Henri-Chapelle

I am preparing to leave Aachen and resume my normal life in Muscat. It was odd to be taken out of my comfort zone and just placed here for three weeks. Not on holiday, but also not too much work. It took me ages to ground myself, and I'm so ready to leave now. But I have had many enrichening experiences, time to think and be with myself, and I have a feeling I'll be back.

Today I went out with my friend Simon and his parents; it was a kind of idyllic day and I'm so glad I spent my last Sunday with them. Simon is a good friend I got to know in Muscat and I met his parents in Rashid's desert camp. It was a night of so much laughter, an instant connection, even a kind of recognition, a good understanding. So, it was wonderful to see them again. The weather could not have been more perfect. They live in the countryside just outside Aachen, their house surrounded by fields, on the border with Belgium.

They took me to a monastry nearby where we went into the beautiful church, walked in the lovely park, saw the water mill and enjoyed a hearty vegetable broth with bread made there, and a dark beer brewed there too. The place had a certain tranquility and we were easy together, like old friends. I was happy, because my German flowed relatively well, I was worrying about that before. The church bells followed me today wherever I went, it was really special.

They took me to a viewpoint where one can look over the so- called 'Valley of God', it is green and picturesque and I could have sat in that place all afternoon. There on the hill was an old bunker from the war, a reminder that the place has not always been so quiet and pristine. Simon mentioned that there was a war cemetery nearby. I had never visited one before, and recently having scrutinised very closely the loved one's pictures of Normany, I really wanted to go.

It is called Henri-Chapelle and we got there in the late afternoon. The path leading to the entrance is flanked with pink and red roses in large beds. As one walks in, you have no idea of the sight that awaits- 7000 + white crosses and Stars of David laid with absolute military precision in the most immaculately manicured lawn. There had clearly been some gathering today, as there were wreathes and many of the graves had fresh flowers.

I have to say it was truly a noteworthy place, a dignified place. I felt honoured to visit there and pay homage to these soldiers. We walked quietly and admired everything, and as we walked out, the church bells were once again ringing across the green valley and the sun was dipping behind the wispy clouds, causing the whole sky to burst into a most deep pink. It was a moment of deep knowing that I am in the right place at the right time. 

My visit to Bonn last Friday is so fresh in my mind. We visited 'Haus der Geschichte'', the history museum there- it covers the post-war years up to the present. I kept finding myself with tears flowing uncontolled down my cheeks; it was not a conscious crying, it was some kind of deep reaction to the knowledge of fellow humans enduring so much pain. I have never really properly thought about how it must have been to come back after 6 years of excrutiating war, and find your whole life in ruin, your home in rubble. So many people lost their homes, lost touch with their families and it must have been truly devastating. The resilience and stamina of the human spirit is truly amazing.

In my opinion, sometimes death is not the worst option.

As most of you know, I have had my share of grief, and as I stood in the cemetery today, I remembered this poem by Henry van Dyke called "Ode to Immortality" that has brought me great comfort through the years. It is an image which I love.


I am standing by the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch
until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sun and sky come down to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says, 'There she is gone!
Gone where? Gone from my sight - that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says,
'There! She is gone! ' ,
there are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout :
'There! She comes!'

- and that is Dying.

The ties that bind

How the time is flying here in Aachen. Took me absolute ages to settle down and now I realise the days are running out at rather an alarming rate. We have had such stimulating and interesting days this week. Firstly in the physics institute where our heads were filled with crazy info on the building blocks of the universe, then the computer centre where we got to spend time in the virtual reality 'cave', and today the /architecture/urban planning department where we went out into the laboratory that is Aachen and looked at the process of historical development.

Aachen is a multi-faceted city. There is the university with 40 000 students- that lifestyle and attitude; then just a few streets away, the mega-rich neighbourhood- people with old and new money, that Simon showed me on his tour last week. Walk a few streets in another direction, and one immediately notices that the people are poor and struggling, and there are also many more people clearly living on the streets than I expected. I guess there are many towns in the world like this, but here I feel it is all in really close proximity.

Aachen was originally a Roman town, and it is famous for the hot springs. The Romans built Aachen in the classical chess-board "castrum'', very ordered and regulated. Charlemagne came and the magnificent cathedral became the main feature. The altar of the cathedral traditionally has to face east, towards the rising sun, and so the city is orientated around that. Where the Carolinian roads then intercept with the Roman streets, there are often unusual triangular shapes. In the Medieval times, a circular city wall was built and the roads were narrower and more windy. Come the 1800's, the town planners were more into the classical boulevard style, as can be seen in front of the city theatre. Aachen in a huge fusion of different styles and spaces, and it all works beautifully. It is complex and interesting and connects all these different historical ages.

