Basia Unleashed

maria full of grace

2011-10-11T10:54:00.000+02:00

'I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart...'

Lately I've been reading about past life experiences. It explains a lot, about why I have irrational fears about bridges over water and cracks appearing in the earth, about why I once burst into tears when my eyes fell on a photo of a Russian Orthodox church in a wheat field south of Moscow; or that my soul is still in a place I have never even visited and yet yearn to. It explains all this. What it explains even more is that we are indeed immortal, our souls never die, we are always within and around one another. The people you love now, you have always loved, and will do so again. We are never alone. The peace this has given me is holy.

Stepping back in time, many years ago, I was told by two separate psychics that I was not the oldest child. I should have been born second. The second psychic went a bit further. She described the elder sister I never had and told me her name was Maria and she was with my father's mother. She described this child physically, with long blonde hair and brown eyes, exactly how my younger sister looked as a child. To cut a long story short, my mother told me I had been a twin. This explained why I could never sleep alone as a child (and still find it difficult), why I am always looking for myself in someone else.

For some reason, the soul that should have been Maria decided it was not the right time to come back to the world. And souls can choose this. Our souls chose the life we now lead. I believe it is the same for those other babies who die in the womb. But those souls are still ours. They will return to us and we to them. Sometimes all it takes to fulfill karma is for a soul to breathe just once. These are advanced and beautiful souls, full of grace.

There is nothing to fear. There is no punishment. Just love, endless love and amazing grace. Just because my twin did not come into the world with me, it doesn't mean she never was. She always was. She always will be.

For Maria and Grace. Eternally.

I believe in angels and not coincidences

2010-12-15T15:08:00.000+01:00

Questioning is part of my nature. I was raised to ask questions and not merely accept. When I grew up and became a journalist, the same was true. But some things, which cannot be explained, just have to be accepted...

Today, my sister is in hospital. She suffered five seizures the previous day and there was talk of putting her in intensive care. When I left her bedside that night, she seemed brighter, and did in fact rally enough to eat up her chicken in sauce dinner and listen to all the goings-on in the observation ward.

I told her I would send her some reiki. I also sent angels, Raphael, Michael, Sandalfon, an army of angels. When I see things, and I mean in the healing sense of the word, I see everything in blazing technicolor and as I lay in bed sending angels, I saw Raphael as a healing globe of fire, flashes of purple so deep and dense, and surrounding it all, a bright white dazzling light.

Today, she was out of observation, in her room and almost back to her beloved self. I told her I did send her reiki and she told me that last night as she was watching the goings-on (all of which she told us in gory detail)she saw a glorious orange ball of light and a series of purple lights with hundreds of thousands of golden stars radiating from them.

I did not tell her about the angels, but what she said, exactly, down to the last glittering star, was what I saw when I sent them to her bedside. If truth be told, I was there too, watching her from above.

I remember the first time I sent a healing angel to someone with incredible spectacular results, telling a reiki master about what had happened and he said: "Maybe it wasn't an angel after all, maybe it was you."

Love, Unconditional Love, can heal anything. Give me your pain, it doesn't belong to you, and you can have my Love. Just share it on.

This post is dedicated to all those who sent me messages of love, especially to Canelita Love, my Mexican angel, who also sent an army of healing angels to my sister's bedside.

f.r.i.e.n.d.s - For Basia T

2010-12-07T11:30:00.000+01:00

I thought I had already posted this, but here it is again, for Basia T

Can a friend be a soulmate or is a soulmate just the one, the one person we have all been lead to believe is out there, just waiting for us, to the exclusion of all others? I am not altogether sure why we have been indoctrinated this way (is this the fault of Hallmark or religious types?) but I do believe that we are allowed more than one soulmate during our lifetime, and call me greedy, but we can have more than one soulmate on the go at the same time.

Of course I am talking about friends. Having more than one lover is just a recipe for disaster. Not that I would know anything about that of course, I'm really not the heartbreaking kind and besides, things like that always come back to bite you on the bum at some point. But recently I thought maybe it was the right time to mention that sometimes you just get lucky with your friends. And new friends who come into your life and make you feel that you have known them for a long time and you feel comfortable with them, like your favourite pair of jeans, and you can't explain why this should be.

I have experienced this lately with new friends. Sweet, gentle people. Someone once told me that beautiful people have beautiful friends - and if this is true - then I surely must have done something good to have such beauty in my life. And I am not just talking about the physical, although, that is true of them also.

If a person shows you his or her soul without fear of being denied, then you are in the presence of a soulmate. For what is a soulmate if not someone who has given you the very essence of who they are? And that is the gift you treasure forever.

honey from the beehive

2010-11-17T19:48:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you come to me when I least expect you; you rise up out of the dark water, your hand skimming the surface of the pool; broad and pale-tipped, like a water lily, the softest touch I ever knew. You rise up and smile, your mouth ripe and wide and alive. Sometimes you come to me when I need you most and know that I can no longer have you. And then I am instantly transported back to that awful place, I can feel the great rip in my heart like the rending of cloth, still taste the sweet and sour metallic taste of your blood in my mouth.

on love, lost

2010-10-26T19:32:00.000+02:00

This post is dedicated to someone I never knew. Someone whose short life was never documented, in fact, was swept under the familial carpet and trampled upon. Silently. And without care.

I have one blurred black and white photograph. In it, she looks abashed and completely ill at ease. She wears all black but her arms are bare, dimpled at the wrist and unadorned, but at the neck of her plain dress, is a silver lizard brooch. She's squinting into the sun and something about her makes me want to take her by the hands and kiss her, kiss her slightly furrowed brow and look into her eyes

She is my great-grandmother. Her name was Armenella Matier. And I look like her. Finding this photograph was like finding my own identity because I resemble neither my mother nor father, but I found my own face in Armenella's gentle, acquiesing yet vaguely annoyed expression.

