Where are they?

With a tear stained face and heavy heart,
I remember through the memory of those present,
So that they live on and not be forgotten.

Through photos, videos and stories imprinted in their hearts and minds,
Layers of memory unfolding like the feathers of a peacock,
waiting to be spread open and freed into the light.

Yet some memory shields itself, too painful to be exposed,
The excrutiating torment and open wounds,

They will never heal.

They will never heal.

The not knowing of where thier loved ones are,
In this breathtakingly beautiful but bone ridden country.
The contrasts of the sun setting over the Andes to the deathly cold desert at night,
The moon illuminating the horrors of what is still unknown.

Where are they?

Where are they?

Siento

Ya se fue la paloma dos veces, me ha dejado un vacío grande en el alma.

Aun siento el aleteo de sus alas delicadas en mi corazón y su luz blanca que intenta iluminar mi cuerpo.

Ay! que difícil es ser mujer, un recuerdo todos los meses de lo que he perdido.

Las preguntas sin respuestas y la búsqueda eterna, para intentar remediar lo que siento he fallado.

La ausencia de mi propósito, de todo lo que quiero, mi espíritu en pedazos porque no veo mi vida en colores sino como retrato en sepia. Y viene la lluvia, y me ahoga en la tristeza.

The beautiful dogs of Chile

I don´t think you could ever say you are alone in Chile.  There are so many stray dogs who are just waiting for some love and affection, and much needed food.  In San Pablo there is a homeless man, complete with three dogs who lay right by his side, through the cold and rain, and blistering sun.  In Chile, dogs are everywhere, in the midst of student protests, running through the tear gas and being soaked by the guanacos.  Barking at the passing cars, fixated by the moving wheels.  They rule the streets and can be found in the parks and squares, a mixture of mongrols with Labrador heads and Whippet bodies highlights the problem of the increasing homeless dog population.

I am normally a cat person, but now having six canine companions I have to say it is true what they say, dogs are so loyal, and know just the right time to comfort you in times of sadness, be your guardian and never ever judge you.  Through times of grief I have had a much needed snuggle with Segundo and Clara and they instinctively knew I was upset and needed some healing.

Recently on holiday in the north of Chile, the beach was full of stray dogs.  One in particular came back to our beach hut looking for food, and from the moment we shared our lunch he never left our side.  He accompanied us to the beach and back, protecting us at night and waiting for us in the mornings.  He was never agressive, always waiting patiently for food and attention. He stayed with us right to the end of our visit, and knew when we were to return to Santiago, saying his goodbyes at the gate with some cries.  It was heartbreaking to leave him.

 It really pains me to think of so many dogs who are uncared for and rely on locals and strangers for food and attention.  I would just like to ask you to take a second to be conscious about the situation of animals, and maybe you can spread some love and affection their way, a friendly pat or food and water and I will guarantee that in return you will have a companion for life.

Para Mauricio

A Mauricio Escobar Fernández, esposo, amor de mi vida, mi media naranja, contigo estoy completo, mi vida tiene sentido.  Te esperé tantos años, ahí estuviste en mis sueños, lejos, pero sabía que ibas a llegar.  Antes de ti sentía  una soledad tan profunda, mis días de color gris, mi alma empapada con la lluvia.

Cuando llegaste me trajiste el sol, llenaste mi día con colores bonitos.  Por la primera vez sentí amada, y sabía lo que era el amor, y todavía lo siento, aún mas fuerte con cada amanecer.  Quiero darte la gracia, porque he tenido tiempos oscuros, una tormenta en mi corazón, pero tomaste mi mano, y de nuevo me trajiste el sol, y nació el arco iris, y estoy saliendo de mi pesadilla, pero de a poco, con tu amor, es tu amor que me da la vida, nunca dejes de amarme, es lo que necesito, lo único que quiero, tu amor....

TE AMO xxx 

To Mauricio Escobar Fernández, husband, love of my life, my soulmate, with you I am complete, my life has meaning.  I waited for you so many years, there you were in my dreams, far away, but I knew you would arrive.  Before you I felt a deep loneliness, my days were grey, my soul sodden with the rain.

When you arrived you brought me the sun, you filled my day with beautiful colours.  For the first time I felt loved, and I knew what love was, and I still feel it, even stronger with every sunrise.  I want to thank you, because I have had some dark times, a storm in my heart, but you took my hand, and you brought me the sun again, and a rainbow appeared, and the nightmare is ending, but little by little, with your love, it is your love that keeps me alive, never stop loving me, it´s what I need, the only thing I want, your love....

I LOVE YOU xxx

Signs and affirmations

I haven´t had the best of times of late, so on Tuesday I went to the church of San Francisco to pray.  The Virgin Mary caught my attention and pulled me near, so I sat down in front of her to release all my thoughts and fears.  

