Lucie departed on Sunday 26th January
That afternoon we buried her in a lovely field
Today we returned to do 11th day puja to help her spirit find its new home
Then lunch back at home
It’s very sad to lose such a wonderful friend, I miss her—-
—-being at home when I return, going on walks together and just being in my life.
Billet-Doux also misses Lucie
She’s such a famous dog with everyone asking about her.
To both Manjula and I.
Ina visited us again this year to become ‘part of the furniture’. It was her tenth anniversary of visiting us.
We celebrated Manjula’s birthday with friends, visited Bylakuppe and Dorjee the monk, (the Tibetan who she sponsored as a child), and Ina got to know and appreciate our burgeoning Kaveri.
She left us after a month’s stay to go back home and visit family and friends in Singapore.
I learned this morning that Ina died last night and her spirit joins her great friend Manjula’s on their next journey.
I’ll dive into my photos and post again with memories of Manjula and Ina together.
Manjula wished to be reincarnated as a tree. She wanted to provide cover and and support to people. To me it reflected her strength and gentleness.
I was reminded of this after reading a recent brain picking, with reference to a letter from D H Lawrence reflecting his love for trees.
“To walk among trees is to be reminded that although relationships weave the fabric of life, one can only be in relationship — in a forest or a family or a friendship — when firmly planted in the sovereignty of one’s own being, when resolutely reaching for one’s own light.”
That’s so my Manjula. It’s a lesson she leaves me with. As she now waits for me to lift myself from my bed of lethargy and act.
“A century ago, Hermann Hesse contemplated how trees model for us this foundation of integrity in his staggeringly beautiful love letter to trees — how they stand lonesome-looking even in a forest, yet “not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.” Celebrating them as “the most penetrating preachers,” he reverenced the silent fortitude with which “they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.”
again I’m so reminded of MAnjula, her own strength, independence and gentle kindness.
“A supreme challenge of human life is reconciling the longing to fulfill ourselves in union, in partnership, in love, with the urgency of fulfilling ourselves according to our own solitary and sovereign laws. Writing at the same time as Hesse, living in exile in the mountains, having barely survived an attack of the deadly Spanish Flu that claimed tens of millions of lives, the polymathic creative force D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) took up the question of this divergent longing with great subtlety and splendor of insight in his autobiographically tinted novel Aaron’s Rod (free ebook | public library), rooting the plot’s climactic relationship resolution in a stunning passage about trees.”
We’re out on our morning walk and stopped to sit reflect and write in one of the many local parks.
There’s a guy wandering around the park. There are two friendly boys following.
What is he doing?
In his bag there’s a series of containers with what seems to be powders, seeds and maybe even snacky things.
He’s distributing little piles all over the park.
Piles of powder on the ground Crunchy stuff on top of the walls.
Got it!
He’s feeding the insects and the birds.
I’m assuming he’s a Jain, doing good things particularly for the animals and that can’t be too bad for his Karma and future incarnation!
Footnote
A kindly neighbour loaned me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with a recommendation to read the section on death. It helps illuminate the ‘matter of factness’ of the Hindu approach. As wordly family we shouldn’t get too attached as the spirit lives on ….. the spirit moves on to another body and as it progresses becomes part of the greater whole. We’ve done the main rituals and send our positive vibes hoping Manjula has found her new home. We know she deserves a good one.
Me and MYCycle 