Gratitude for trees - dedicated to Wild Child

There's something so magnificent about trees... They inspire me on so many levels. I can never tire of looking at them and always discover something new and wonderful about them.

We are so fortunate to live in an area surrounded by green, which allows me to breathe in their healing presence on every walk with little Dorka.

Today I was reminded by these beautiful creations of the saying 'don't worry if your shadow is bent if you know you're standing straight'. I reach back to these comforting words so often for reassurance as I very often feel misunderstood and oversensitive in my communication with fellow humans. Hence my love of animals and nature, for their uncomplicated simplicity. When you're already quite a sensitive soul and take so much of what people say or don't say personally, pregnancy hormones really do not do you any favours in that department. Add a bit of Corona virus to the situation, making you rely on technology for most of your interactions = recipe for disaster...

But you can never underestimate the restorative power of a walk in nature. For me these experiences are hightened by prayer, as hidden wooden paths are my favourite spots to have hearty conversations with the One Who Knows.

In this time of so much uncertainty and not being able to be with so many people you love and care about, I find gardening and my daily walks in nature pure medicine.
I looked at the trees on my sunny path today and was mesmerised by the way their leaves reflect the rays of light pouring onto them and how they show their gratitude by growing towards that source and stretch out their branches in what resembles a warm embrace.

There's something so inviting about a row of trees winding along gravel paths enticing you to explore further... even if you are 8 months pregnant and exploration gains a whole new speed and manner falling very far short of graceful!

Spotting these two directions I was transported back to a poem I came across in my studies in Kuwait many many years ago, The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.

...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

...

Looking back at this poem 20 odd years on I tried to figure out the reason why it stayed with me for so long and realised the more I tried to interpret it or understand others' interpretations of it, the more it lost of its beauty. I came to the conclusion that it was satisfaction enough for me to admire life's twists and turns and decisions, whoever made them. I feel a deep sense of gratitude for all the paths I took, that have led me to the exact moment I am living now. I guess this is what the poem means to me. I dedicate this entry to a dear friend
living Germany now due to life's circumstances, whom I have nicknamed 'Wild Child', for her love and fascination of nature that reminds me of mine. My dear Wild Child, may you keep finding peace and solice in nature and may the paths you choose take you on wonderful adventures. Love Noémi PS: Don't forget to embrace every opportunity for fun on the way as the pebble on my walk today reminded me!
...

New Life - Dedicated with love to all those affected by COVID-19

Once I read a quote from a lady in my favourite Hungarian magazine that went something like this: 'Even if I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would still plant an apple tree today'

I always found those words deeply hopeful and uplifting.
 Last year I planted an apple tree. Not because I thought the world was going to end, but because I've always had a deep rooted appreciation for trees and growing my own fruit seemed like one of the most wonderful things I could imagine. Also I was expecting my first baby and wanted her/him to be able to walk out into our garden and pick an apple straight from our tree.

Although the world didn't end as such, that first baby of ours never got to pick any apples from that tree as her time here with us was a very brief three months. Her little heart carried on beating somewhere else after that...

Jumping forward a year, the UK and pretty much the whole world is in lockdown because of the spread of COVID-19 and I am in my last month of pregnancy with our second child. The world, yet again, has not ended, but life as we know it has been shaken to the ground with a lot of questions and uncertainty for us humans...

To have this outbreak coincide with the arrival of our baby and Easter is both unsettling at times, to say the least, yet filled with hope and promise for a brand new way forward.

Our time during lockdown has been blessed with rest and tranquility, a chance to nurture and enjoy our garden, the company of our sweet furry family member, Dorka, who has been putting a smile on our faces for 15 years now, and allowed us much needed quality time together before our new arrival joins us.

Having said all that with much gratitude, not one day goes by without our thoughts and prayers going out to those who have had to carry on working and putting themselves at risk for the well-being of others, including my own mum and brother, my colleagues at the Lantern community, the people providing food and supplies for us, collecting our waste and other services, and last but not least, the incredible NHS and care staff having to face the toughest challenges of all day after day.

My heart is also daily with those who have found themselves face to face with the illness, whether it be themselves or their family members, and especially those who won't be able to cuddle those loved ones after the lockdown is over.

