richard attenborough democratised every space

I remember meeting Richard Attenborough, it was just once and I wasn't a celebrity friend, I just happened to sit next door to him at a memorial service lunch and the thing I remember was that he was interested in meeting me as if I was a star.  Ben Kingsley said that he democratised every space he inhabited and I can echo that.  The greatest people who have ever lived democratise the space they inhabit, they make it available to whoever meets them there.  This is unusual, most people want to put a fence around their own chosen space, their belief, their speciality, their religion, their philosophy but it just means that there are those who are inside that space and those who are outside.  It takes a great soul to recognise the person opposite them with their plate of sandwiches and their need for a seat as exactly the same as themselves.
Thank God for people like this who believe that the person in front of them is just the same as anybody else.

what we could all learn from the remarkable South African Granny

You get back from your holiday and pick up the newspaper or turn on the news and you are horrified by the sheer violence which is going on in so many places in the world.  Tit for tat, rocket for rocket, bomb for bomb, life for life, child for child, so it ticks on and the casualties mount and the fury incites further fury.
I thought back to my South African mother and grandmother and how she had dealt with the loss of her only son, shot and killed 16 years ago and I wondered how many people whose child, caught in between one side and the other, killed for no apparent reason, could focus her damaged eye and heart on the pain of all mothers whose children were being killed and not focus on the effect on herself and her family, not seek to find and hurt and prosecute the murderer but simply focus on all the mothers and grandmothers who were meeting the same horror, the same knock on the door, the same sit by the bed and the same identification process.
Then I thought that unless you have an example of someone who does this, how would you ever be able to take that remarkable route.  And unless you heard her story, you wouldn't even consider it an option.  So, if you know anyone who knows anyone who has a son who has been killed or has a son about to go out and take revenge on someone else, tell them that there is another way won't you.

You asked why hair is white, this is a good account.

 Well, the abracadabra child and all other abracadabra children, do you ever wonder where hair comes from? You, with your noticing eyes, have noticed that the hair on my head is going white and I have noticed it too!!! It reminds me in the way it grows of the way my mother and father's hair turned white, slowly changing and slowly thinning.  It sprouts from your head for sure and actually it sprouts all over your body in different thicknesses and it creates a space around your body which protects from the heat and cold and allows the wind to cool the sweat which you sweat when you run fast.  And it fits you exactly, better than a hat, it is just right for where you live, thicker where it is most sunny or most cold.
But where does it come from? whose idea was it to cover us with it and why does the hair on your head go grey?  Old people mainly get the grey hair and as well as grey, it often changes its thickness for thinness and its coarseness for fineness.  Who organised all this? Did you?  Do you think they had a good plan in mind especially when they organise this hair growth and change in every body?  You have your lovely hair all long and you tie it up on the top and let it down and brush it and put ribbons in it because it is beautiful.  It is meant to be beautiful and to show how beautiful you are.  My hair is telling me, whispering to me, a different story, it's beauty isn't there for the same reason, it's beauty is there to alert me to the changing part of me so the other part of me, the watching eye, just like your observant eye can see what is going on that changing part.  I have lots of teachers in this, everybody who is on the same journey as me has noticed the change in their hair.

What is it telling me?  Well, this is what Ihave read and this is how I am thinking about my white hair.  It is thinner on the top and on the very top of my head there is a tiny tiny space in the bones of my head.  It was a bigger space when I was new in order that my head could grow quickly after I was born.  This is just like you and your sister and every other baby that is born.  That space, I believe is there for the unchanging part of me to leave from when the changing part changes for good and I appear to die.  I want you to think about this because lots of people in all our lives die and we want to be sure that they are safe.  And I believe and there are lots of wise people who tell a similar tale that when I take my last breath and then breathe out, out of the top of my head go I.

a trio of hairy creatures

What makes this Granny remarkable?

Here is a remarkable Granny. She looks nice doesn't she but the remarkableness is in her story and she has said that I can tell it to you here.  She is South African and clearly she is a white South African.  South Africa is a country which has been divided right in it's heart by the idea of colour.  She married and had two children, a daughter and a son and they lived right there in South Africa under the sun which warms both the white and the black people.  As all stories go, all went well until the terrible thing happened, the unthinkable thing.  16 years ago her son was shot and died 5 weeks later in hospital with his grieving father and loving mother beside him.  She said to me that she couldn't have imagined a pain worse than this, the pain of watching her son die from such a ghastly act.  She and her husband wanted to bury their son with all the dignity they could and asked to bring his body home.  But the doctors couldn't allow it, there had to be an autopsy.  She could hardly bear the idea but they said…"Ma'am, this is the law, a murder has been committed and we have to send your son's body to be examined". " But surely not" she said, "we have never had to think of murder in our family, it is outside our thinking".  "We are not that kind of people".  Well, they had to do as the law decreed and his body had to be taken to the city mortuary where it would wait for 8 weeks before examination and release for burial.  Her husband was broken by this, she said he never recovered but what happened to her which allowed her to survive and not only survive but to make something beautiful and reasonable out of something so violent and ugly?  The act which took her son and destroyed the peace of mind which her husband had was transformed through her remarkable way of thinking.  

This is the process she described to me and out of which she made her way from grief to understanding and compassion.  Her brother had to identify the body and he told her that in the mortuary, the bodies were so numerous that they were piled up in a pyramid with just a label on the big toe with a name.  This was because there were so many murders in South Africa at the time, so many that the queue for autopsy was weeks and weeks of waiting.  In the waiting and in the space within her self, she said that she realised from the description that she was just one of many mothers in South Africa, mothers both white and black who had lost a beloved son and that this connected her with the great sadness and despair that was engulfing the whole country, a despair borne of difference.  

