Recipe for Sore Hearts

This morning my girl brought over a book from the guest bedroom nightstand and asked me to read it for her. Just a pretty little book with a pink cover that Mr. Urban had given me as a Valentines gift years ago, that serves us very well as guest bedroom decoration. Tao of Love, a compilation of ancient Chinese Taoisms. I flipped through the book and landed on a random page... " How can we be sure that we are instilling the right values in our children, who are being brought up in such unsettling times?"

Unsettling times. It's been a sad, heartbreaking weekend with every thing in the news. I can't stop thinking about all the guns, all the people suffering from mental health issues, all the single mothers struggling with balance in raising a family...

But then as I was cuddling my girl in bed, I thought of unsettling statistics I had read just days ago that in America 24 people (mostly women) were victims of rape and domestic abuse (that is by someone they know), EVERY MINUTE of EVERY DAY. Oh, and when I happened to glance at the news on "Heavy Gaza Bombings" last week I read that that over 100 people were killed and over 225 children were injured by the recent bombings...

There seems to be no shortage of events that threaten to crush our optimism and hope in the goodness of humanity any day of the year.

But then again what a marvel is the gift of Human Spirit. I know it is beauty seeking and capable of Love... it is ever expanding in experiencing so much good and so much bad.

And I know that even the Grinchiest, Meanest, Coldest of us humans are capable of kindness and goodness. And when you look into the cases of many perpetrators of evil acts, you can always find hurt, insecurity, poverty, lack of love and acceptance in their lives. People with scars, without deep spiritual connections, and without empathy for the consequence of their actions onto lives of others.

But as the singer says "Love is here to stay". And all we can do in the face of evil, is to infuse our world with more love, more kindness, more empathy, more beauty and more spiritual connection to the goodness of the universe... Teaching our children that yes, Anger and Hurt and Disappointment and Greed is a normal part of humanity but that in the face of all that we have the power to breathe, stay quiet, pray for patience, take a walk, say a kind word, give the benefit of the doubt, read a book, take a nap, go for tea, and let go...

Yes, no question that humans have no business with guns and all kinds of destructive weaponry. Sure, let's try to change that, the whole world over...

But in the meanwhile, let's also sit down more to tea and delicious afternoon snacks of sweets, fruits and nuts. Let's use our prettiest cups and sweetly pass each other the plate of delicious cookies and linger around the table doing nothing. Let's take an extra fifteen minutes to prepare breakfast or dinner for the ones we love. Think of the best recipes and sprinkle love into each meal we have together, around the nicest tables we can set.

And if Spirituality is the concept of our individual connection to this amazing universe and the human community then we would do well to bring more spirituality into our homes. Encouraging our children to find themselves connected to the beauty and the creativity and the love that is ever flowing in our universe.

FORTY THREE YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS AND FORTY DAYS

My life and the life of every Iranian I know, is bookended by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It doesn't matter that I was barely old enough to remember this historic event or that I spent the decades that followed it, far far away from Iran, the Revolution of 1979 is a heavy, tacky, cruel bookend that defines who we used to be, who we are and the recurring nightmares and dreams we’ve had for 43 years. I can pinpoint with certainty the exact month after which a general feeling of displacement settled like sticky dust all over me, my family, my classroom, my teachers, our closest friends, our home, our city… In the years and decades that followed, I never experienced another event that brought such a magnitude of change to the nucleus of life. Not in Iran, and definitely not after a whole life lived outside of Iran. Perhaps only recently, the experience of the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic, the significant fear, change and frustration that both events brought to our col

On Donald Trump, Crunchy Bananas and our Children... A "How To" on keeping up Spirits and Sanity

The other morning at breakfast, my four year old looked, yet again somberly, at the breakfast before her. Despite having enthusiastically selected a hodgepodge of liberally salted hard boiled egg whites on the side of toasted hamburger buns, strawberries and vanilla yogurt and a cup of milk, she still could not bring herself to enjoy her breakfast. Her face was wrinkled, as was mine with exasperation from yet another failed attempt at assembling a palatable breakfast for my picky eater. This one, she is quite the philosopher. And before I could ask her why she wasn't eating, she said: "Two Things!" Holding up two tiny fingers. "The smells of these foods I picked, don't go with each other! And I wish Donald Trump would magically become Hillary Clinton, and the word (world) would be GREAT again". Despite our best efforts to protect our children from the anxiety of these times, they are alert and picking up on the mood (and the lingo) in the wor

Safa

I have always loved words. The way some people love shiny new objects. As soon as I heard a new word, a word that captured my imagination, my energy, my hundreds of unnamed inner thoughts and feelings, I would latch on to it with fearceness, joy and curiosity. I have also always been intrigued by how regular old words can be used in an unexpected context and evoke bursts of unexpected feelings in the listener, such as laughter, anticipation or tears. I would search for those words coming out of the mouths of everyone around me, and mentally catalog them like a dutiful librarian, and await the opportunity to say the words with my own mouth out loud to an audience, or better yet use it in an essay where the teacher could grade it, get a kick out of it, or read it to the whole class. As a child I always loved the Persian word Safa . For one thing the word sounds so simple, yet sophisticated and beautiful, and for another, each of my memories of hearing this word is stored in th

An Urban Girl

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