Armenella had five children. For some reason, one day, she put her head in the gas oven. I don't know where she is buried. I don't even know if anyone knows why she did it. No one talks about her anymore. Anymore? No one ever talked about her.

My grandmother, who married Armenella's eldest son, also died young. But at least I have some recollection of her. According to my mother, I was not just the apple of her eye, but the star in her night sky and that she once told my mother (even though I was four years old at the time) if anyone ever hurt me, there would be no place left on this Earth for them to hide. I sometimes feel she can manage that, even from beyond the grave. I wonder how things would have been with My Armenella.

My mother now, too, is gone. Losing a mother is not something to dismiss lightly, and I have written about her on more than one occasion, but this post is about imagining the impact that the love of two other matriarchs would have affected my life.

No one will ever know the whys and the why nots of the life and lonely death of Armenella Matier. Very few people ever seemed to have cared. But here I sit, so many, many years after she took that desperate decision, and as I believe time and space have no effect on souls and love, that finally she has been found. And she is loved.

For Armenella Matier. With endless love.

soul

2010-09-26T16:43:00.000+02:00

When we are asleep, time and distance are nothing; there is no difference between the living and the dead, between people we have met or have never met. The world of unconsciousness is a place where souls can meet.

I believe the same thing exists in waking consciousness. Send love, send unconditional love to everyone you think about.

the wind beneath my wings

2010-08-06T19:46:00.001+02:00

Someone far away, but close to my heart, inspired me to write this, something that I should have been written a long time ago, to someone who is the heart of my world.

There is no other way to say it, but I thank G-d for your life, I thank Him for choosing you for me, for your acceptance of the deal and for your continued devotion to the pact. Without you, the world would fall apart, and if not, then it would be a dark, empty, loveless place, it would be just another star spinning in the Universe, minus one golden, dazzling orb of light.

Without you, I would have had no one to show me what real generosity means. I would have had no one to hold my hand on the darkest night and just be there, in silent sympathy, not judging, just loving. I would have grown up unaware that there really was someone that I could trust with my life, someone who would give up, if it was ever needed, their life for me.

To think of a life without this golden light is unthinkable and thanks to G-d, unnecessary, because you are here, you are my golden light, my best friend, my soul, my sister. My everything. The wind beneath my wings.

I love you Keren.

The Trail of Tears

2010-07-20T10:49:00.001+02:00

Today is Tisha B'Av, one of the saddest days in the Jewish calendar. This morning, under a beautiful blazing summer sun, I stood on my balcony, looked to the azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea, and I wept. Exactly 518 years ago, the Jews were forcibly expelled from Spain, a country where they had lived since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

To witness the peace and tranquility before me and then to think of the pain, the thousands and thousands of men, women and children, walking the roads and highways of 15th century Spain, bedraggled and bereft of all possessions, crushed and broken and defeated, was too much to bear. Centuries of art, enlightenment and creativity, swept aside by the pen of the Catholic monarchs.

A few years later, in 1502, it was the turn of the Muslims to face the same fate - to leave the country they had turned into a civilised nation.

Expulsions, whether forced by those in power or due to circumstances, are a shared human experience. The Irish, who died of starvation and left Ireland in their millions; the Cherokee Nation, forced to walk hundreds of miles to Oklahoma - and today's refugees, all still walking along the trail of tears, leaving behind everything they ever owned, leaving behind their homeland, leaving behind the bones of their ancestors.

Recently, in a conversation with novelist Mitchell James Kaplan, whose debut novel 'By Fire, By Water', is about those cataclysmic days of 15th century Spain,he talked to me about wanting his novel to be published in Arabic, because he wanted to show people that an American Jew admired and appreciated the contribution of Muslims to a way of life that seems long gone. To paraphrase, there was a time when the Jews and the Muslims lived hand in hand.

"I want to build bridges," is what he actually said. It is easy to say that the world should start to build bridges, but in reality it must start, as Mitchell James Kaplan said, with me. Imagine a world where there are no expulsions, no refugees, just bridges over old trails of tears.

Today, serve humanity by dedicating yourself to a vision greater than your perceived boundaries.

Mitchell James Kaplan's novel, 'By Fire, By Water', is available at all good bookstores and online at Amazon.com

Spanish Heart, Spanish Soul

2010-07-12T11:35:00.003+02:00

It seems an auspicious moment in Spanish history, for those who follow soccer anyway, to announce to the world that after five years of fighting it, five years of not wanting it - and not knowing what I wanted either - that I am staying forever.

I have written about Spain before but now I am writing about my home, my people. This is a country of frustrations, petty bureaucracies and endless rule breaking. Yet it holds in its palm a people who are intensely emotional and deeply spiritual.

Spain, I once wrote, is built on passion and blood. Passion for life, for the family, for love; the blood of martyrs, the blood of Christ and the blood of innocents, whether they be Madrid bombing victims or those who were victims of Torquemada’s Inquisition or those who fell at the hands of the conquistadors. Blood and passion are the twin pillars of what it means to be Spanish.

Spain, from the window of a plane, is all jagged sierras beside the dancing waters of a sea of infinite beauty and depth of colour.

Spain has continued to surprise me, and I have been surprised at myself. This has been a journey of contradictions, and this is a country of contradictions, of dazzling light and beauty, of Arabic, Jewish and Christian heritage, of art and architecture and literature, of music and film and sheer, unadulterated alegría de vivir.