I dedicate this entry to all these people and my wish is that God's grace and healing be with them in this difficult time.

I sign off with a picture of the first blossoms on the earlier mentioned apple tree, that presented their delicate selves over the Easter weekend. May they be a sign of hope and healing to all of us. ☀️🍎☀️

A lesson in faith

These enormous trees were once tiny seeds too...

Diary of a Mama to be

This diary is dedicated to Grace Arnold, our baby in heaven, thanks to whom I am starting to believe I can be the kind of Mama I have always wished to be.

It's 2.45am and it seems to be the trend in this pregnancy that my body wants to do everything but sleep at this time of night. Things like pray, eat peanut butter and oatcakes  (this is the only time I can get away with peanut butter as there are few things hubby detests more!) and write. I won't mention the hundreds of trips to the loo or alternating between sweating buckets and trying to hog the blanket back from Daniel and Dorka,  who sometimes occupy 95% of the bed!

So if I'm not going to get any sleeping done, I might as well share some of the million thoughts whizzing through my hormonal brain.
My only experiences with motherhood have not been the easiest so far, so it's no surprise that sleeping at night has somewhat gone out the window. I go to bed with the best intentions,  whispering positive affirmations to tiny bump, uttering my childhood prayer I learned from my sweet great grandma asking God to watch over all my loved ones, sometimes I even spoil myself with a foot massage or yoga breathing and or lemon balm tea. Nevertheless,  I wake up in the night checking whether I still feel nauseous,  still have tender everything and hoping so much that everything is going to plan in there.  It takes a lot of trust to hand all those worries over after having had a missed miscarriage,  where you have every sign of pregnancy only to find out that baby is no longer with you.

The other night I came downstairs to have melon,  as you do in the middle of the night when you're growing another human inside you, sat on the sofa enjoying the stillness of the night, when the words 'natural mama' popped in my head. So I googled it or shall I say I 'Ecosia-d' it, a new search engine I use to help support the planting of trees. And I found a beautifully inspiring family who share videos and have written a week by week guide about natural pregnancy,  which I cannot wait to receive in the post! I listened to a very moving interview with Genevieve Howland, the mama who started this project, and found so inspirational the honesty with which she shared her journey through 3 miscarriages and her reconnecting with Faith, quite literally,  for she named the rainbow baby they had after the losses Faith. You can listen to the interview here if you feel called to

https://youtu.be/Ezq3FJxR0-A

I also found reassuring and uplifting the ease with which she talks about her faith and her struggles with it in the midst of all the miscarriages.

Signing off with gratitude for this Godsend reassurance and will go back and try to reclaim my 5% of the bed! 💞

Dancing to faith

In the last 9 months I've been through three losses, trained to become a Nia dance instructor and am in week 6 of my second pregnancy. It's been everything but an eventless year.

Rewinding to end of November 2018, November 29 I believe it was, I'm sat in the dining room of my Alpha Course hosts. It's our last but one session, and the topic is prayer. They offer to pray for everyone in the group individually, for our own specific issues, mine being our (medically) unexplained infertility.

I don't think too much about this, with Christmas soon approaching and with nearly 4 years of trying without success. Christmas passes and January arrives. Without a period. I'm too scared to get hopeful after way too many negative tests. However, after a week I pluck up the courage to buy a test. On January the 8th I took a day off to be free to celebrate the end of the Alpha course. I happen to do the test on this very morning. I notice a new curiosity sneaking in instead of the fear of the negative, and I think, what if it was a yes?...

...And there it is, the first time in my life, ever, the test says 'PREGNANT 2-3 weeks'

I cannot believe my eyes! I wake hubby up, who's still half asleep, but not for long. We are both swept into a wonderful, yet scary new reality of becoming parents, or so we thought...

That evening I decide to share at the Alpha celebration what a blessing the Alpha course has brought into our lives. Never in my life have I had so many people offer to pray for me, for us.

The following 8 weeks is a bit of a blur now, but involves lots of nausea and stress at work, strains in our relationship over priorities in life at this stage, a 3 week illness with the worst fever and aches I've ever had, praying baby would stay strong in spite of the paracetamol and antibiotics I very reluctantly ended up taking, and my 38th birthday, 4 days after which I'm told baby no longer has a heartbeat....................................................................................................................................................



