It’s another lovely Prompt for the Promptless from Rarasaur, and another lovely word for which there is no exact translation into English.
Saudade is a Portuguese word that describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for an absent something/someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return.
Saudade was once described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one’s children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.
This fuzzy picture to me represents a saudade feeling or moment, because it elicits memories and emotions which are both happy and sad.
Let’s get the sad parts over with first.
1. Mom and Dad have been gone for almost five years. They aren’t coming back, except in my head. I miss them.
2. I miss wearing pink pants. Come on, you have to admit that pink pants and missing wearing them are both incredibly sad things.
3. This was my Aunt May’s house. She’s gone too. And for all I know, so is her house. Perhaps the world misses her decorating skills.
4. I miss having dark brown hair. But my old face and aging skin doesn’t.
And now for the happy stuff.
1. I was going to crop off those crooked pictures at the top of this shot, but decided not to. There’s a weird kind of symmetry going on here – three pictures, three pillows, three people. One crazy couch from the eighties. A happy little moment in time.
2. I remember mom was always smiling and laughing. Unless she was sleeping. Although it’s possible she smiled and laughed in her sleep too.
3. My dad was a handsome man his whole life. He often put on a serious face for photographs. But he was rarely serious.
4. There was a whole period of my life when my kids were growing up that flew by in the blink of an eye. I don’t remember being unhappy, so I guess I wasn’t.
I don’t long to go back in time, although I’m glad to remember the happy times. I don’t think remembering should make a person sad. A little nostalgia is fine, and knowing what your journey was like to get to this point is great knowledge to have. But it’s today that’s important. The here and the now and the joy of this exact moment. Being exactly who we are. Making happy memories with the people we love. The love we share now will be the love that remains tomorrow.
Life is short - I don’t want to waste a minute of it on emptiness and longing.
English: Children dancing, International Peace Day 2009, Geneva. Français : Enfants dansant, Journée internationale de la Paix 2009, Genève. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
How do we teach children what peace means, and how do we raise our children to be peaceful?
The answer is amazingly simple. We teach by example. Simple answers don’t make the actual process easy of course. We have all seen or been the parent who yells and rants, flips out and stomps off, slams a door, gets mad, gets even. Kids mimic what they see, they repeat what they hear, and they either learn from our mistakes or they repeat them. The best and maybe the only way we can teach our children what peace means is by living it.
My parents were both peaceful and peace-loving. Mom always saw the best in every person she met and every situation she faced - she could put a positive spin on even the worst disaster, and point out some redeeming quality in a complete ass. Dad forever saw the funny side of life. It’s like I spent my childhood with a Mark Twain clone - he would tell us a funny story or make a witty remark or a silly comment that didn’t just make us laugh, it made us think. My parents never had raging battles, and rarely even argued for long before coming to a mutually acceptable decision, even if the decision was simply to agree to disagree.
How incredibly lucky we were to be their children, sheltered from the violence and cruelty of the world for so long. Of course the down side to that is not knowing how to react to, and cope with, furious anger and deliberate malice when confronted with it head on. We were taught not to fight back and that peaceful resolutions were always to be sought, and almost always possible to reach. We were shown that siblings can be our very best friends, that mistakes can be forgiven, that happiness is something you have to find within yourself because no one is going to present it to you on a golden platter. I grew up knowing that anger you can’t let go of will just make everyone miserable. No matter how uneasy the peace, it is always better to seek it than to let a conflict fester and grow.
So how have I done as a mother myself, after having been blessed with such shining examples to follow? I wish I could tell you I’ve been the perfect wise and peaceful parent, but if you’re a parent yourself you know first hand there’s really no such thing. Parenthood is something we muddle through hoping to keep the damage to a minimum. We want peace and happiness and joy for our children and we will wish hard for it for the rest of our lives.
Before I became the incredibly smart old person that I am now, a newborn baby always looked to me like some blank little human that could be shaped and molded into whatever sort of person its family was capable of creating. Not so great parents ended up with little brats. How completely deluded that notion turned out to be.
Newborn child, seconds after birth. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Because a child is born with personality plus. All we can hope to accomplish as his parent and guardian is to get to know him, keep him safe and watch him grow. We can guide and console and love him but we can’t make him turn himself into something he is not, and perhaps was never meant to be.
