Let's be moved

Let's be moved
by the fabulous beauty of nature 
and stand in awe 
for every tree along our way 

Let us be moved
by the amazing health we enjoy
and be grateful
every second of the day

Let us be moved
by the wonderful power to help
and give a loving service
to anyone in need

Let us be moved
by the marvelous power to speak
and give a friendly word
to all people we meet

Not always sweet

Deep under my skin
a special love flows
through my veins

the love for the sea,
who whispers sweet words
in her soft and wavy voice.

But when the waves
become roaring and loud
my heart feels bruised.

When my sea allows
a jellyfish to come my way
i feel a bit betrayed.

But still, I love the sea.
In my heart
there is an ocean of love :)

---------------------------------------------------
I hope you enjoy the little poem above 

Alertness

Today, I want to pray,
to pray in a special way,
not to have or to get more
but to be a bit better
to live a bit better

I pray for enough alertness
to see and act on the many opportunities
that today, as each other day,
will present themselves to me
to help, to assist, to elevate others a bit
to inspire, to alleviate some sorrow,
to create a simple smile.

I pray for the wisdom
to walk through the day
with an open heart, an open mind
ever ready to understand something new
to know a bit more
to see the world from many angles

I pray for my wife and sons,
that they may get the same alertness
that they may get the same wisdom,
that they may find joy in selfless service
that they may walk Your path
that wonderful path filled with grace
filled with love and kindness
filled with harmony and peace
filled with strength and inspiration
filled mercy and tenderness
filled with gratefulness

I pray for my larger family
for all who work with me, for me,
for all my neighbours, my patients,
my friends and foes
I pray that the world will move fast
to this wonderful kindness revolution,
that is really standing in front of our door.

Let us live a life towards that great Vision
Use my body, my heart, my mind and soul
to achieve that greater Vision for humanity
I am ready to serve.
Please help me to be ready to serve forever...

Whisper from nature

A soft whisper from nature has entered my breath
I swallowed and inhaled it to my lungs' deepest depth
and now it is tickling my heart and my mind
it keeps humming a song of love and being kind

Whenever I feel lazy to give help to a friend,
it will make me reach out anyhow a loving hand.
The small voice gives me peace and harmony;
it awakens a sense to experience the beauty of reality

It encourages me to stop and throw out all my greed
It reminds me that grace and love is a much bigger need.
Dear small whisper of nature, please do not leave me
I cherish you so much, feel welcome to stay eternally

Caregiver burn-out

In a few weeks time I have to give a talk on prevention of caregiver burn out in a palliative care situation. I am not an expert in this but I have had a few ideas about what I may incorporate in the talk.

1. My experience with my dad
When my dad got demented, a nurse came everyday for his bath.
I am living in Malaysia while my dad was staying in Belgium
When he got worse, I went quite often on a 10 day visit to Belgium
just to be with him. I was for these 10 day with him for 24h.
I cherish the moments I spent with him during these days,
but they were not easy days. I had to face the regression he had undergone
since my last visit. I had to deal with his deterioration in memory,
his deterioration in behaviour.
When I was there, the nurse who came every day for his bath, was not asking
me to take over the task of bathing him while I was there. She still came.
I was so grateful for that. To bathe your father, to wash his private parts,
is a stress, it is something extra burdensome, something that would have made the visit
harder still.
Surely it is good to involve the family in the care of the patient, but if on and off,
you can go just that extra time and alleviate the family of cleaning the wound for that
one day, it may mean a lot to them, it may mean a lot in terms of prevention of burn out.
What was more, is that the nurse did it in such a great way.

He did not like his daily shower, but the nurse knew him so well and was
so friendly and optimistic with him that she was capable of doing away with his resistance.
When she came in the morning she brought so much energy with her, that the house was feeling different after her visit.

2. Listening
Sometimes all a patient or a caregiver needs is to share some of the problems with someone they can trust. Making some time to ask open ended questions and truly listen, can make an almost miraculous difference for the one that is listened to.

Or just being with them in silence. No need to talk all the time.