It might sound odd, but the last four weeks have shown me where my allegiances lie and how the Spanish passion has overtaken and consumed me. Living here has posed many questions for me but, I have had patience with everything unresolved in my heart... I have not searched for the answers, I have lived everything, and it has come to pass that, without ever noticing it, I have lived my way into the answer...

With endless thanks to Rainer Maria Rilke

Mi Vida Española

God for the soul

2010-07-03T11:06:00.001+02:00

This is a poem dedicated to a Muslimah of special grace, a person who has been all of these things to me and who reminded me one day, in her inimitable fashion, about god for the soul. Sara, you are a poet in my heart.

All the light in the Mediterranean blue is just a reflection of your eyes, your soul.

You have been my rock, my fortress, my nightingale

my princess, your name means princess,

Siddiqah, Sājidah, Nur - you are my Ayat an-Nur, far beyond pearls is your value

I will send God's angels to you until the day He sends them to come for me

Bedouin Heart

2010-07-03T10:41:00.000+02:00

I have a nomadic heart, a soul that cannot rest.

The world is my home, and home is where the heart is...

watch those emissions

2010-06-30T14:53:00.001+02:00

The Universe is not punishing you or blessing you. The Universe is responding to the vibrational attitude that you are emitting.

I love this. Thank you Abraham, whoever you may be..!

saying grace part 3

2010-06-22T10:18:00.000+02:00

As there were originally Three Graces, I will end this series at three, although it's a shame in some respects as I know so many people with this beautiful attribute. The third person I have known all my adult life and we have been though several lifetimes together in this one life, some of it good, some of it terrible, some of it just plain amazing. So this is for you, my beautiful grace, S.B.

How many people do you know who have truly crammed what seems like several lifetimes into one short life, a life that is yet still blossoming and changing? And that this person never blows her own trumpet or throws herself bouquets and is only ever interested in the care and happiness of those she loves? Because when this girl loves you, it's like being bathed in a hot, bright-white light and you begin to sense just how wondrous life can be...

When I say your name, I get laughter, strength, support, love. When I see your face, I see nothing but beauty. I can hear your laugh in my head, even though you are on the other side of the world and I haven't heard it for a long time. It's imprinted in my brain. Some people come into the world to be beautiful. Some come into the world to be special. Some come into the world to go about things in their quiet, gentle way. You have come into this world because sometimes, once in a while, the world needs all these things in one person.

You are the Three Graces.

saying grace part 2

2010-06-21T09:08:00.000+02:00

I didn't expect to write a sequel to yesterday's post, which was about my amazing (full of) grace soul sister, C.S. But I started to think about the Three Graces, what they stood for, and how I am lucky and grateful to have real graces who fill my life with their light. So this essay is for P.W, also with eternal thanks.

Not only did you give me angel wings, but you showed me how to fly. Not only did you give me the healing power of the Universe in my hands, but you showed me how better life is with healing love. You showed me how to heal me. Just a few minutes in your presence and I feel like I've been plugged into the mains. Your energy, your love is contagious. Thank God I caught it.

saying grace

2010-06-20T13:18:00.000+02:00

I have a friend who is full of grace. Grace. Noun. Definition: mercy, forgiveness. Synonyms: compassion, generosity, love.

There is a serenity in everything you say, I feel it beat off your written words and wrap itself around me, like a protective cocoon. Soothing as a gentle kiss. Grace is not something you can buy; it is not something that can be intellectualised and dissected and put back together again. Grace is a state of being, a state of consciousness, a way to share, a way to live.

Just be you. Just be grace. This is who you are, who you always were, always will be.

For C.S. and her eternal grace.

little sparks of light aka the Almond Spring effect

2010-05-01T12:58:00.000+02:00

Recently I learned to breathe up and down instead of in and out. This makes you feel as if your body is part of a billion pieces of cosmic light, which of course, it is. And this is what connects us. It makes a person realise that life is never just you or me, but us and we. But I also made another connection recently to something infinitely more precious than millions of pieces of light. It felt like my soul had been returned to me.

Time and space mean nothing. Distance is irrelevant. When I open my eyes in the morning, when I sip my coffee, when I sit down to write, when I am breathing up and down with the Universe, I feel like you are sitting next to me. An Almond Spring moment.

You will know what that means.

The sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky...

shoe story

2009-05-18T09:11:00.001+02:00

This article begins with a cliche. Cliches, while being annoying, tired and sometimes trite, are rooted in truth, which is probably why humankind simultaneously uses and sneers at them, because unpalatable truths are usually, well, unpalatable. Somehow I got to thinking about this shoe story after reading the most improbable and jaw dropping piece of hatred on a youtube comment, which I'll get out of the way now, and tell you it was this: "shut up you fucking piece of Jew scum, you oven dodger."

My usual response to such epithets is "is that it? Is that all you've got?" and then I forget about it. But I haven't been able to forget about this and I cannot, no matter how I try, forgive it. But this isn't a piece on irrational fear or hatred, it's about a shoe, and a cliche.

I once saw this shoe. In a museum. It was a highly fashionable and desirable wedge heel sandal, in a chocolate brown suede leather with a narrow, pretty pale green trim. It was a little shoe, maybe European size 36. I could have put my foot in that shoe. The fit may have been a little too close for comfort as I'm a size 37, but you know, I can suffer for style. It could have been mine. The wearer must have been a petite lady too, I think she must have been super stylish and probably loved herself madly as she skimmed down the sidewalks of some city in her beautiful suede wedge heel sandals towards the cafes and the chattering and the fun. I bet she was pretty. And laughed a lot and her laughter was infectious and made everyone who heard it at least smile, if not laugh.