Now, you will wonder what she has done since and I can tell you.  She has held a hope in her heart for the people of South Africa, for the people of her city as well.  Two days a week she works in a school in Durban which fosters just this same vision.  

I might just have seen a friendly lady from South Africa and not heard her story.  Then I might never have known about the bright light of hope she has and how it came about.  You will be wondering if she meditates won't you?  And of course she does and what is more, she was a meditator then, when the thing which seems so terrible happened to her.  

Special picture for all grandchildren everywhere

I would like to introduce you to this Galaxy called the Whirlpool Galaxy NOW

Whirlpool Galaxy

Did you know that this wonderful galaxy was up there?  Look how it streams out from a hidden source, constantly moving, going from light to light.  This week I have been introduced to the way patterns that exist in my body are repeating all over the whole universe and here I am, not 100 yet (actually someway off) and I never knew that this  is right above my head.   Did you?  You can find out about it on your i pad and then look up and if you can't actually see it find out more about the stars and look and see how they fill the sky, no wonder we say they fill the heavens because they are so so beautiful.

How to have a good death!

Dr Katherine Sleeman

Well you will say, she is really on a roll with dying and death!  And I am, I am a realist and it doesn't take a grand-daughter's observations on the colour of my hair and the years I have lived to make me realise that there is only so long to go.  Does this frighten me?  I don't think so, I have seen and been with people who have died well, with their families there and their striving and worrying about past and future laid to rest.  The timing of their dying and their deaths has been a major factor in feeling so strongly that we shouldn't legalise euthanasia, we should recognise that dying is part of living, we should prepare for it and not be so fearful of the manner of it's coming, that we allow assisted suicide, legalised euthanasia to be a term we become familiar with.  We should just start to learn about how to do it well, to make our preparations if we are allowed to but above all to know enough about it to not be frightened into making a natural thing into something forced.
No jokes today folks but here is a link to a brilliant film of Dr Katherine Sleeman talking about the future of medicine in the context of dying and palliative care.  Pass it on to anyone who needs to feel that there is a benevolence in every part of the cycle of our lives and that with help, we will touch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VsYhw9z-1Q

EuthoNOsia No to giving this word legal status

On Sunday, walking down towards the gate, I looked carefully at  the old chestnut trees which are diseased and getting weaker each year.  In the past I have walked past them thinking that maybe we should chop them down and replant with new trees but this Sunday with the sun filtering through them I saw just how beautiful they still were.
It made me wonder if we are giving enough thought to the debate about euthanasia and if we are about to let this word become a law which means it is a live option.  Euthanasia would be on the menu….discussions with the family doctor would include it, this treatment or that treatment or have you considered euthanasia Mr Jones?
Once upon a time we didn't know what salt and pepper squid was but once it was on the menu, it became a tasty option and euthanasia could be like that if it became legal, it could be an idea to roll around in the mind and wonder if it would be best for me or him or this Granny or that.

Well, let me say now that if the option was there, we might stop being careful with our bodies, we might not continue to polish our shoes and turn ourselves out bravely, we might just say, on a bad day, 'bring on the pills and the plastic bag and let's end it'.  But now there is good palliative care which means that to the very last breath we should be able to keep as comfortable as possible. But if euthanasia becomes an active option, that idea of proper palliative care could be downgraded.
Is there anyone out there who would help to start  a No to legalising Euthanasia campaign, a EuthaNOsia campaign because if there is, I would love your help.  I would like us to share the good that we have known through looking after someone right to the very last breath, right to the fall of the very last leaf.

A conversation with the abracadabra girl on white hair

Leto is Older than me!

She, the abracadabra girl comes along early for a bath and helps me with the rollers I put in my hair to tame it into something suitable even if it isn't very stylish.  This is always a chance to ask important questions and make searingly honest comments  Earlier this month, we had one of the early morning sessions which started like this: "Granny, your hair is white, how old are you?"
"66"
"Oh, that is nearly 100"
"Well hang on", I say, "it is 34 years to go till 100"
"How old is Grandpa?"
"71"
"Oh dear, You are all nearly 100, I won't have any grannies left before long, you'll all be dead" (sad face).

Abracadabra child, a few years ago

I, of the white hair and not really thinking I am nearly 100 am thinking hard….this is clearly something she is thinking about too plus apart from my own departure and its certainty, there are lots of Grandparents who have disappeared from sight without any explanation being able to be given so I try my best.
"Well, think of it this way" I say "no-one knows absolutely for certain what happens when you die but I believe the wise people who do seem to know and they have given us clues and if we read those clues, we can see that dying isn't the end for a person"
They say that "there is a tiny tiny part of all of us which never changes, it is the most alive part, smaller than the smallest battery, tinier that the tiniest light.  This lively spark has everything about us and about the world and the stars and the sun in it.  This part, the wise say, leaves each body out of the tiniest tiniest space in the top of our heads and rises up to a place full of light.  This heavenly place is, a resting place, where you get a chance to gather your self together and, some say, to choose where you'll be going next!
Eyes light up, she is interested….
I continue: "they, the ones who know say that some people will come back as babies.  I have heard that people often return to be babies where they lived before, amongst people they loved, or near places that meant a lot to them.  Some people, special people, are born for special jobs and they will always go to the place they are  most needed, but you can be sure that if you have a baby, it will have chosen you very carefully and that you will be the BEST person to help it become it's own Best person.
So, nobody disappears forever, they just change and swap their white hair  for new hair, maybe blonde, brown or black and their old bodies for bodies that might be soooo fit, they will be competing in the Commonwealth Games before long.
So, look carefully at every baby, they will have a long history and an important future.

Where did these babies come from and where will they go?