The very hardest part about being a parent is knowing how much growing up we have left to do ourselves. I sometimes think our children teach us just as much about life as we are trying to teach them. Maybe more. We give our children rules to live by, examples to follow, consequences for their actions. It’s only fair that there should be some parenting rules, and for whatever they’re worth, here are mine.
1. Keep talking to your child. Tell him what you think, what you believe, what you want, how you feel. Some of it is bound to sink in eventually.
2. Shut up and listen. Let him freely express what he thinks, what he believes, what he wants, how he feels. You will learn more things from listening to your child than you ever believed possible. Have some serious discussions. Share some laughs. Keep an open mind.
3. Be loving and kind and compassionate. Growing up is not easy. You haven’t finished the process either, so be patient with your child, and be patient with yourself.
4. Be grateful for what you have and less concerned with what you lack. Know that ‘things’ themselves are not what make us happy. Be generous whenever you can. It really is true that the more you give the more you receive, no matter what the ‘gift’.
5. Support your childs creative nature and expanding spirit. Share his happiness, share his joy. Teach him that sharing the joy of others brings joy right back to him. Be constantly delighted and astounded by the incredible person he is turning out to be. His dreams are different from yours and his path is not the same as the one you are on. How boring and disappointing it would be if we all raised little mini-me’s.
6. Be okay with life. Work with change, rather than against it. Accept what is, let go, and let be.
When we are okay with life, there is no reason to fight. When we are calm and confident and have a sort of mental equilibrium somewhere between what is ‘wrong’ and what is ‘right’, the tension and the struggle to go one way or the other disappears. I think that is called peace. I think that is the only way we can teach it to our children, by showing them that we get it, that we want it, and that we live it ourselves the best way we know how.
Although you see the world different from me
Sometimes I can touch upon the wonders that you see
And all the new colors and pictures you’ve designed
Oh yes sweet darling so glad you are a child of mine
Child of mine, child of mine
Oh yes sweet darling so glad you are a child of mine
You don’t need directions, you know which way to go
And I don’t want to hold you back I just want to watch you grow
You’re the one who taught me, you don’t have to look behind
Oh yes sweet darling, so glad you are a child of mine
Nobody’s gonna kill your dreams or tell you how to live your life
There’ll always be people who make it hard for a while
But you’ll change their heads when they see you smile
The times you were born in may not have been the best
But you can make the times to come better than the rest
I know you will be honest if you can’t always be kind
Oh yes sweet darling, so glad you are a child of mine
Child of mine, child of mine
Oh yes sweet darling so glad you are a child of mine
Child of mine, child of mine
Oh yes sweet darling so glad you are a child of mine
This reminds me of the suggestion to change my password to ‘incorrect‘ so that when I can’t remember it, the prompt will say ‘your password is incorrect’.
No, I don’t know why two such dissimilar things seem to me to be connected but there you go.
We spent an excellent weekend with kids and grandkids, and although I hate to say so and jinx it, the weather was BEAUTIFUL! It’s actually still beautiful today. We were sitting outside on lawn chairs beside our snow mountain watching the kids try to pummel it into submission, but it’s a pretty hard packed hill that will be around for a while yet. There was also a dog catching snowballs. Entertainment like that is hard to find.
When I got home from work today there were three messages with gorgeous artwork sitting on the pillows of my bed, and another one on top of my computer. See how well these kids know me? Those are the two places I would be certain to find stuff, that’s for sure. And my fridge is completely papered over once again with delightful works of art.
I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend and a fun April Fools Day. Think Spring.
Is your wine bringing you joy? Save the vino for happiness. For wonderful times with friends and family. For those times when you just want to toast your little heart out.
Drink to celebrate your joy, not to try and find it. – Sarah Sturgis for MindBodyGreen
Strangely enough, I can remember as plain as day telling my mother on my sixth birthday how happy I was to be the wonderful age of six and all grown up at last. Too bad I don’t recall what her reaction was to that. But six to me was such a magical number, so incredibly more mature than 4 or 5. I would soon be going off to school with my big brother. I would learn how to read what the people in comic books were actually saying to eachother without making any of it up. How could life possibly get any better than that?
My daughter had a similar epiphany at an even earlier age. She made a simple announcement one day. “I can tie my own shoes, and I can blow bubbles with my gum, and when I get some hair in my nose I will be all growed up.” Who was I to argue with her criteria? These things are different for everyone.
