Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Love and sorrow

I'm sitting on a rock in my childhood forest. The sun is shining with its warm rays on my face. I hear the birds chirping from the trees next to me and my heart is filled with love and sorrow. Grandma wanted to rest so I went out in the forest, to gather strength and clear my thoughts.
Many times my small feet trudged around in the moss here. As a child I walked here with my grandmother to pick flowers, look at butterflies and ants, and listen to her telling stories of all the creatures in the forest. That's why I feel love. Love to my grandmother and for all that she gave me. The sense of nature's greatness that she passed on to me. Thoughts on how we can take the help from nature to keep us healthy.
In almost all her life, she has been healthy, until now. Now her energy is running low, the cancer has almost taken her last strength. Sitting on a chair listening to a woman from the municipals social services who can´t offer any assistance is more, much more, than she have the strength to do. It hurts me to do this to her. It hurts that the system is so inflexible.
My thoughts take me to India, to the little village Phardapur and to the family that I visited there. Four generations living together. Grandma in the family is the first I meet. She sleeps on a mattress outside the house and she sits up when I come. She peers at me with her brown eyes. She does not say much, and I can hardly understand the few words she say, but she makes me feel welcome. I see her from the place where I'm sitting inside the house. She lay down again and pulls her blanket around her. One of the chickens that run in the courtyard decides to keep her company. He jumps up and falls asleep in her lap. It looks so peaceful.
My mind automatically makes a comparison.
Here we do things in a different way. We make our elderly stay in a retirement home. In our minds, we have neither the energy nor the time to take care of our elderly relatives ourselves. Therefore, we will send them to an institution, where others are working to take care of our relatives. Others who also have relatives, who they cannot manage to take care of just because they take care of ours. Before, I thought it was natural, right now that equations don’t make sense to me.
I sit on a chair in the kitchen. Wood fire crackles pleasantly behind my back and I hear grandmother's heavy breathing from the bedroom. I no longer know if I want to send her away to a retirement home. I would rather stay with her as long as she is still here and as long as she wants me to be with her. I have more energy now, I´m able to think new thoughts. I have a new equation now, one that I actually think make sense.





Many thanks to all my wonderful friends, for your love, support and care. It means a lot to me.

Also many thanks to Janesh Vaidya, for the love that you spread around you. It gave me energy to make a decision with my heart.

If you want inspiration, visit http://www.janeshvaidya.com/, he is a man with a big heart and a beautiful mission and generoulsy spreads his words of wisdom over the world. 

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