I fell in love with that shoe the moment I saw it and with its previous owner, even though everything I have said about her comes from my own imagination. But it frightened me. Because in another time, another world, I could have been her. And I wouldn't have needed her pretty shoes to walk a mile in them.

There was only one shoe. One shoe in a jumbled, tangled collection of shoes. But there it was, sitting pretty in the midst of all the decaying, disintegrating footwear, amid the broken sandals and tatty leather - grey shoes, brown shoes, black shoes, red, white and blue shoes - out of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pieces of footwear, I saw just her shoe. And her.

It's been years since I was at Auschwitz, but she's still there. More often than not, we don't have to go too far to walk a mile in someone else's shoes as most human experiences are shared. But dodging ovens is not one of them. And for some reason, it hurts me to know that she didn't.

like an angel passing through my room

2009-02-25T22:09:00.000+01:00

I have written of angels lately and spent much more time than that wondering about angels and their celestial selves. When people refer to others as angels, what do they mean? What is it about a supposed being that has never lived an earthly existence, a being with almost magical divinely-inspired qualities that makes us take its name and bestow it upon others?

If you believe it to be true, an angel is a being filled with light. And light, though it may sometimes be concealed, never disappears, it is always there, even though we may not be able to see it. In the same way the stars still dazzle on a blazing summer's afternoon, light, and in particular, the light of love, can never be extinguished. We just have to know where to look for it or recognise it when it comes into our lives. Sometimes it is just the quiet voice in your mind, sometimes it knocks timidly and shows a smile. And then there are the times when it bursts into your life, like a blazing catherine wheel, beautifully and brilliantly unstoppable.

Such moments are often the most perfect surprises and manifest themselves when we are least expecting it. Often they are small surprises, precious moments, an act of kindness. Lately, there has been a lot of angelic light in my life, some of it I found myself, some of it given to me, and that, dear reader, is the best kind.

When human beings stop thinking for themselves alone, when what we do is purely for the benefit and happiness of another, when love is its own reward and demands nothing in return, when we remove the labels of friend or enemy, black or white, gay or straight, male or female and extend our love to everyone, it is then we are something akin to an angel.

For those of you who have shared their love, their lives, their creativity and their hope with me, this is for you. For those of you have given their time at my request to make little children happy, this is for you. For those of you who shared their children's precious smiles and laughter on a miserable day when I didn't feel so happy as I do today, this is for you.

There is light and love in all of us and when it is given up freely, this is what makes us angels.

eight legged freak

2009-02-25T17:52:00.001+01:00

Something I found today that was written during my stay in Sydney:

It wouldn't be seemly to be in Australia and not write about spiders. Before I go any further, I would like to add that on my first visit to Australia, I was indeed bitten by a spider. We looked it up in a book going by the state of my three wounds which at first looked like mosquito bites but which then hardened into mini volcanoes that spewed out clear liquid. Nice. Attractive, too. Anyway, the said spider was declared to be a jumping spider, and lo! in the big book of spiders, there it was, described as being "kittenish". I was not impressed.

Now I find there is something lurking outside in the garden. It's the size of a cat and lurks in a web that could catch a German Shepherd. I kid you not. Apparently it "lives" there and "doesn't bother anyone". Well, it bothers me. Everytime I pass it, I wonder why I do not have a giant size can of hairspray in my hand, or any other kind of spider be-gone instrument.

I bet it knows now I don't like it and is planning to move webs and "bother" me....

the real conspiracy theory

2009-02-04T19:01:00.000+01:00

Sometimes things happen and you are so overwhelmed by the event that you often wonder if it ever happened at all. And telling everyone that it happened doesn't always help, the more you tell people, the more it becomes something of an urban myth. Or maybe that's just me.

So, I am going to tell you something, put it down in black and white, so that when I start to feel as if it didn't happen, I will be able to read this and hopefully dispel any rumours to the contrary, even though they take place in the battlefield of my own mind.

Last week, I sent an angel, an archangel called Raphael to heal a sick boy. The boy in question lay in a hospital in Canada with a fever of 104 degrees and the doctors had no idea why this was happening to him. He was in extreme pain. His mother, as you might imagine, was beside herself. I don't know these people personally, I only know the boy's mother through a Facebook application, which by the way, has brought a lot of love and beautiful, empathetic people into my life. More of which later and possibly in a different posting.

In trying to reach out and comfort her, I thought that the best way for the boy's mother to cope with what was happening to her son was to give her strength, so I did an angel card reading for her. I told her I would also meditate with Raphael and send him to give her son a healing kiss. And this is what I did at about 1.30pm, central European time.

The meditation was something beautiful and powerful. I saw a boy lying in a hospital bed surrounded by orange and gold waves of light and an angel leaning over him, his dazzling white angel's wing covering the body so that I could not see what the angel looked like. There was an overwhelming sense of peace and calm.

When I awoke the next morning, his mother had sent me an email to say that the boy's fever had suddenly broken at around 5am and that his temperature was down to 100 degrees, he had been allowed home and all tests had come back negative. She was convinced the angel had indeed shown up to kiss her son. What with the crossing of numerous international time zones, an ocean and a set of Rocky Mountains, five in the morning her time, was more or less, 1-2pm my time.

I have wrestled with this. Half of me wishes to rationalise it, the other half just says accept it. And that is exactly what I have done.