I don’t remember my son ever making any such great declaration about adulthood, so maybe it’s just a girl thing. Whenever W talks about his own childhood we’re left with the impression that he was born grown up, since he vows he never did bad or childish things and never once, even as a teenager, disappointed his parents. I’m certainly glad he got a little more interesting later in life.
The funny thing about having felt grown up so soon is that it has given me more time than most to realize I might have been wrong about it that first time, and just as mistaken at all the different stages in my life where I’ve believed (however briefly) the very same thing. Graduating highschool, going to college, getting a real job, being in a serious relationship, getting married, having children, and asking myself with every new experience, nowhave I learned everything there is to know? Have I left childish things behind? Am I living my very best grown up life?
The older I get the less I care. Growing up is no longer one of my lofty aspirations. There are days when being a grown up really bites and I think how much fun it was to be that deluded little six-year-old. With less visible nose hair. Age and wisdom and maturity are not always all they’re cracked up to be. It’s silly to be in such a hurry to grow up and take on all the hard stuff that life is going to hand you.
For some reason or other, growing older is what has finally taught me how amazing it is to see the world through the eyes of a child. And the older I get, the more I want to act like one. I don’t mean the crying, foot stomping, temper tantrum moments (although every once in a while those can be wonderfully therapeutic). I mean experiencing moments of pure delight and wonder and joy, being happy with the simplest pleasures, playing and laughing and loving and holding nothing back.
So if some serious stick in the mud adult rolls his eyes at your antics and tells you to grow up, don’t do it. Just say no. You don’t have to stick your tongue out for real, but imagine in your head how great actually doing it would make you feel. And then go ahead and feel exactly like that.
Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is the beauty of things unconventional and modest. It’s not just a style of art, it’s a world view.
“Wabi-sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture. It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, modest, natural, and mysterious. It can be a little dark, but it is also warm and comfortable. It may be best understood as a feeling, rather than as an idea.” – Mark Reibstein and Ed Young
Thanks Rarasaur for this excellent prompt for the promptless.
Imperfect, impermanent and incompletedescribes so many things in my life, I found myself wandering around pointing them out to myself for such a long time that it got a bit ridiculous. At last I have come to the conclusion that wabi-sabi is just an over all general description for everything we hold personally dear. Might as well find and appreciate the beauty in our imperfect lives, because imperfection is all any of us is likely ever going to get. I suppose my cluttered mess of a house is a reflection of my scattered life, because it’s full of things I love, not for their perfection or their value (as potentially lucrative yard sale items) but for the way they make me feel whenever I look at them.
My granddaughter Omayja (pronounced by combining the meditation mantra Oohhmmm with the continent Asia) sat down at my kitchen table a few months ago and drew me a rainbow. It has been on my fridge ever since. It isn’t perfect as far as rainbow shapes and colors normally go, but to me it is a beautiful work of art. Normally I clear my fridge of all the coloring and pictures after a couple of weeks of opening and closing the door and having various pieces fly off in the breeze and flutter to the floor. That way there’s a clean slate for the next creative frenzie.
But this particular piece has survived a number of clean sweeps. I can’t seem to take it down. It gives me the most peaceful happy feeling whenever I look at it. And now it has a name, as every great work of art should. Omayjas Wabi-sabi Rainbow.
The next time she’s here I’ll ask her to sign it, and then I’m going to frame it and hang it up somewhere in the place of some perfectly aesthetically beautiful framed thing that pleases the eye but means nothing to my soul and has never touched my heart.
Valentine’s Day never meant a whole lot to me until my first grandaughter decided 12 years ago that the 14th of February was a good day on which to arrive in this crazy world.
Explain why you chose your blog’s title and what it means to you.
Breathing Space Life on the Sidewalk….where every day is a new beginning, take a deep breath and start again.
1. It all started seven years ago and was inspired by the site called ”myspace” and reading about other people and their adventures on their own “space”. So I wanted a space too. Being spacey and all.
2. My fear of water and drowning and not being able to breathe, plus my love of being left alone to think, plus my inability to come up with anything even remotely unique, prompted the Breathing Space name. You can find “Breathing Space” on Wikipedia, but it has nothing at all to do with me and everything to do with a band by the same name.