I have been thinking about the people and events of our lives, the seeming randomness of it, but yet how one somehow senses the invisible ties that hold those events and people together. There are so many seemingly unrelated paths and choices, but somehow beneath that, the mystical fibres that bind, that order, and cause these
experiences and relationships with things, places and people to converge and present sudden and magical answers. Serendipity. Connectedness. Complexity, Beauty. Infinite possibilities.

I realised that my thoughts have been connected to all the experiences I have had this week. The amazing building blocks of the universe: that the huge expanse of space is mirrored in the internal workings of the atoms, in the neutrons and quarks and bosons. That science is about the very particles that make up our universe, the huge spaces between them and the forces and fields that glue it all together. Connectedness. Imagine I learnt this week about the Higgs boson called the "God Particle". For me the incredible fusion between science and the spiritual life.

In the virtual reality cave, we examined space, and looked at tangible concepts, that are yet completely intangible. We believe that they are there, so they are. The visible and the invisible connected.

In my walks and tours around Aachen, I am reflecting on my life and path, looking at how the place developed, the spaces connected, the seeming unrelated elements fused into one unusual and beautiful town. I am thinking how my life has evolved, the people and the spaces connected, and how all the seemingly unrelated elements reveal themselves to be perfectly aligned, again and again. I ask myself how I can possibly doubt this, as I am living in the middle of this miracle. I feel so inherently like a particle of God.

Is this what love does? Bring it on.

My wish tonight, may we all perceive the order, the serendipity, the blessed continuity of our lives, no matter our religion or creed, and have the humility to feel gratitude for it. Amen.

http://www.ted.com/talks/carter_emmart_demos_a_3d_atlas_of_the_universe.html

Follow this link to see a 6 minute mind-blowing demonstration of a 3-D map of the universe.

Where the wind always blows

I have so much noise in my head that I have really struggled to get my backside back into this chair to share my words with you. When my thoughts and emotions are such a dappled pallette of colors and shades and light, it is difficult to find a theme. Somehow I have a need to draw one or two strands out of the entangled spagetti mess at a time and examine them before I can articulate.

I have to wait for that process to happen, thank God I am not professional writer! In any case, it all came together today in the middle of an energetic cheering crowd of 15 000, a football match here in Aachen, and I felt I could pick up my flow again.

I have been happy to be in Germany and have been having an enjoyable time with the students; it has not been stressful as so many before me reported. I am experiencing a lot of new things, and each day is an unknown,a mini adventure, even more so that usual as my inner landscape is also in constant flux. 

There is a large part of me that does not want to be away from home and feels really ungrounded. I feel like a balloon bouncing up and down, finding my centre and losing it, finding my centre and losing it, on average 15 times a day.

Happy to be in a country where the church bells are ringing all around. That and the sound of the cartyres on the asphalt in the rain are soothing and so deeply familiar from my previous life, that ocassionally I can take a deep breath. I am dreaming of the loved one often and wake up before dawn full of his stories and the lines on his face, and sometimes with tears, and this also makes me miss home. I am actually so blessed to have this intimacy, but also I am having a hard time keeping myslef rooted and letting my eyes perceive the different hues of this very moment.

How can a love be so fundamentally grounding and excrutiatingly uprooting at the same time?

We visited Cologne yesterday. The cathedral is a magnificent structure out of limestone and sandstone, the second highest spires in the the world, after the single spire of the Minster in Ulm. Or as I fondly call it, the Monster. I had the privilege to experience it again just a couple of months ago, a place I have deeply enjoyed since I first visited in 1997. In 1880 this cathedral in Cologne was the tallest structure in the world, crystalline white and visible for many miles around; an important place of pilgrimage, holding relics of the holy three kings.

It was hit in the war, but unlike the rest of Cologne, it was not wiped out. The story goes that the bomber pilots used it as a navigational marker. The facade is now quite blackened, due to the bombing and the acid rain, and there is a constant process of restoration in process. The cathedral has had a master builder since around 1240 when construction began, and it was somehow comforting to know that the current chief engineer is a woman!

I only spent a few minutes inside; my geologist friends with firm faith only in rocks, were waiting patiently outside on the square where the wind always blows, eager to show me their favourite Vietanamese watering hole. In those few short minutes, I sensed the centuries of worship that went before me. I sensed the faithful and also the doubters laying their sorrows and difficulties before God, finding a voice for their pleas, as well as their gratitude.

As I lit a candle on that ground, I joined those legions finding expression to their humanity and found there a moment of peace.

Seeds on fallow ground and sleep

I have to tell the world that I had a brilliant nights' sleep. It is not often that I sleep for a solid 6 hours without waking up at all. I woke up in a state of peace. What a blessing.