Someone, much wiser than me, once told me that when we want something badly enough, the whole Universe conspires to help us get it. The Universe knows us better than we know ourselves, which is the key to understanding why we don't always get what we want. Perhaps what has happened here is that I have conspired with the Universe and all its beings of love and light to make something beautiful happen. And that is my true path.

the world is a wedding

2009-01-28T13:37:00.000+01:00

Somewhere in the Talmud there is a saying - hurry and eat, hurry and drink, for the world we are leaving is like a wedding. I found these words, the world is a wedding, while reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave, and while it's easy to understand the meaning behind it, enjoy life because it is fleetingly short, I since discovered that the Hasidim have taken a different interpretation entirely and one which fits in with what I wanted to say today, given especially the state of this world in which we live; a world where man's inhumanity to man and woman's inhumanity to woman knows no bounds.

A wedding, maintain the Hasidim, means nothing without the bride and groom and their attendance at the wedding is similarly meaningless without the words, and I'm just using the standard English language here, "I do", though the Hebrew is much more poetic and beautiful -

harei at mekudeshet li, "you are married to me".

As this is not a lesson on faith or beliefs, my interpretation of it is that without love and compassion and understanding for those who surround us, including strangers, including those we dislike for whatever reason, and including those who hate us, then life is empty and without grace. I have written before about the love of strangers, but one act in particular, which I strangely did not mention in my previous post, came back to me while I was thinking about this.

I was in Jerusalem, while on holiday in Israel, my sister and I decided to buy some Judaica from a shop in the Cardo. The Cardo is an area of the old city and along the restored streets you can see remnants of the the first and second Temples, dating back to the 10th and 1st centuries BCE. It was in one of these shops along the Cardo that we ran into an angel.

His name was Jonathan. He had made aliya to Israel from Australia and we spent a long time in the shop and ended up buying about $400 worth of stuff. Silverware, seder plates for Passover, handpainted silver worked mezuzot and ceramics, all of it handmade and beautiful. Then came the moment where the angel appeared. The shop did not accept credit cards, we had no traveller's cheques and cash was limited to the bus fare back to Tel Aviv and a couple of felafels thrown in. I would like to say that what happened next was one of those defining moments in life where you completely realise your entire raison d'etre or are instantly filled with the light of the Universe. But I was too shocked for that and maybe this was, in fact, Jonathan's moment.

He wrapped the items up and handed them to us and said: "Send us a cheque when you get home."

We tried a little bit of stunned quibbling, the failsafe polite "oh we couldn't possibly, it's too much money", but he insisted. We left the shop in a state of semi-stupor, quite incapable of processing what had actually happened to us. Of course he had done a great mitzvah for us, a great act of human kindness by trusting us to send the cheque. Had we not sent it, his mitzvah would have been none the less and we would have been part of those who fall into the category of soul: cold and black as a piece of lead. Well, we did send the cheque and the following year, when we went back to Israel, we made a point of heading for the shop to ask if the cheque had arrived. He just smiled at us and said, "I'm sure it did."

This man had made the world a wedding. Everything we say or do affects the world and everyone in it - and if everyone in the world realised this, we might be in a better situation. Like ripples in a pond, what starts out as a small splash with us can cause big waves elsewhere. Sadly and usually this is a negative thing, but imagine, just imagine if it was because we had decided to marry the world to ourselves.

I have married you to me and we will make the world a wedding. Is there anything more beautiful?

honey from the beehive / the broken hallelujah

2009-01-24T21:29:00.000+01:00

This is the story of three women and two men and their relationship with one of the most fascinating, beautiful and powerful men in history. It is also a story of broken dreams, broken lives and broken hearts. Of betrayal and hate and shame. And of a love that was so strong, it spun out of control and spiralled into history, exploding into murder, revolt and the loss of everything.

When honey is taken directly from the beehive it is raw, sweet and potent; it is pure and imbued with the life force of those who have given their short, precious lives to bring this delicate, perfumed candy into existence. The cost of this breathtakingly high price is scarcely acknowledged and rarely portrayed.

So this is the story of the honey from the beehive, the story of those who have no voice.

Sometimes you come to me when I least expect you; you rise up out of the dark water, your hand skimming the surface of the pool; broad and pale-tipped, like a water lily, the softest touch I ever knew. You rise up and smile, your mouth ripe and wide and alive. Sometimes you come to me when I need you most and know that I can no longer have you. And then I am instantly transported back to that awful place, I can feel the great rip in my heart like the rending of cloth, still taste the sweet and sour metallic taste of your blood in my mouth.

The Whore, The Wife, The Mother, The Lover: When Ishai died the world turned black. Just as the love of God means nothing to a heart starved of human love, when he died and the evening star turned the skies to the colour of the void, all the King's prayers ended and from that sudden, eviscerating moment, the golden light, the golden love, the shining hope and the shimmering bliss of our life turned to dust. When the King broke bread and communed with his God, I cried for my seven day old son on the kitchen floor.

God gave a present to me, to us, made of flesh and bone. I spent hours every day just staring at him, watching him sleep, unwrapping him from his clothing and breathlessly worshipping his pure, innocent perfection. For forty eight hours, David and I had something outside of ourselves to obsess over, forty eight hours of pleasure with our newborn son. The sickness struck fast and brutally.

Officially, and this is where the knife was really stuck in, he was nameless. He died a day short of his eighth day, the day when he would have been made a son of the covenant, the day when his name would have been announced to God, to Israel and the world. But my God is a jealous God and our son, made in the name of love and beauty, was too much, even for God to bear.

I begged God to take me instead. But that would have been too simple, wouldn't it? David tore his clothes to rags and wailed like the possessed, the sound of his grief making everyone flinch with its rawness. But my gift was gone. Those precious jewel lips and infant stars for hands were lost forever. There was a terrible pain in me, so deep and damaging, it was as if someone had run a knife into my womb and shredded it.