Come April, barely a month after Grace left us (I chose a name for our baby as part of my healing) we find out that Daniel's granddad is very poorly, with very little time left. So come the hospital visits, which turn into visits to his care home where he was receiving palliative care, to our final visit to say farewell on April 22.

The funeral is tough, with moments I'm not sure who I'm crying for more, granddad, the baby or myself...

Our two dogs who have been an unbelievable comfort in my life through the worst of times, are not so much anymore. Lujzi, our 15 year old is fast deteriorating, sleeping all day, losing mobility and hearing and slipping away from us gradually. Our final cuddle happens on June the 3rd at an emergency vet in Wimborne where we decide to let her go and be free of pain. And she falls into my arms for the last time. I'm absolutely heartbroken............................................................
My heart in pieces, my faith a mess, my body and soul joyless I try to get through every day as best as I can, but I feel like I'm just a hollow shell being blown around by the wind.

✨✨✨


My first glimmer of hope arrives in the form of a Nia dance leaflet I pick up at a friend's yoga class, and instantly I have an urge to look up the next training date. Little more than a month later I'm dancing through my sorrow in Crispin Hall Glastonbury, and rediscovering the healing power of dancing. I feel joy, I feel hope and I want to wake up in the morning again just to move my body, to experience freedom from pain, both physical and emotional.

I thought I couldn't possibly cry any more tears, but the dancing moves things buried deep down inside and the dance floor becomes healing, cleansing medicine for me.

My teacher on the training brings to my attention that it is not unusual for ladies to fall pregnant soon after a Nia training. Our conception happened within less than a month. The magic of Nia paired with a powerful reconnection to my faith, brings a second positive test, a new ray of hope.

Where my faith was concerned, I was so struggling to fit into the box I created in my mind of what a relationship with God should look like. Bringing dance back into my life I was able to open up to a whole new world of connectedness to body mind and spirit and my own intuition.

Today I am hopeful and grateful for everything that has happened, as it has made me who I am right now. A stronger, healthier, more joyful and balanced person than I've ever been.

I can't wait to embark on this journey of becoming Mama once again with fresh eyes and surrendering to the will of God and letting go of wanting to control the outcome. The one thing I do know is that dancing and my faith are a well of strength and inspiration on my journey, and ones that I will always be able to depend on no matter what.

                               🙏💃🙏

A dog and her girl - IVF, letting go and new hopes...

It was 15 years ago one evening I'm out with some friends when I get a phone call from my brother saying he found a puppy on the way home from his night out and that it's sitting in my bathtub right now. That night had been challenging. It's not long since I lost my dad to a long battle of alcoholism, I'm having stomach problems of all sorts so I happened to be at the hospital on an emergency appointment just before I went to visit my friends and received this life changing phone call.

I ask my brother, 'does she have fleas?' He says 'no, just some flying bugs around her in the bathtub'.
Fleas, of course, many of them. When I first saw her she was shaking like a leaf, tiny and soggy from the bath water, drinking the shampoo water from the bath tub. She was the most adorable thing i'd ever seen. She was only meant to stay with us until she was better and I'd found someone who was going to adopt her. The TV repairman next door and his daughter.

The first night I had with her I dried her from her flea infested bath, gave her some clean water to drink and fed her liver pate with lots of garlic, having heard somewhere that garlic was good for worms. After seeing her flea situation I could only guess how many other organisms were also inhabiting her tiny body. Her little breath stank of garlic. I wrapped her up in a blue cloth, you could only see the tip of her nose, and put her in a white Styrofoam box, the closest thing I could find to a doggy bed.

The same doggy is now 15 with white whiskers and a freshly shaved belly from a liver scan she recently had, she's curled up in her wicker basket under the radiator and resting her tired little legs. The vet put her on a weeks rest for her hind left leg to heal.

My heart is in pieces.

I've lost people I've loved and felt the deep pain of that. But I've always loved dogs way more than people, they could never hurt you as much as people can.

So D and I got married just over 4 months ago and have been trying for a baby for almost 2,5 years now. Me being 36 and he 37, our time and options are becoming limited, or so it feels.

We're in the process of starting IVF, but secretly I pray that we can conceive without me having to be pumped full of hormones. I believe nature knows best in most areas of life, so why would this be any different.

