"How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope and with expectation.”

We are born, we live and we die.  Life on this material plane exists of these three stages.  Birth is pretty traumatic, you emerge down a narrow restrictive channel bruised, bleeding and gasping for air.  Dying, I’m told can be pretty traumatic too.  Again, gasping for that last breath, facing darkness and feeling battered from holding on to life. What about the in between?  Well, living that gap between birth and death, can be bloody, breath taking and you invariably find yourself in the dark at times.

So what do we learn from all this?  For one, I tend to find the whole idea of re-birthing hogwash.  As if repeating the birthing experience as an adult can exorcise what went wrong first time around.  I feel the same way about reincarnation, the idea of having to live another life again, how depressing and repetitive.  I also am heartily fed up of listening to people who claim they were Princess Antoinette, or the Queen of Sheba in a previous life.  Please, isn’t living one life sufficient and having the notion of endless repeat attempts an admission of failure (a sort of university of life, examination resit schedule for the chronically incapable)? And doesn’t having that notion of endless repeat attempts steal from this one life the priceless unique opportunity that it really is.  Much as some would prefer to think otherwise, this is it folks, no rehearsals, no second takes we have only one shot.

You cannot even prepare the baby within for that shock of birth.  No stroking of that bump or careful explanations of the coming process can help.  Pre-natal classes, prepare parents but we are kidding ourselves if we think they make a major difference to the actual experience ahead for the baby.  Being born is traumatic.  Having a chilled out mother perhaps reduces adrenalin flowing to the baby, a darkened room helps reduce the shock of bright lights on the newborn, a quiet delivery room avoids the noise assault experienced somewhat.  The voices of family members, whose voices are familiar, can be comforting, but who are we kidding here.  Birth is traumatic for a reason.  Without that shock perhaps that first vital breath is not taken.  Indeed some babies require removal of fluid from their airways and a jolt to the body to get truly going.  Transition is painful, by definition there is a letting go of what one has become accustomed to.  We can have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next phase of our life.

By contrast, dying can sometimes be incredibly peaceful too.  Weariness, deep tiredness to the bone can anaesthetise that final transition.  Sleep is referred to as ‘the little death’ for many reasons.  It is also a surrendering to oblivion, to a different state.  So, if our physical life is like bookends, with birth and death at either end, perhaps there are lessons that can be learned and applied.  Not being afraid will help reduce the trauma, a peaceful environment soothes the spirit (not easily found in the modern hospital environment) and being surrounded by those closest, remind you that you are not alone even at this final moment and wrap you in that greatest comfort blanket of all, love.  I chose to think that we are then, freed of our physical body much as when you remove the cage, the bird is finally free to fly.  This transition is traumatic but necessary.  At a recent funeral a family friend was speaking to the audience of mourners and pointed out that death is not a shameful and fearful thing to which the recently departed loved one has been subjected to.  It is a part of life, like birth and a path each one of us sooner or later will take.  He then asked the question, “How should we view death?”  and gave this quote as an answer,  "How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope and with expectation.”

So, what about that period in the middle called life?  Well, it can be traumatic but then that usually  means a time of change has come.  Be comforted that you are at a turn in the road and a time of transition.  You may well be a little bloodied, somewhat in the dark, not sure of the way ahead, but don't forget to enjoy the journey.

Be gone foul cup cake

I will not eat that cake

It sits there gloating

Full of fat, bulging cream

As if to say

Be like me, abundant

Indulgent, finger-licking good

But I have eaten my ryvita

My chosen food of suffering

Chewed down the tasteless

Sesame covered cardboard

And I will not be tempted

By such fancies as that

Luscious cup cake

I have aspirations

To be less of me

And if I have to live

On cardboard and water

It will be so.

I am a woman with a goal

Not some weak floozy

Who is thrown by the unexpected

I am made of sterner stuff

My will once set

Cannot be broken.

Be gone foul cup cake

I spurn you

You are nothing to me

In the greater scheme of things

You are but a tiny morsel

I’ll take just one crumb to remind me

Of all that I choose to reject

One needs to know the enemy

Keep your friends near

But your enemies even closer

Heavens that cake was small

It started with a crumb

Barely a morsel

But somehow the cake has been eaten

I can’t believe it’s gone

In the greater scheme of things

I will not let such a slip

Cause me to lose my way

To err is human after all

Even one crumb can lead you to disaster

Now I know the danger of a tiny piece

That is how it begins

A slippery slope

To cake indulgence

I will be strong

I will say no

To all future, finger-licking food

Exhibiting Oneself

I sit in an art exhibition in Valletta, keeping an eye on the paintings and the visitors.  It suddenly strikes me that art, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.  But, what do I know, being from a science background, I am in foreign territory here in more ways than one.  Valletta, the capital of Malta is beautiful.  With her elegantly chipped sandstone walls and narrow steep streets, surrounded by the blue Mediterranean she is a unique find.  The streets are laid out like New York in a grid fashion but with wonderful buildings rich in history at every turn.  