Recently before I had seen on the clocks 3.33 and 5.55 on various occasions, I hadn´t yet made the correlations.

Yesterday, while I was sitting at my desk in the library, I noticed a ladybird on my shoulder.  Which I found to be quite strange, wondering how it got inside and was quite unusual for this time of year in winter.  So I decided to look at the internet for the meanings.

Well, the ladybird is the beetle of the Virgin Mary, and the angel number 333 means that the Ascended Masters are near you. The Virgin Mary is one of the Ascended Masters.  You may not believe in such coincidences, but it really has been a comfort for me, and since I was not actively looking for signs I believe in this even more.  The number 555 talks about a major life change.  I am not quite sure what that is yet.

If your mind is open, you may notice signs.  These can be number sequences on clocks or car registrations, butterflies, white feathers and rainbows as some examples.  During difficult times we are not alone.  There are angels all around us to let us know that everything is going to be fine.  Even if we are on the dark side of the storm, the rainbow will always shine through in the end.

Love and light to you all.

Thinking of Frank

There´s not really a day that goes by without me thinking about you.  It seems weird to not send you a card this year.  It took a long while to allow myself to get to know the real you and I am glad I did.  I still sometimes hear you in my head, or think of you when the lights flicker.  I remember all your sayings, your habits, your mischievous behaviour.  I say this with tears down my face and with a heavy heart because it still hurts that you are gone.  It is true the saying that you don´t know how much you love someone until they are gone.  I regret not saying it enough.  Happy Father´s day Frank.  Thank you for being part of my life.  I love you.  So many people loved you and always will.

Thoughts in my head

I am at a place with so many contrasts. Somewhere so breathtakingly beautiful but at the same time so cruel and unfair.  Where you feel overwhelmed and in awe of the energy of the snow capped mountains and elevated by the magical kiss of the hummingbird.  Yet in a heartbeat you can be suffocated by the smog of injustice.  The cold wind bites your cheeks and envelops your soul.  Time can stand still but simultaneously fly by with the blink of an eye.  Your mind struggles to make sense of what it already knows.  This is my reality.  Confused by the indifference to such difference.  I wait for the bloom of the Atacama Desert.  Patiently.  And I wait.  But nothing.  Oh how I desire for that arid space to be full of life and delicate flowers.  With vivid colour and strong perfumed scent.  May the hummingbirds soon delight in its glory.   It just has to be.  It just has to be.  

Children

There is something just so wonderfully beautiful about children, their innocence, their naievity.  When I was eleven my older sister had her first child.  Georgia Naomi.  She was, and still is, one of the lights of my life.  I remember pushing her into the hedge in her silvercross pram with bouts of laughter.  That is one of her first memories funnily enough.  But I loved her, even if I were mischievous.  She used to sleep over our house, in my bed and she was my first ´daughter´.  

Then came two nieces and nephews from my other sister, Chloe, Maddison, Sam Ben and Sonny.  I used to love getting them to sleep.  Holding them in my arms.  Sometimes dealing with the sickness bugs that went round and round.  Cleaning tremendously full nappies.  I was amazed that so much could come out of a small bottom!!  I was more mature and less mischievous, although I remember doubling over with laughter after cutting Sam´s hair with the clippers and forgetting the guard.  He had a nice bald patch on the side of his head.  My sister Laura was sort of laughing but trying to contain her horror at the same time.   

My twin Charlotte had her two.  Sebastiaan and Theo.  Sebastiaan was born in Germany.  I never forget the time I had to leave him the first time to return to England.  It literally and physically hurt my heart.  I guess that was coming closest to feeling what it is to truly love a child like a mother does.  I had been with him for the first couple of months of his life and was very very attached.  Then Theo was born on the kitchen floor, in Charlotte´s home in Bristol.  It reminded me of the story Like Water for Chocolate where the protagonist was also born on the floor and they swept up the salt that had evaporated from the maternal waters.  After being very present in their lives, I had to leave my boys to start my life in Chile and it hurt tremendously once again.

What I guess I am trying to say is I have always been maternal.  It has taken me a long time to find the man I really want to make that journey with.  It took me a while to convince him into the path of parenthood.  Unfortunately I had a miscarriage in January.  It has been so hard trying to get my head around it.  Imagine something you want most of all in life, someone offers it to you, you have it and are so happy, then as quickly as it comes, it is taken away from you again.  I was devastated.  You spend so much time questioning youself, feeling a failure.  Pregnant women seem to be everywhere, people due at similar times to what you would have given birth.  It hurts.  But I would never begrudge that most precious thing of anyone. Unfortunately miscarriage is not spoken much of, but it is more common than you think.  I confided in a friend who had gone through the same.  I also have two friends with fertility issues, and they are the most beautiful and deserving people you could think of.  The fertility lottery seems so unfair.