Life, said David, is for the living. They all like to believe that he turned his heart elsewhere, that our baby's death signalled the end of his praying and bartering and beseeching of God to spare the tiny life when he spoke and said: "I will go to him but he will never return to me."
They all think they know him so well. But I know how the air around him trembles at night and how our son's name is offered up and whispered to deaf ears and a stony heart.

once upon a terrible time

2009-01-03T13:11:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time there were three little girls (well, there will be four involved but that comes right at the end, just to keep you reading). Two of them grew up with nothing but love and hard working parents; the third had a fairytale princess childhood with everything a girl could want - but did she? The first two, Irina and Anna, knew the third one, Helena, because Helena's nanny lived in their tenement block. Helena's father was a pharmacist - they had a big house with a garden and she had all the dolls a girl could want. Anna and Irina's parents were just shopkeepers and factory workers, but that's childhood for you, no one's counting the pennies when you are just a girl. They were all nine years old.

Then one day, not to put too fine a point on it, shit happened. Helena disappeared. Anna and Irina did not understand why. And then Irina disappeared. And Anna was all alone. Anna was alone for the next sixty years.

So here comes the fourth girl. For her to be introduced at such a late stage of the story requires artistic license, so you are just going to have to bear with me and accept that as circumstances go, she got involved. Here's where it gets interesting: Helena hadn't disappeared, well not literally, someone had saved the day and saved her life.

And girl number four found her. After sixty years, after being hidden in a wall in a house in Lodz, after displacement and a lifetime of wondering, she had been found. Helena was alive and well and suddenly, thanks to girl number four, on the phone to Anna, crying and laughing and talking like nothing had happened to spoil the endless summers and the ice cream and the music. They met one more time, when Helena flew to Poland from Israel.

So what about Irina? The missing girl? Well girl number four tried her best; she asked everyone, the saints, the scholars, everyone who might know. Until she went to the place where the ultimate truth lies and asked: Where is Irina Borenstein? But they had never heard of her. No one had ever heard of her, it was like she had never existed. So, that's six million and one.

Girl number four never saw either of them again but she thinks of them all the time, like she did today for some reason. And at least three people know that a nine year old girl growing up in the Warsaw ghetto did exist and deserves to be more than a name that never even made a list.

__this was first posted in September 2006 but Irina will soon have made the list at Yad Vashem. I promise.

to whom it may concern

2009-01-03T13:10:00.001+01:00

I learned from you that beauty need only be a whisper

love is a stranger

2009-01-03T13:07:00.000+01:00

I had grand plans to write here last night while I was under the influence of the Grey Goose and several copas of vino, when my head was full of questions and my heart full of emotions, but the link wouldn’t work and I had to hold my fire, which, for those of you who know me, will know is something of a gargantuan task.

What is the fear in people when love is shown to them? Some act like they never had love and they want me to go without too. I am talking, of course, about all love, not just the kind of love you give to someone in a bed for 48 hours straight and even though I know this flies in the face of all those hours with Madge in Kabbalah class, we only get one shot at this life, one chance to make it all right, just one chance. And mostly we throw it away.

Over the last few years, I have lost people I cared about very much to a terrible disease and then the possibility of me joining the ranks was brought abruptly to my attention last year when I was in Sydney. Now there is a three year old child seriously ill with cancer and we have embarked upon, me, my sister and Stan Afeaki, a little fundraising foundation for her and it’s hard, it’s so hard and slap my thigh and call me naive but I really, really didn’t count on people’s blunt disinterest. And I struggle with my feelings about this on a daily basis.

I’ve always been too emotional, I’ve always felt too much of other people’s pain, but this is part of me and now I am old enough not to make any apologies for who I am. I have been around the world and seen astonishing beauty, sadness and ugliness and I have been blessed by the kindness of strangers; angels in the midst of the unbelievers, their love shown unconditionally, even in the smallest way - and angels, like love, find you, not the other way around:

so, to the man at Hawaii airport who knelt on the ground and cradled my stricken sister’s head in his lap until the ambulance came; so, to the woman on the train from Buenos Aires to Mendoza who shared her food with me upon the realisation that all I had for the 23 hour trip was a bottle of water and a biscuit; so, to the South African rugby team who sat in a circle around my sister all night while she slept to protect her from being sexually harassed at Dubai airport; so, to the six year old child who spent her savings to buy me a gift; so, to Diego Ghersi, an officer and a gentleman; so, to the unknown German man at Frankfurt airport, aka the Hellmouth, who saw me in distress and offered his help; so, to the unknown man in a London restaurant who mysteriously paid for my dinner; so, to all the people who for some reason smiled at me across a busy street; so, to the people who don’t build a fortress around their hearts, I thank you for your love.

Time goes by so quickly that a year seems like no time at all. Show your love, give it unconditionally, whether or not it is returned, whether or not you think it is “deserved”. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to do, but it’s the only way…

is it just the margaritas, or are you, looking at me?

2009-01-03T13:05:00.001+01:00

How did I know this would happen on the day it happened? How did I feel it? And there you were, making me feel like I was back at school…almost punched your arm and ran away….bathing me in the bright white spotlight of your smile. You made me forget myself, thought I was someone else, someone good…

god's greatest work

2009-01-03T13:03:00.000+01:00

I believe it was Robert Louis Stevenson who called the people of the South Pacific islands “God’s greatest work”. Captain Cook called the islands of Tonga “the friendly isles” and if there is one place I would happily be castaway on, it would be Tonga, because dear reader, you can believe the hype. It’s all true. Sit in your car for more than three minutes doing nothing except look mildly perplexed, and someone will rap the window and ask if you need any help; don’t worry, be happy; nothing is too much trouble; just call me; give me your hand, I won’t let you fall…that’s my Tonga.