The best way to visit her is by sea.  The huge walls of Valletta rise above you as you get closer and its fortifications intimidate exactly as intended around half a century ago.  

Right in the centre of Valletta lies St George’s square, which I am overlooking at present.  Surrounded by the ancient buildings of the Knights of St John there are water fountains laid out in the middle.  It’s lovely to sit eating an ice cream while children frolic in the water jets.

 I watched a four year old, at first, play cautiously with her hand in the shooting water.  Then growing in confidence she carefully lowered her hair in to the spraying jets.  She put her face directly into the jets of water and giggled at the explosive force hitting her eyes and mouth.  A growing audience watched as she explored further.  After lying on top of the many jets, she tried sitting on them.  By now completely soaked and bare foot she wandered through the many jets with arms and legs outstretched spinning in ecstasy.  Finally, she sprawled on top of as many jets as she could cover on the flat of her back and while moving her arms and legs, like a figure making snow angels, she controlled the tall jets blocking and releasing them in turn.  Her delight was ours, her genuine wholehearted absorption, a reminder.  Of how all of us should approach life and art, arms outstretched and spirit unleashed.  Only then can our hearts be touched and art do its magic – a true ladder for the soul.

Across Canada and The USA by Campervan

We were in a camping van recently, my family and I, recreating a road journey of over fifty years ago. It’s rare such things happen.  You always mean to do such trips but usually never do.  Life kind of gets in the way or runs you over.  Half a century ago my father decided to immigrate to Canada from NI.  He had a teaching post offer in the plains in Saskatchewan in a tiny hamlet called Piapot. So with his young wife and two toddlers (My Mum and brothers are shown in photo above) they headed out westward, where so many have gone before.  All of them in search of something better, I expect.  Later, he moved to Maple Creek a larger town nearby with proper shops.  On his holidays his persistent restless urge got the better of him, so he set off on an epic journey across Canada and The United States in a large car with his family.

It was this journey, which took us across Canada to Vancover and down the US through loads of national parks, that we redid in 2010.  It felt epic driving a massive camper van through country you associate with movies.  Coming from a small island the vastness of a huge continent is heady stuff.  The campervan rattled and shook as we drove and handled like a small house on a trailer.  As before, there were five of us but there were changes too.  I was merely an embryo on that first journey and my Dad had died five years before the trip.  He has left a huge gap in all our lives and he was the missing passenger on our journey.  He would have loved it. The lakes, glaciers, forests, plains all unfolded before us.  Then, when delight or weariness got the better of us, it was time for a nice cup of tea in our campervan.  Elbow to elbow with my brothers for the first time in three decades felt like revisiting your childhood as an adult.  Only this time around instead of fighting we enjoyed the closest company of all, family. 

There were challenges, my eldest brother’s boots (which had smell one cannot begin to describe), my mum’s skin reaction to mosquitoes (huge swollen pus filled protrusions), a hernia and more (don’t ask!).  But it was all great!  The open road, a huge campervan and total freedom.  We saw real live wild bears in the forests, swam in glacier lakes, explored and have photographs to prove it.  I’m so grateful for all of it.  In Maple Creek the school had been preserved as a museum, so my Dad’s classroom was there exactly has he had left it down to the posters on the door and exercise books.  There was even a picture of my Dad, looking so young, with his class beside him.  Strange sadness as well, as if we were close to him, but he was gone, out of reach, despite our longing.  

Piapot was different, the whole prairie area has suffered economically and there has been a huge exodus of inhabitants to the bigger cities.  So Piapot, which had always been a tiny hamlet beside the Trans Canadian Railway line, had shrunk still further.  The school here had been disserted for years with grass growing waist high around it.  Peeping through the front door everything was still there desks neatly lined up as if it had been left just yesterday and not a few decades.  It felt strange, as if we as a family had been transported back to the same spot 50 years earlier in a time machine. Then, as my brothers stood shoulder to shoulder next to the train lines, a huge endless train trundled past and sounded its horn.  It completed the miracle and we were all awash with the past, delighted to have caught this exact moment on the wind.  There is a photograph of my Dad with my brothers next to the same railway crossing and you’ll never understand it – but we were all there, every one of us, together again at that spot.  It felt like, this is the moment that we had come so far for.