Before my loss I had been having dreams of a child for some time.  I didn´t recognise the face, but the child was just ´there.´  A baby bird died in our dining room, scared of fright being cornered by the cat.  I guess the signs were there that it just wasn´t meant to be.  I had a dream the other day of my own baby.  I know it was mine because it was in my arms and I was trying to breastfeed it.  It gives me hope for the future.  I yearn to have that closeness.  The warm embrace of a child.   I have so so much love to give.  For now though I am engaged in a different project while my heart, body and soul heals.  My work life has suddenly taken off in the area that I want it to.  But I know motherhood is in my destiny, somewhere in the future on that twisting path of fate.  

For my love

It was so wonderful to be in your arms, listening to the rain tapping the tin roofs as you stroked my face.  I felt happy again, a happiness that has been absent for some time.

The boats bobbed up and down with the tide, in the light of the moon.  The water washing under the houses on stilts that I dreamed of many years ago.  Our destiny.

  

How divine to share the week with you, the moment seemed like forever as time stood still, and it was just me and you.

Our love flowed freely again, and nature approved with heart shaped puddles and hummingbirds celebrating our kiss.  

Life is the wheel of fortune, what goes down must come up.  Life on earth is short, the physical may cease but the soul lives on.

And so our souls continue to dance with the stars, our love so strong that our spirit becomes one.  She is born of the sea, rises with the wind and rains back down into the earth.

She, like our love, is eternal.

The birds by Kate Morton de Escobar

 Squawking gulls o´er the sea shore,

Pigeons walking clumsily on the floor,

Graceful swans in unison glide,

Pelicans bobbing along with the tide.

Dove symbol of peace for which we pray,

Robin with memories of Christmas day,

Cuckoo finding refuge in the trees,

Swallows building nests in the eaves.

Birds migrating and gone to soon,

Owl twit twooing by the light of the moon,

Rooster crowing marking a bright new day,

Oh how I love my birds in every way.

But the hummingbird is the favoured one,

She brings me hope of better days to come,

She brings me messages from those I miss,

With her delicate warm embrace and kiss.

Lucho, another abandoned dog, another member of the family

Chile has a problem of epidemic proportions when it comes to abandoned dogs.  Driving down into Laguna Verde, or in fact any Chilean town, the amount of unwanted dogs left to fend for themselves is shameful and shows an urgency for educating the masses and highlighting the widespread scale of the problem.  Would it be o.k. to abandon your children because of thier colour, because they were no longer small or cute, because they became to expensive or too much of a burden?  A child is for life, not just for Christmas, and so is a dog!

The reasons for abandonment here in Chile mirror how discrimination works in wider society.  Black dogs are rarely wanted, the more European and blonder the better, your face must fit, and if preferable, you must fit into a Gucci handbag.  How heartbreaking to see dogs running into the roads, with little food, and even worse, mistreated and kicked by uneducated yobs only because of an inquisitive sniff.  

Luckily there are many groups who are trying to make a change here.  There are many people who love animals and try to find those abandoned ones homes.  They leave food and water in the streets and knit them clothing for the cold.  Which brings me to the story of Lucho.

Lucho is a mongrel who has recently won our hearts.  A month or two ago, our poodle cross Pelusa went missing.  Naughty little girl had escaped and was looking for mischief.  We were delighted as she appeared two days later, but she arrived with a flea bag in tow.  For several days, Lucho stayed outside of the gate, waiting for Pelusa, to shower her with howls of love.  Finally we caved and let him in, hoping the dynamic with our other five dogs would work.  We gave him the name ´Lucho´ because he fought so hard for Pelusita´s love and didn´t give up.  

Lucho is rather a strange creature, with almost human eyes and a human sounding gruffy voice.  He is ridden with fleas, but who could not love him?  Due to the amount of abandoned dogs in Chile, there are some strange mixes of dogs, whippets with labrador heads and sausage dogs with chihuahua ears.  He surely was abandoned because he has a big head and probably was too large for his owners who wanted a purse size pup.  But we have grown to love him just as he is, even if he does cause tremendous mischief with Pelusa, he is now part of our family.  And our story is one of many which gives me hope that things are starting to change, that it takes just but one person, and one dog to make a difference.  Love and kidness is everything.

Today

Today brought some closure in one of the saddest chapters in my life.  I have lived some of my darkest moments recently.  The one thing I wanted most of all in this life was taken away from me and left me heartbroken.  Margarita said that when you are sad, look into the trees and see their beauty, but I found it so hard, all I could see was darkness through my tear stained soul.  Now I will go to my favourite place to recover, to be at peace with my animals, so that the hummingbirds envelop me with their love and light so that my heart finds happiness again.