My subconscious must be calming down. I haven't shared the continuation of my passport saga with you, but it has really been riding me mentally for months. I have had so much support with it from unexpected quarters. Now, an angel called David, friend of a friend, has appeared from nowhere, and is helping me make a case for my citizenship after the British authorities told me on my last holidays that they would not be renewing my passport past April. A mistake 16 years ago, so sorry.

I believe everything happens for a reason, and I have not been able to see any reason at all for this thing happening in my life. One reason I now very clearly perceive, is to believe emphatically in the kindness of strangers.

Let mystery have its place in you-

do not always be turning up your whole soul

with the ploughshare of self-examination,

but leave a little fallow corner of your heart ready

for any seed the wind may bring.

HENRY FREDERIC AMIEL

I love it that life is like this, just catching you with the small moments of magic. And those small moments of magic often opening some inner window shutter, sending one's life in a completely new direction. What is life if we don't believe in the mystery of it. There was a moment sitting with the loved one this weekend passed; my nose just brushed his hair ever so lightly. It was the most soothing moment of connection with another human being, felt like a seed fallling on a fallow corner. The depth of the experience so unexpected.

I wish you all good sleep, the kindness of strangers, magical moments and a special seed falling on that little fallow corner of your heart today.

Of kitchen scales and sharing my sanctuary

Today is Thursday and I am really happy. As most of you know, it is virtual  Saturday, and I have been doing absolutely nothing. Some days are just made for lying on the sofa watching detective series on television, and swtching off from the world. It has been one of those. I am also happy cause the Eid holidays have been declared and I have almost a whole week off from work. I show up on Saturday and Sunday, then our road trip starts on Monday. I am so excited. I spoke to Rashid of the desert camp and am determined to do the island, the turtle beach and the desert. As Joseph Campbell said, and as I have quoted here before, Follow your bliss!

I then have to show up for a couple of hours next Monday before flying to Germany with the students in the late evening.

So, it is almost Eid and time to make little surprise packets for the children. The  Omanis call these "Eidia". Usually the children in the neighbourhood come ringing the doorbell on the morning of Eid, asking for 100 besa notes and sweets, but I prefer to make little packets for the children that I know. I persuaded the man to drive me to the famous Lulu this morning. This was a big favour, as every bedu and his wife from the interior is coming into town this weekend to do pre-Eid shopping. Luckily he needed some ingredients to make his yummy rusks, so was willing, although swearing most of the way. See "Driving out of the box" entry below!

I bought loads of sweeties and some packets of colored pencils and although we had to brave massive queues at the check-out tills, we escaped unscathed. 

I enjoyed mixing the sweets and then made up the packets in small zip lock bags. Just as I was finishing, the loved one came out of the kitchen with his electronic scale. He painstakingly weighed all the goody bags one by one to make sure that each kiddy got their fair share, sometimes taking and sometimes adding. I really liked this, as I really couldn't be bothered about the details. For him the fairness and equality of this process was very important.   

I have another little story to share today. I have been asking the universe for ages about ways to make a little extra cash. Up to very recently I would never have thought of sharing my house, it is my sanctuary and the centre of my universe and the energy in there is very important, like a sacred space.

I recently had Shefaa staying for a month which worked well, and I have been thinking about it seriously. I put the thought out there, deciding that if it was meant to be, it would come to me.

Recently I was catching up with a colleague of mine on the beach outside our university. We were sitting on the beach on some nets in one of the fishermen huts looking at the sea and watching the gulls play over the water. It was a little windy, the perfect temperature, and the waves were making tiny peaks, like mini meringues. It was a moment that felt frozen in time. She was telling me how her partner was looking to do some volunteer work, possibly leaving quite soon, and how she was looking for flat for the next academic year. It felt right and I asked her immediately if she would like to come live with me.

So, after some discussion and not too much thought, I will have a housemate from November to next June. I have liked her since the first time we met, a very gentle and sensible person with beautiful green eyes and a consistent integrity. She is coming over on Saturday to thrash out the details, but I think it will be GOOD.

Of rocks and vigilance

This was my father's favourite psalm. I feel that he is close at the moment, really watching over me and I have been reading this psalm every day. These are such beautiful words of connection to nature and of complete trust. It doesn't matter what creed you follow, these are comforting and strengthening words. I think of my father in the last months of his life, and how these words were a safe-haven for him.

I love the image of feet not slipping, as I have such bad balance, I can barely keep my balance on a bike... famously falling off my bike in front of the school inspector walking his dog in our neighborhood.

I love the imagine of looking to the hills, God as a rock, eternal and ever-present and I love that my name derives from Stephen, meaning rock.

The most meaningful actual rock in my life is Table Mountain. I had a wonderful realisation a few years ago about how much it meant to me growing up in its shadow. I have been through so much, and the mountain is a solid presence.

