Almost home a week but that spacey feeling from switching time zones lingers or perhaps it is something more profound than that ….. family grounds me somewhat … Sarah and Rob hosted a great welcome home barbeque last weekend … so good to reconnect after two months away. Aliana has turned into a sweet little lady in my absence! Great feeling, holding her in my arms … Stampede is well underway, reminding me why I normally escape the city for the ten days 🙂 I am just not much of a “hee haw” party animal anymore, if I ever was. 🙂

Oh, that Birlad, Romania was closer, so I could pay the little ones a visit every week! … emotionally, this was my hardest volunteer posting yet …. It broke my heart to leave these children behind, children who only have the stream of volunteers to give them a sense of love and belonging in the world …. they are all abandoned children and no matter how hard I try, I cannot wrap my head around anyone doing that to a child …. So yes, despite intense happiness to have my own family to hold, love and cherish, a part of me will always yearn to be of help to those most vulnerable, those requiring extra love, care and attention. I suppose I need to feel useful …. making me think, is altruism ultimately, at its core, really just selfishness in disguise? 🙂

My own children have been adults for a long time now …. raising them has been one of the true joys of my life. More than any job or career I had, being a mother was what I enjoyed the most of all. Both Sarah and Tim are happily entrenched in their own lives, no longer in need of the impediment of a doting mother intruding in their lives …. I feel I still have so much more to give and a typical Canadian retirement holds no appeal at this point in time. It would appear I am drawn to those in our world, who have so little …. I am happy in their midst without the distractionsi and accoutrements of our modern world in Canada, a country where we have so much of everything, an embarrassment of riches in every area of life, riches that many parts of our world have never, nor will ever know ….. I think of the penniless peaceful sadhus of India who have willingly renounced all worldly goods or my little ones in Birlad, who can light up a room with smiles in the midst of the harshest of living conditions! …. Not meaning to be too hard on my fellow Canadians, or myself for that matter, but it appears most of us need far too much of everything, thinking the road to happiness is paved with having ‘stuff’!! In recent years, I have noticed a movement afoot, a growing trend, to incorporate more simplicity into our lives, even here, in the land of plenty. It is not without irony, that I realize I enjoy writing thoughts down on my IPad 🙂 …. helps enormously to bring some form of clarity to my experiences of the past few years …. the mind attempts but somehow is failingly incapable of formulating adequate descriptives and reflections on perhaps the most inwardly transformative years of my life as an adult … my insides feel as though they have been rearranged and I am not quite sure how to adjust to the new configurations …..