I could talk about these islands being everything you imagine when you think of a South Pacific idyll; about palm laden shores of crystalline blue waters and white sands; of vast clear skies; the smell of tropical blooms and coconut. But while these things make Tonga so appealing, they are not what make Tonga so valuable. Its people are its greatest treasure.

Maybe this comes with being a little beyond the pale when it comes to the global rat race. Maybe you have to forego the luxuries, the trappings, the money, the big businesses and all that comes with everyday life. None of that is there in Tonga and in some ways, Tongans will always be richer for those reasons alone. And I am richer for being given the gift of meeting God’s greatest work.

kolonga mon amour

2009-01-03T12:59:00.000+01:00

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being—the reward he seeks—the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

Funny where you find love. Or where you fall in love. Or where your soul takes flight. Or where you find a certain something you have never found or maybe felt before. If home is where the heart is, then mine can be found beating happily somewhere off a bumpy Pacific island road, somewhere through a coconut plantation that stretches down to a sea of unimaginable beauty and colour, somewhere where there is a hammock strung low and where everything shimmers and time stands still. So still. Do you hear it? That whispering sound of gentle nothing?

sangre de la pasión

2009-01-03T12:58:00.000+01:00

Spain near enough grinds to a frenzied halt during Santa Semana, where on the surface it seems that the Spanish are celebrating their unbridled passion for being theatrically Catholic. But bubbling barely beneath the surface is the desire to reaffirm and give reverence to what it means to be Spanish.

A little bit of history: the present day traditions of Holy Week in Sevilla has its origins as early as 1248 when King Fernando III reclaimed Sevilla from the Moors. And thus Spain to Catholicism. The events of March 11th 2004 in Madrid were not lost on the Spanish, whose expulsion of Arab dominance is re-enacted in every city, town and village in former Moorish Spain every year without fail.

Spain is built on passion and blood. Passion for life, for the Madonna, for the family, for love. The blood of martyrs, the blood of Christ and the blood of innocents, whether they be Spanish or those who were victims of Torquemada’s Inquisition or those who fell at the hands of the conquistadors. Blood and passion are the twin pillars of what it means to be Spanish.

When the Madrid bombs killed 191 people on March 11th 2004, the Spanish were the first to realise that history repeats itself. If the jihad is truly against those who seek to crush and destroy Islam, then Spain knows its bloody passionate past had a part to play. On March 12th, eleven and a half million Spaniards took to the streets in united grief and passionate, yet non-violent protest. Within days, José Maria Aznar´s Iraqi-war supporting government was uprooted in the general elections and Spanish troops came home when Zapatero’s new government took office.

Semana Santa in Spain is an unforgettable experience that causes all who see it to reflect on their own culture and the history of humanity. This is a country of frustrations, petty bureaucracies and endless rule breaking. Yet it holds in its palm a race of people intensely emotional and deeply spiritual. The blood of the passion may refer to Christ’s journey to Calvary, but that very same stuff flows in the veins and drives the heart of every Spaniard.

ode to a little bird

2009-01-03T12:56:00.002+01:00

Donna Tartt wrote in The Secret History: “The dead come to us in our dreams because it’s the only way they can make us see them.” She went on to say that when we “see” the dead in our dreams, it’s akin to seeing a star….if that is true, and I think it might be, then the dreams I have of my mama, each one portraying her ever younger and ever more glamorous, and always laughing and always the force of nature she was, is pure light from a dead star. Let me set the scene.

My mama and papa met when they were very young. She told me she loved him the minute she set eyes on him. She was 14, he was 15. They got together shortly after. They stayed together. They got married. He would never leave the house, not even to the post office, without telling her where he was going. He called her bird. She loved the very bones of him. This is my standard, this is what I have to live up to.

My mama died of cancer four years ago. She was living her dream and she loved every single moment of it. We had an inexplicable mother-daughter bond, yet in some ways I am half the woman she was. She was afraid of nothing. Nothing.

In the end, she went very quickly, once she knew I was on my way from London. All she was worried about was that my dad would be ok, that I would be there for him. I just hope she heard my healing prayers of hope across the miles and that she felt the bright white light kiss of my love.

She sang everywhere, my sister said she was singing some party song shortly before she died. It wasn’t a party until my mama showed up. She was cute and funny and rude and bawdy and bloody bloody beautiful.

And I would give up every single thing, every single thing, just to have my beautiful bird song mother hold me one more time…

tales from the flight deck

2009-01-03T12:55:00.000+01:00

There is nothing quite like being at 40,000 feet, where time seems to stand still, where the world is pure and bright and beautiful. Unless it’s a night flight and all you can see is the void. Which reminds me of the days when a girl could ask to visit the cockpit and be allowed without being considered a threat. Today I am not even allowed to bring eyebrow tweezers on board in case I kick in the flight deck door and give the captain a much-needed brow job.

So I suppose I should explain why I was in the cockpit in the first place. It all started with a certain Capitan Teresano, an Argentinian airforce pilot, who allowed me into the cockpit of his Fokker as we flew from Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia to Ushuaia, the most southerly inhabited town in the southern hemisphere. For those who don’t know, the Argentinian airforce used to sell seats to civilians as they shuttled around southern Patagonia, maybe keeping their eyes on the Malvinas as they did so.

Anyway, this flight deck thrillsville was a revelation to me. Because the planes don’t fly to great heights like jets, the topographical views are mesmerising. I saw the tip of Chile and Argentina as it turns up at its most southerly point back towards the Atlantic, I saw the gentle blue curve of the Earth itself - and I saw the ground rise up to meet us as the Captain landed the plane with me standing upright jammed between him and the navigator. I was addicted.