3. Life in the fast lane is an expression I like, but have never EVER lived. Life in the slow lane would be slightly more accurate, but life on the sidewalk is even better. Because here I am, strolling along, watching the rest of the world zip on by. Where the hell are they all going, anyway? I’d hitch a ride if I really cared.
4. Somebody said I should have more of a tag line or something to better explain what this blog is all about so that’s where all the deep breath new beginning stuff came from. I keep thinking I should change that to something better. You know, the whole starting over thing. One day it might just go missing altogether.
5. I am a grandma to five kids, ages 7 to 12. W has always called me Lin, as if saying my whole name would wear him right out. So those two things combined end up being grandmalin. However, if you are French you might read it as grand malin which very loosely interpreted means big shrewd/cunning/crafty or clever person. Voila. It can also mean malicious or malignant, but I try really hard not to be either one of those things.
Il faut être malin pour réussir – You have to be shrewd in order to succeed.
Il m’a donné un sourire malin – He gave me a knowing smile.
There’s your French lesson for the day. There is some French on my father-in-law’s side of the family but that’s my closest claim to being French myself.
6. The name of my alter ego Jazzy is nothing but wishful thinking. I’d like to be jazzy. I like jazz. I was reading a book in which there was a minor character named Jazzy. This one kept showing up in random doodles. Thus Jazzy was born. She will die when she runs out of stuff to say.
7. In the beginning my site was all about the history of my family and preserving the pictures and the memories for future generations. After several years of that I got bored and branched off in a multitude of different directions so that now I have no idea what any of this is really about. It’s a work in progress. It’s a walk on the sidewalk.
Some days it’s just a long sit down rest on the curb.
Today I’ve been inspired by Far Away in the Sunshine to fill in some blanks in a soul-searching exercise. I did something like this before in Complete This Thought about six months ago, but the prompts for this one are a little different, so I’ll see if I am different now as well, or if I’m simply remaining stubbornly the same.
Here is what you can copy and paste to do your own soul-searching. I hope you will take this little challenge and reveal yourself to the world. The more we know about each other the more there is to love, right? Well, I hope that’s how it works.
Far Away (Photo credit: hippydream [is busy])
I am
I know
I want
I think
I have
I dislike
I miss
I fear
I feel
I hear
I smell
I crave
I search
I wonder
I regret
I love
I care
I am always
I worry
I remember
I sing
I argue
I write
I lose
I wish
I listen
I can usually be found
I am scared
I need
I forget
I am happy
I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandma and a child of the universe.
I know a little bit about love.
I want the people around me to be happy and unafraid.
I think entirely too much about inconsequential things and not enough about what’s really important, and there are days when I really can’t figure out which is which.
I have everything I need. And then some.
I dislike all this clutter, but I don’t know where to start to make it disappear. Come on over and help me out with that.
I miss my mom.
I fear poor health and pain and tragic accidents.
I feel blessed.
I hear voices in my head. No, I don’t. It’s just me pretending to be voices in my head.
I smell a little off. No shower yet today. I’ll get around to that shortly.
I crave inner peace. Perhaps a shower would help.
I search for more and more things that I’ve misplaced as the years progress.
I wonder why I thought a cupboard shelf was a good place to set down my phone.
I regret nothing major in this charmed life because look where it has taken me.
I love my family.
I care what happens to them.
I am always reading.
I worry that my eyesight will fail before I’ve read everything there is to read.
I remember when that happened to my mom and how audio books saved her.
I sing in a grandmas weakened voice, off-key and scratchy, but with joy in my heart.
I argue about the dumbest things.
I write because writing is as vital to me as breathing. I write on everything, everywhere. I write in my head.
I lose track of time.
I wish there could be an end to all the fighting.
I listen with my ears but I try to hear with my heart.
I can usually be found reading, writing, and never even remotely involved in anything to do with arithmetic.
I am scared of losing the people I love.
I need peace and quiet and a good book. And the occasional glass of red wine.
I forget the bad things as fast as I can. That way there’s more room for remembering all the good stuff.
I am happy to be alive.
Follow the rainbow..they say this wordpress.com site is ENDLESS..but who knows, you may find a bag of skittles, Neil Gaiman, or that greedy little leprechauns stash o'lucky charms.