So far according to the doctors our infertility is 'unexplained'

I have a flashback of being 15 or so and being so angry with the world around me that I decided I would adopt a child instead of having my own...

Not to mention the doubts in my head about ever becoming a parent worthy of raising another human being...

Then there was a dream I had about half a year ago about a blonde little girl, aged 2 or 3 in a snow white dress, waiting for us to adopt her...

And then there was the day we watched the film LION, and the scene in it when the adoptive mother, Nicole Kidman's character talks about her past, her alcoholic father and her vision of adopting children later on in life...

Who knows what God has in store for us. I am keeping an open mind for D's sake and from gratitude to God for keeping me sane all these years and for giving me hope again.

I wake up very often in the middle of the night around 2-3 am and cant get back to sleep so I pray and talk to God and ask for healing for all the sadness I'm still carrying. I look at cheerful people and so wish to be one of them, but when I'm on my own with my thoughts I still find so much pain and struggle, especially lately with what we've been through with Lujzi, the only baby I've ever had...

Last night I was quite poorly with my cold and feverish headache and had a longer than usual chat with 'Papa' the name given to God in the wonderful film The Shack. In this film God appears as a beautifully warm and loving lady brought to life by the radiant Octavia Spencer. When Mack the main character who grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father first meats her and looks shocked and puzzled, her very poignant reply was something like 'with a past like yours we didn't think you could handle a father figure'. How very appropriate as far as I'm concerned.
So my very lengthy conversing flowed into a very soothing resting with God, like I was being cradled and held safe, reassuring me that whatever life brought, this safe haven would always be here for me to return to no matter what.

I just lay there hot with fever, gasping for air through my mouth as my nose was so blocked up, thinking of all the people and animals I love dearly, and the fear of losing them suddenly turned into a letting go.. A handing over everything to God and trusting that he or shall I say she will watch over them all and never leave their sides whether in this life or what follows.

I have decided to call my God Love, no he, no she just an all embracing Love.

I've just spotted it on a candle in front of me and it says:

'Love makes life lighter'

A beautiful thought to close this entry with, I believe.

Love Noemi
xxx

White Piano

Her name was Beatrix and she lived upstairs on the second floor, just above my flat. She entered my life just after my father exited it. I was 22 at the time, I remember that clearly. She was a peculiar girl, like none I'd met before or after her. Eyes sparkling blue and childlike, tiny, vulnerable frame and wavy blonde cherub-like curls; her fascination with angels was no surprise at all.

Mine was non existent at the time; not sure who to trust and what to believe in I was just plodding along in life, waiting for something to happen.

One day I bumped into Beatrix on the way home and noticed her eyes were red from crying. I invited her in for a cup of tea and she ended up staying for several months. Where
she came from or where she then disappeared to I might never know, but she left a mystery behind that I am still trying to solve.

Among her few possessions were a bunch of angel books that she kept in a pile in the living room. I didn't show much interest in them until one day she handed me one to have a look at. I sat down on the sofa and opened it on a random page in the middle somewhere, only to find the script of a conversation between a girl and her father. It was a psychic reading where the girl, her name was Laura I believe, was talking to her dead father and he was apologising to her for all the things that he had done. Later on in the conversation the grandfather appeared as well and explained to the girl that he is the one to blame for everything, as he too was an alcoholic and had mistreated her father.

This was my first major dealing with a coincidence of this magnitude. The first thing that came to my mind was that if somebody had swapped the names around and put my name instead of Laura's, every word would be an exact mirror of how things panned out in my family. I was puzzled and not sure what to think; part of me thought that perhaps this was how my Dad was trying to communicate with me, part of me thought things like that can't happen, especially not to me. Nevertheless I shared my thoughts with Beatrix over a nervous cigarette on the balcony; to which her reply was "wait till you see what happens in 11 years time"
I remember thinking "no you can't do this to me, I can barely wait five minutes for things let alone 11 years!!! Nevertheless, as it became clear that she wasn't going to let on any more of whatever she was referring to I worked out in my head that I would be 33 when this thing, whatever it was, was going to occur...

A note from almost ten years after writing this entry - two days ago my mum told me while painting pottery together in a cafe, that Laura was one of the names they thought of giving me. (02.03.2026)