Preserving - how to do it

Canning

One way to preserve is to use canning.  This is a method that means you have to lock yourself away from contamination to avoid any sneaky bad things getting in at you.  Unfortunately, if you are not particularly careful, in the first place, it just take one slip and you become unsafe.  So leaving a contaminate in the mix, without thorough heating and high pressure, or allowing a break in the seal after closure will mean you are exposed to corruption and danger.

Freezing

Just keeping things at a much lower temperature and never allowing heat can preserve but is not as long lasting as canning.  It requires a considerable amount of energy to maintain the effort.  Also, in the process you lose some of the essential you (tendency to become a little mushy).  Frozen as you once were, you are inevitably somewhat less too.

Dehydrating

Taking all the moisture out of you means bad stuff cannot grow.  You can last quite effectively with this method.  You won’t be as nourishing, as you once were either, and in the process you often get pureed.  Preserved but in a different form if you get my drift.

Pickling
Pickling is a common preservative and in solution we can last some time.  It is a common technique in modern days and you can grow to love the taste and the feel of being pickled.  You can find yourself more comforted, social and outgoing in the pickled state.  In the shortened modern form of pickling, excess pickling is expected along with frequent vomiting.

It would seem that preserving oneself in the modern world is fraught with difficulties.  You don’t want to isolate yourself, freeze all emotion out, remove the life force or anaesthetise yourself with alcohol.  None of these things will really do.  They are just a method of avoiding, concealing, ignoring the inevitable.  

Change comes to all of us let’s embrace it.  So I’d like to introduce the concept of renewal.  Our skin does it all the time so why can’t we?  Instead of keeping what we are, why not let it go and become a better us.  Then, instead of viewing each passing day as a threat we can see it as an opportunity. 

May today bring assurance to your heart, quietness to your soul and a renewal of your spirit.

My first Love

You can look back at relationships and see in hindsight the first hairline cracks.  You didn’t see them at the time but passion has blinkers.  Veils are gradually lifted, you not only get to know a bit more about yourself (there are veils between us and our own hearts after all) but also you see the people you know with different eyes.  This applies to other aspects of your life as well, like careers.  Looking back through the wreckage of my physics career many things have become clearer.

I hated physics at school, loathed it, in fact.  But I’d read enough about the subject to know that the awful tedious physics one ploughs through in class, bears little relation to the beauty of relativity, our galaxies, sub atomic particles etc and the practical applications for all that knowledge.  To me it all felt pure and noble – a search for truth.  Having good enough grades in every other subject, bar physics, I managed to get into university to study what I loved.  My physics degree was fun and I sailed through with a 1st class degree.  I started my PHD and was lucky enough to get a CAST award, which involved working in the prestigious Royal Signal and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern for a month every year.  During this month, I was put up in a lovely health farm and the healthy food, regular walks in the Malvern hills and physics research was a heady combination for me. 

The first cracks appeared when the Duke of Edinburgh came to the site, to give the RSRE an award for excellence in industry.  His security people, refused me entrance to the site that morning.  Somewhat bewildered, I was forced to spend the day outside in the hills and not cooped up in a lab with experiments.  No big deal, but the next day everyone including my supervisor was enraged on my behalf.  Apparently, being from Northern Ireland and technically a visitor, my presence constituted a threat to the royal party.  So, despite having security clearance and badges etc I was deemed too dangerous.  It’s quite amusing really and I could see the funny side of it.  Which was more than my fellow colleagues did.

Then, I did something which angered my supervisor.  That year, I married, despite being half way through my PHD.  His annoyance was not the distraction a marriage might bring but it was that my husband was from the Middle East.  At that time, relations between that region and Britain were as challenging as that between Britain and Ireland.  So my working in a Ministry of Defence centre like RSRE was causing him a major headache.  My security rating plummeted and that month I had to wear a red badge on site and was accompanied at all times by a security guard!  It all felt very ridiculous, my work was not rocket science.  All I did was study the metal-semiconductor interfaces and try to understand what was going on. 

In order to get rid of possible contaminants (which would complicate things) my experiments were done in an ultra high vacuum.  To make sure that these surfaces were totally clean, I cleaved them inside the vacuum.  Then, in this totally clean environment with a freshly exposed semiconductor surface I gradually evaporated down metals and studied them.  As I say, not rocket science, but while I was experimenting with antimony ( a metal), over in the USA, theorists were modelling how this metal would behave on my particular semiconductor and blow me down, my experimental results exactly matched their predictions.  It was particularly heartening as this happened independently; neither knew what the other was doing.  Science is lovely when something like this happens.  You really get the sense of a breakthrough of sorts.  A jump in understanding.  It may have been one particular interface but it felt like it was all exciting stuff with my papers published and presented. 

