato, you get 14 out!! Next year, I'm going to try Maris Piper and Pentland Javelin potatoes. The Robintas are the earlies - we still have lots of Desiree and Homeguard varieties waiting to be dug up later this month.
Onions looking healthy:
You pick them when the leaves are all yellow and fallen over, which is about now. Next year I'm planting hundreds of onions!!

These are the runner beans and purple climbing french beans (foreground):

I built this stick support for some borlotti beans. A bit of an experiment, as I planted them quite late in the season. On the right hand side are two crown pumpkin plants. The idea is that they'll creep along the ground and suppress the weeds around the beans. Let's see...

And there are tomatoes:

Why I love Freecycle

I thought I had discovered the cleverest thing when a friend told me to "go find it on freecycle", and I did. But, of course, the cleverest thing had already been discovered by everyone else, which was exactly why it worked so well.

For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, go to www.freecycle.org. It doesn't take long to figure out. This is from the front page of their website:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,543 groups with 5,477,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on “Browse Groups” above the search box. Have fun!

The more I've used it, the more pleasing I've found it. Here's why:

1. Freecycle provides the vicarious thrill of seeing what other people throw out and pick up.
2. Freecycle satisfies your acquisitional consumerist urge AND your urge to be a green eco-bunny at the same time.
3. Freecycle gives you the opportunity to feel generous and helpful and to make others feel happy and appreciative, for absolutely no cost to anyone.
4. You can get some really cool stuff.

Happy freecycling!

Right speech

"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." - Oscar Wilde

"Be careful of the words you say, keep them short and sweet. You never know from day to day which ones you'll have to eat." - Anonymous

I remember, when I was about 13 or 14, spending a lot of time wondering and speculating about what my schoolmates thought of me. Perhaps it was just the average self-consciousness of being a teenager. Perhaps I was more self-absorbed than most. The flip side was that I also spent ages scrawling into my diary long, convoluted analyses of what I thought about everyone else. Judgement. If there's anything that defines adolescence, it's an obsession with personal judgement.

Thankfully, although the nasty corridor of adolescence seems endless at the time, we do eventually leave it behind us. Well, one hopes. And hopefully, along the way, someone teaches us some more fruitful ways of handling personal judgement. I developed a personal checklist to use as armour against the fruitless urge to submit myself to others for judgement, or to stand in judgement over them.

1. Screw what other people think. Stay true to yourself and let the rest follow. Whatever you are, whatever you do, you'll always elicit someone's disapproval. Trying to defend yourself is a pointless pursuit; smile at their disapproval. They can keep it if they wish.
2. There are only two kinds of criticism. The criticism you can learn from and the criticism that doesn't help. There's no point fighting criticism. Listen to it. If it's the first kind, you can be grateful for it for teaching you something. If it's the second kind, you can be grateful for the opportunity to smile and practice your personal strength.
3. As for your own judgements of others, there is a fine calm to be reached in recognising them clearly before reacting to the impulse to share them. The more carefully you recognise and listen to your judgements, the more you will realise how fleeting they are, how little there is to be gained by sharing them.

Of course, then I knew nothing of the Buddha. Now I wouldn't call myself a practising Buddhist, but I do draw inspiration and instruction from several teachings of Buddhism, simply because they make sense to me. Between these and the principles I have learned from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living course, I have repeatedly found a rich reserve of wise teachings that have helped me weather many personal storms.

Right speech is the first principle of ethical conduct in Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. Right speech is defined in Buddhist texts as: "abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, & from idle chatter: This is called right speech." The Buddhists are not the only ones that define right speech negatively, or according to the kind of speech that should be avoided. Similar doctrines are echoed in Jewish teaching, which forbids "Lashon hara" (literally, "evil tongue" or "evil language"). Islam likens talking about others ("backbiting") to eating the flesh of the dead, who cannot defend themselves. Buddhist teaching does, however, go into detail about what right speech is, not just what it isn't.

Right speech is spoken:
- at the right time
- in truth
- affectionately
- beneficially
- with a mind of good will.

"One should speak only that word by which one would not torment oneself nor harm others. That word is indeed well spoken.

"One should speak only pleasant words, words which are acceptable (to others). What one speaks without bringing evils to others is pleasant."

It's worth noting that Buddhist teachers define "pleasant" as "not bringing evils to others", not as simply charming or easy. The teaching is not, therefore inviting us to speak euphemistically or in flattery. Rather it is only worth speaking when the words are not going to bring damage, torment or harm.

Whilst the dark days of adolescence are long gone, the daily challenge to approach right speech is never far away. It is a constant practice, only ever to be approached.