The wandering soul of the dragonfly monk

  Death: the silent and peaceful twin of life and love   Each time death visits me, it brings along a friend- grief . This pandemic has brought me closer to darkness- not in the traditional sense of how one would associate the ‘feelings, emotions and the actions’ connected with this word, but rather openly welcoming it into my life, acknowledging it and for the first time in years allowing it to stay and be at peace with it. Some of you may not be able to understand this or grasp how one can feel this- but maybe one day I truly hope you can feel what I feel and maybe when that happens, we can chat more about it. In the meantime, I will try and share how ‘grief’ and ‘death’ visited me. The past year and this year have dished out a number of deaths our way- way too many I tell you! but that is the cycle of life, of reincarnation and death. Last year, I lost a dear friend of mine, a dear soul that shared his magic with me, and I hope I shared some magic with him through...

“My child- I will find you. I see you smiling in the rays of sunshine- I see you sliding down the rainbows. I see you! In whatever form you come- you have become one with my soul and heart” (Spending time with these beautiful children- Agent Orange Rehab Centre Vietnam. photo: Victor Sapar) I close my eyes and I imagine tiny fingers, tiny nose and chubby cheeks. I imagine tiny hands gripping onto mine so hard they don’t want to let go. I imagine their mushy wet lil’ lips all over my face especially when they kissing their ‘momma’ with so much love. I smile, I feel all ‘chummy’, I feel immense love and immediately in ‘awww’ mode. I stop. I tell myself, “Come back to the real world Veen. Pull yourself together. It’s not impossible!!!” Tears stream down my cheeks, as I open my eyes, my heartbreaks, I feel a tight knot in my tummy- it hurts and then I slowly massage it. Purse my lips, thumb moves closely to my lower lip (a sign of nervousness and a...

Divorce…Separation…what’s it like? What did you do? “A mix of cold sweats, heart beating faster than normal, twisted tummy with scared butterflies fluttering around and a feeling of yet another headache coming along when I think of divorce and separation”, and these are feelings and emotions I wrote down when I was in a “one digit” age group! At that young age, I knew exactly what I wanted and where I wanted to be in life. I knew that I was going to adopt children, I knew I was going to be very independent and that would mean working hard to challenge my INFJ tendencies and personality traits, but going through my old diaries and notebooks, I only see well written stories and articles of the situations of our world and a reminder that I didn’t need a ‘man’ to make everything complete. I was a child- how did I know all these things? Perhaps I knew something at that age that the adult me refused to acknowledge.   Well, I got married young in my early twenties an...