I am a lover of rocks and collect them, I don't know much about them, although I am attempting to be an amateur geologist. I love them for their aesthetic value, for their color, shape, feel and beauty. I often walk around with a dead normal stone in my pocket, to ground me and remind me that even those things that seem permanent also change, it is just a matter of time. I love the way geologists have the capacity to think in thousands and millions of years. It really makes us seem so trivial and truly puts things in perspective.

I love the image of God not resting, but constantly watching over us, like a mother sitting by the bed of a sick child, being ever vigilant and aware of the child's every move and breath.

The man has been ill recently and I spent a night wth him, lying awake and listening to his breathing, switching on my all senses and intuition to what I could do to support and comfort, praying for his peace in the night. Being so relieved when I could tell that he was sleeping deeply.  It is so incredible to know that God does that for us every minute of every day into eternity in his all-encompassing capacity.

Living in the desert, I also love the idea of being protected from the sun; God being the shade to rest in, an oasis, not letting any harm come to us.

It is called a psalm of ascents, as this are one of the songs that the people used to sing as they ascended to Jerusalem to praise and worship.

I wish that we may all rest assured that we are protected and watched over, and sleep in peace tonight in that knowledge. Amen.

I lift up my eyes to the hills-

Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord,

the Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot slip-

He who watches over you will not slumber:

indeed, he who watches over Israel

Will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord watches over you-

The Lord is your shade at your right hand;

the sun will not harm you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all harm-

he will watch over your life;

the Lord will watch over your coming and going

both now and forever.

Psalm 121

 A song of ascents

Psyllium husks and cute ears

''If you were here, I'd kneel for you, a thousand kisses deep."  L.Cohen

I never thought I could get so excited about psyllium husks. I have never been a breakfast person and I am not a great eater of fruit, plus I have a famously runny stomach. The Chinese say that the stomach is the second brain, and I certainly find that to be true. My stomach and brain are often in disagreement.  My stomach generally doesn't like to leave the house. I always have a little chat with it. 'Listen tummy, we have to go to work and I know that it's going to be a challenging day, but really it will be fine', or 'Listen lovely tummy, we are going on holiday but I promise to give you nice food at regular times'. I am forever coaxing my stomach to go with me without protesting.

Before going out the door, I invariably have to make a last loo stop. It used to be really bad, but since I have been living in Oman feeling much less stressed, my stomach has also settled down a lot.

 A BIG part of this because of Opra Winfrey. My goodness, is there anybody's life she hasn't touched in one way or another. There she was one night with Dr Oz. Bless the man. I always want to call him Dr Spock, I sort of expect him to have pointy ears. I like his ears, they are a good size. I absolutely do not trust men with small ears. Can't explain this phenomenon, sorry. Men are so bad at listening in any case, can you imagine what terrible listeners men with small ears are. Not to be trusted, absolutely not.

Back to Dr Oz with the ears. He was saying this thing like, Are you always rushed at breakfast or just skip breakfast all together? Do you suffer from an irregular tummy? Why don't you make yourself a shake in the morning with a banana and some frozen berries and some psyllium husks? Perfect, get your portion of fruits, give your body some sugar first thing in th day, fantastic anti-oxidants in the berries, and colon cleansing husks.

This idea literally changed my life. No more runny stomach. No more mid-morning sugar slump and frantic scavaging for food. I literally became a more emotionally balanced person overnight.

But what the hell are psyllium husks? I had a bit of a mission to find them, and my friend Renate has been posting them to me from South Africa. Or any unsuspecting friend has been bringing them to me from there. But these things are not cheap and I became determined to find them here. It has taken me months, and I have asked loads of people, most who look at me strangely.Completely by chance, I mentioned it to Vishkir, a friend going to South Africa, hoping he could bring some along.

He told me immediately that his mom uses them regularly and that you can get them in the local Lulu supermarket next to the panadols and the Vicks.We love the place, it has everything. I always take all my visitors there as part of the standard tourist trail. The name means "Pearl".  I made a bee-line there, and lo and behold, there was the little green packet with the deer on the front just as he said. And really reasonable. Joy.

I have been pleased about this now for more than a week. Everytime I see the packet in the cupboard my face breaks into a huge smile. What I am trying to say is that sometimes one can derive enormous pleasure from the smallest of things. Plus, sometimes something really simple can make a really big difference to your quality of life, you just have to have your ears and eyes open and be willing to give it a go.

The man in my life thinks I am a weirdo, yes, his word. I once asked him why he likes me. I think most of you can anticipate the kind of answer I thought I would get. I didn't get any of that. He answered that he perceives me as part alien, part mermaid and part unicorn. This is about as romantic as I can expect to get, and a huge compliment coming from this man. The one thing I can say about him though, he has very decent ears.