White roses and gray lotuses

This afternoon I received a bunch of beautiful white roses from a friend here in Leuven. It was indeed a surprise. I had to scratch my head to find a suitable vase or jar to keep those roses and that is when an empty juice bottle came in handy. I had bought some plants to keep me company in my early days in Leuven and unfortunately one has died, the other is alive but not very happy and the third one is actually fighting some strange sort of infection. I must say, I have not been taking good care of my little green angels and that hurts. I don't understand what is going wrong? Am I watering them too much? Are they not getting enough light? What could I do to make them feel better? Now the roses are sitting on my dining table and I smile every time I look at them.
My countdown in Leuven has already begun, I leave Leuven on 17th of December. By the time I started feeling truely 'settled' in Leuven, it was already time to look for a suitable accommodation for Nijmegen, my next academic destination. How excited I was to see the structure of this program arranged by three universities in three different countries. Now I realize how little thought I gave to this daunting task of uprooting myself from one place and moving to the next every three months. My way of exploring and experiencing any new place is to spend atleast an year so that I can see the entire cycle of seasons and changes in the environment and lives of people around. For this program, it is going to be autumn in Leuven, winter in Nijmegen and the spring in Paduva. I have to start winding up things here, sort out the belongings, plan goodbyes to my friends and contacts and I have about 5 weeks or little more to accomplish all this.
What I enjoy the most about my evenings in Leuven is the Tuesday evening at zen meditation when I am surrounded by gray lotuses and I absorb a lot of positive energy just by being around them. I am indebted to a friendly ghost in neighboring Netherlands for coining the term 'gray lotus' and letting me use it in my writings. The first gray lotus I met here has recovered beautifully after 2 weeks of illness and she bloomed so elegantly this evening, I could not help looking at her. I so hope that few years down the line, I will turn into a gray lotus and can pass on the same feeling to some young restless soul..
The movies and the books, the gray lotuses and cooking and off course my classes and discussions on reproductive health technologies make my day so action packed that I barely have time to mourn my losses. But being too busy to think about losses is not really having accepted the loss. I hope some day I will get there.. till then I am going to enjoy my days in Leuven, Nijmegen and Paduva..

Good night...