Celebration of life...

A beautiful gray lotus that I know about indirectly is celebrating her 97th birthday tomorrow in the North of this country. I have not met her, I do not even know her name. It doesn't matter really as what matters the most to me is this lived experience of 96 years on this planet, having raised a family, being quite healthy and celebrating her birthday with the extended generations of the family which now includes a great grand daughter who is less than 2 months old. I can only imagine how beautiful this family gathering will be. To me that seems like truly accomplished life but then it also makes me curious. How does this gray lotus reflects on her life? what does she think about it? What would be her words of advise for lost young women like me? Her life has almost spanned over last century. She must have changed her own self in order to adapt to this ever changing world around her. Looking back over those 96 years, these changes can be quite profound but she survived and she blossomed and here is now her moment of celebration. I wish you a wonderful birthday, Senorita. May you cross 100 in health and satisfaction.

I am always fascinated by the elderly people for their having lived the life successfully, surviving the storms and disasters and moving on. I feel I lack that perseverance, that zeal for life and the patience and acceptance that comes along. I always desire the things that I lack, so it is obvious why these days my predominant thoughts are about becoming a 'gray lotus' myself. I feel happy when I am surrounded by them in Begijnhof, I keep observing them, I keep smiling at them and I keep dreaming about becoming one of them. I know that old age is not all that romantic, even when there are clear shades of romanticism in how I perceive old age. I have never lived with an elderly grandparent to have close experience of old age and the pain and suffering that it might bring along for the elderly person and the family. I have one distant grandmother who is I guess in her late 70s but I hardly know anything about her. My mother's maternal grandmother died at the age of 87 in 1980 and I have heard so many stories about this woman and her innate strength and beauty. The story of women in my family, particularly on my mother's side are all about these strong women with virtually absent men.. it is almost a women's world and this great grandmother of mine leads our battalion. My mother feels that I would have been extremely close to this great grandmother if she was alive and she also sees a lot of her qualities in me. I have often thought about documenting stories of this wonderful woman as narrated by my mother and I am going to take up this project seriously on my return home. In fact she could be my starting point to a project about women's experience in marriage taking me to the beginning of 20th century.

Another such beautiful gray lotus who is 93 years old lives in Northern Thailand. She is the mother of my Thai friend, Nid. This accomplished mother of seven daughters is very liberal in her thoughts (we were impressed about her openness to relationships and her advice to her daughters) and she loves watching wrestling. We all burst into laughter when she explained that she likes wresting because she can see these 'well built' men fight hard with each other. I can only imagine this woman sitting in her living room in front of the television set biting her teeth while watching these wrestling men. I always feel that I should have been somehow there, as a 'fly on the wall' in this household, way back then, where a man and a woman raised seven daughters. As my friend describes it, it seems that their house had freed itself from standard stereotypical gender norms. Nid remembers her father taking active interest in cooking and household work. This gray lotus lost her husband some 35 years ago, she now lives in their ancestral property and a farm in Northern Thailand with her three daughters, grandchildren and extended family. She has eight dogs to keep her company. This woman was our biggest source of inspiration while we were studying in Amsterdam. Every time Nid called her on phone, her mother would ask her about the day she would graduate. Her next words always were, 'do not worry about me, I wont die till you graduate and come back home with your diploma'. We all knew we had to get our diplomas as this woman was waiting for that moment. Nid did go back home with her diploma and I am planning my trip to Thailand just to spend a few days with this gray lotus and I am going to take my mother along.

I picked up this leaf on my way home from the school this evening. It has a beautiful design with the clear but still merging boundaries of brown, yellow and the green. We have a saying in Marathi 'Pikali Paane, Hiravee Manne'. Old age is described as 'dried leaves but the green souls'. Here is my leaf.. drying, turning brown but still having a beautiful green border. what better symbol I could get to pay respect to these gray lotuses.. this post goes out to all those gray lotuses who have made such a difference to the lives of the others by just being there...

Happy birthday grandma up there in the north...