Given my security rating, however, my marriage was a real headache for my supervisor and he complained bitterly.  Exasperated by his nagging I told him my husband’s family were in the oil industry and really rich.  This he understood immediately and he dropped his belligerent attitude.  Mid conversation his objections melted away and a tone of respect was suddenly engendered towards me.  Ah, the respectability of wealth!  We talked for a half an hour in this vein and I accepted his warm congratulations on my marriage.  Then, I told him that actually there were no oil mines in my husband’s family.  No massive wealth that made my marriage sensible and wise in his eyes.  He was floored and speechless.  He could not now backtrack and change his tune, after all that would make obvious his real objections and how much money changed his attitude.  He told me, I was too clever for my own good and we laughed together. 

He had the last laugh.  During my last visit to RSRE, while heavily pregnant, he pumped me for ideas on how to make faster switches.  It was presented as a physics problem and I was encouraged to be as off the wall as I liked in coming up with unique ideas.  So I was creative and gave him a list of ideas of the top of my head from radioactive decay, to diodes, to lasers etc.  He took out a sheet and began scribbling some of the ideas down.  I laughed and said most of them were just brainstorming stuff with probably no real chance of practical implementation.  He retorted that only one had to work to make it all worthwhile – they could afford many to fail.  Perplexed, I asked what it was all for.  He told me that it was related to my PHD research.  Now, I was confused and he was eager to explain.  “We are trying to make faster switches for bombs, that’s what we’re after, that’s what’s funding the whole research you do here, each year.”

I remember my stomach clenched in shock and my hand went to my bump in an instinctive defensive reaction.  Making faster switches for bombs!!  All my work in understanding interfaces, the beautiful theoretical predictions, the scientific experiments to find the truth, the noble truth.  It was all to make us more effective at killing and destroying.  I finished my PHD but I never did any more research in my field again.  There was something about carrying a life that meant being a part of taking a life absolutely abhorrent.  My published papers all date from before my eldest son was born.  His presence in my life made me choose a different path.  I can have no regrets about that.  I look back at my relationship with physics like a bad affair, it started with passionate devotion and ended in acrimonious divorce.  It’s such a shame because I did love physics so much.  

Let each morn be better than its eve

"Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday."

You get up and hope that the day ahead is better than the one before.  Not in some vague wishing good things for the next day for yourself, but more in the desire that whatever the next day brings (good or bad) you will find something within to face it with grace and dignity.  It is not about what comes to us, it is all in how we deal with what comes that matters.  That is the nature of this game of life we all play.

"Man's merit lieth in service and virtue and not in the pageantry of wealth and riches."

It helps to realize the purpose of our lives and what it is not about.  If life is about service to humanity then the acquisition and display of wealth becomes rather a distraction to the main goal of being here.

"Take heed that your words be purged from idle fancies and worldly desires and your deeds be cleansed from craftiness and suspicion."

When I think about words, how they can hurt others, be fuelled with all kinds of desires, no wonder our deeds inevitably reflect our ulterior motives and doubts.  So we need to choose our words with care and make our deeds worthy.

"Dissipate not the wealth of your precious lives in the pursuit of evil and corrupt affection,"

Time is so precious and how easy to waste it on passing fancies that make a mockery of the reality that the only real wealth we have is our allotted span of time on earth and what we choose to do with it.

"nor let your endeavours be spent in promoting your personal interest."

If we focus only on what we want, what we feel, who we are, then we fail to see the horizon out there and lose our way on a comfortable circular path of selfishness.

 "Be generous in your days of plenty, and be patient in the hour of loss."

Perhaps the only real measure of a character is not what we do in good times but how we cope with the really bad periods.

"Adversity is followed by success and rejoicings follow woe."

It is the nature of our lives that, like our landscape around us, there are hills and hollows.  It is a truth that sometimes the hollows are more like deep dark endless ravines.  But they give us a valuable perspective on life and when you emerge from a deep dark valley the sunlight feels so good!

"Guard against idleness and sloth, and cling unto that which profiteth mankind, whether young or old, whether high or low. "

There is a strange lethargy that can steal from you, your rightful birthright.  This is not something you must guard within that others may take from you.  It is the strange ability in all of us to lose our sense of purpose and direction.  No one can take it away from us or give it to us, it is within each one of us and only we can and must find it for ourselves.  


Quotes taken from Baha'i Writings (Words of Wisdom)