The night flight from Rio de Janeiro to Amsterdam was, however, something that made me a small child once more. The pilots were after chitchat about Ireland, I was after seeing some stars. The cockpit of a 747-400 series is the size of an average room in an average house. There were three extremely tall Dutchmen, an equally long limbed stewardess and me, with plenty of room between us to set up a dining table and get the drinks out. The pilot duly switched off his cockpit lights so that some random wee Irish girl could sit on the floor and press her face to the window like a child, staring at stars the size of Chinese lanterns for a good 25 minutes. Hundreds of thousands of glowing gleaming dazzling pieces of cosmic light. The sight of them burned a hole in my conscious.

I could have stayed there forever but he wanted his dinner. When I got up to go, still mesmerised, I asked him why they flew with the cabin lights on, thus rendering everything into a gaping void before them, he just laughed and asked why he needed to see where he was going.
“Oh it’s not that,” I said, “it’s what you might not see coming towards you.”

But that, dear reader, is another story….

when love came to town

2009-01-03T12:52:00.000+01:00

When someone we love dies, we become selfish. Death becomes not about the person who died, but about those of us who are left behind. I remember when my mother died, my father kept it all in and if he cried about it, I never really knew. A year later when Sophie, our Burmese cat died, he cried inconsolably for days.

Losing an animal seems to bring out stronger feelings because, unlike humans, our animals never judge us, never bear grudges, never say things they shouldn't, never wound us with harsh looks or comments. They never stop loving us, no matter how mean, petty, disagreeable and wretched we are. This is what we need to learn to be like with other humans and this is why losing the one who loves you above all others cuts like knife.

Last year when I was in Australia and so lost I didn't know which end was up, a labrador dog came into my life. People come into your life for a reason and so do animals. My friend didn't need another dog, but there he was anyway, small and blonde and beautiful and suddenly in her garden and in my life. There were days when I thought I would go completely blind with the pain that was inside me, but everything changed when Toby came to town.

He grew big, I mean huge, he wagged his tail so hard every time he saw us that it could have powered enough electricity for a small town, but there was something about his eyes that gave me a lifeline.

Toby could see right into my soul and in his eyes I could see the power of the universe. I could go on endlessly about how he would suddenly get up off the floor, come over and stick his big face on my thigh and stare up at me, or how he would sit beside me and cuddle right up close as if he knew what I was feeling, but all dogs are good at that. We could be like that too but we just never learn to read the signs in others. We could do it if we stopped thinking about ourselves alone, like Toby.

He taught me patience, because by God you need patience with a puppy; but mostly he taught me how to love again. Toby, I don't know who you were, or who sent you, but you came when you were needed the most and you gave of yourself so selflessly. To people who would say that you were just a dog, you didn't get the chance to experience Toby's love in your life, to have that full on joy to the world experience or be taught what is the most difficult thing for human beings to do - love unconditionally.

Nineteen months is not a long time to be on this Earth, even for a labrador dog. Often I have wished I wasn't so sentimental about animals because when they die, the pain, the loss of that unconditional love is almost too much to endure. But if I hadn't had him, I'd have lost so much more. Today has been a sad day because mourning the loss of a beloved animal reminds me that I still have so much learn and so much to give and I'll never quite match up to his high standards. But then again, he wouldn't want me to, he loved me for being me. He loved us all equally, the good and the bad, he made no distinction.

Today should be a celebration of pure love. Because love is pure and it rises to the top of all the mess in our lives and we should embrace it and reach for it whenever we can, no matter where it comes from. Today is the day that love came to town.

For Toby - March 2006 - December 2007

my kalashnikov

2009-01-03T12:49:00.000+01:00

I have a Kalashnikov. Yes, that's correct, you didn't misread that. I. Have. A. Kalashnikov. I keep it in the kitchen cos well I never know when I might fancy taking it out and admiring its clean simple lines, functionality and beauty.

And how did I get my hands on such a treasure? Well from the daddy of all things kalashnikov, from the General himself. Mikhail and I shared a couple of shots one evening. He is quite by far the most enigmatic and most humble person I ever met and left me with more than his clever invention for memories.

I've been reading several reviews lately of a new book about the AK-47 and its impact on the world. Beloved of armies, guerillas, terrorists and Quentin Tarantino characters, when you absolutely, positively gotta kill everyone in the room, the AK-47 is your only weapon of choice.
Most people know the history of how Mikhail Kalashnikov came to invent his deadly weapon, a weapon that also fires underwater, and the new book claims he wished he'd invented a lawnmower instead.

But on a cold day in London, in full Russian dress uniform, the most gentle of human beings, slightly bewildered by the all fuss being made of him, spoke about the mother of all necessity - survival. Mr Kalashnikov has been an inventor all his life - he invented a vodka glass for the Russian navy that would never tip over, not even on the highest of seas - and lately in his old age and not exactly the richest man in Siberia inspite of all his achievements - he put his name to a brand of vodka.

This is not a paean to a weapon but to the man I met. I have a wonderful photograph showing the moment when he, surrounded by photographers, saw me trying to sneak a photo of him on my phone and reached out to me. The photograph I have was taken by one of the snappers present and given to me later as a surprise gift. The General and I are laughing and look like we're down the pub having a few swift vodkas...which technically we were.

But that evening, at a party given in his honour, I received his favourite invention. The one that people can't resist touching, can't resist trying to defeat. Everytime I take my Kalashnikov out of the cupboard and fill it with Russia's finest, I think of that humble, honourable man and how I'd been lucky enough to meet a whole lot of history in one person.

Russian toasts are notoriously long and sentimental, he said, and once you open a bottle it must be finished. So even when I'm completely whacked on vodka, I'll never spill a drop, thanks to my Kalashnikov.