3. Asking for strength.
When I start my rounds, I tend to ask some strength from our Creator.
This strength is always in the air surrounding us.
We just have to open ourselves up to it.

A sniff of breezy cool, I’m breathing in;        

Soft rays of morning sun on my skin              

A healing wave of love flows over me           

A small prayer out in all sincerity                    

I am not asking for things I miss                      

I only pray for peace and bliss                          

Because inside there is this certainty              

That our Creator knows what is best for me.

The Universe’s abundance knows my need 

Living a life of purpose, pure and sweet.     

No more anger, just tuning into the energy

That fills my soul with love and creativity.

Poetry

When I was a teenager, in my late teens, I was writing already some poetry.
I tried to rhyme and as you go along with this habit, you tend to become a bit better at it.
But somehow along the way, the poetry bug did not last into my thirties.
At the time I had started to write poems, I thought whatever I wrote was sounding so much like nursery rhymes rather than high elevated level poetry. I was shy about and never published what I wrote then. They were written in Flemish (Dutch), my mother tongue.

At that time, it was fashionable for poetry to be like a soup of words, nice words, around a theme, but very hard to understand or even guess what was meant by it all. I have read so many award winning poems and all too often the message got really lost in the style and even though there was some sensual pleasure in reading the words, there was no clear understood message, no spiritual pleasure in reading the poetry.

When I read the essay of RW Emerson, titled the poet, I gained some insight that not all poetry had to be a hard to understand soup of words. He wrote: "The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet." and "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. 12 The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet."

When in 2010 I fractured a vertebra and was bed-bound for 3 months, I was listening to audio-books and one of them quoted a poem of William Blake. I remember I was in my garden when I found the website that allowed anyone to post poems. I thought back about my teenage years and for the first time, I tried to write a poem in English, Little Purple Flower.

I still was quite unsure and used a poet name or pen name, Aufie Zophy.
The response to this poem on PoemHunter has been quite encouraging.
As I was more and more into poetry and read so many poems, I became more
confident.

Now I know my small pieces of writing, my small verses are worth to be called poems. 

Every time I put out a poem, I want it to be read.
I want to share some experiences, some insights, some little ideas in my poems and always hope that it will reach a large audience. Today I am very grateful for my capability of writing and for the readers who have read some of my work.

I have selected my most cherished poems and put them on a blog, while still  all or almost all my poems are listed on PoemHunter .

This is like a long invitation for you to visit my blog with poems and if you want, leave here and there a comment. I will be grateful for it and I hope you get something out of it: a bit of joy, a grain of inspiration, or just a tiny bead of love...

Sprinkles from nature

 Sprinkle 1
An almost true story

A cheeky little cloud
kissed secretly
a tree in my garden

I had seen it

Soon the evening sun
gave it smilingly
a wonderful orange blush

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sprinkle 2
Lying on my back 

When I lie on my back in a lazy chair

below the branches of casuarina in the air

and the bouquet of leaves on top a coconut tree,

I refuse to close my eyes,

‘cause the enticing blue skies

with single white clouds passing by

are playing a supernatural game with the greenery.

All these behaviours

Of all these behaviors that I detest,
there are so many that I have performed myself.

I love to be kind.
I love to be nice
But we do not all the time manage to live up to our ideals.

I love to be fair
I love to be just
But we o not all the time manage to live up to our ideals

I sometimes don't understand, how I can lose my temper
when the things that happened were in retrospect not that bad.
I sometimes don't understand why I chose to behave in such
or another not so good way.
But sometimes I do not manage to live my ideals,
Sometimes we lose it.

I guess, the times we mess up things, are like little lessons,
little lessons we learn, not to judge others too severely if they mess up.
Surely some people mess up more than others,
but still, if we have made similar mistakes ourselves,
we manage to make a milder judgement.

We are imperfect, each in our own way.
I can accept myself with all my shortcomings
and I think these shortcomings help me to accept
the shortcomings of others too.

Let us choose tolerance, acceptance, peace, love and kindness.
On and off we may not succeed and be nasty ourselves too,
but we can exercise kindness like we exercise our muscles,
the more we use it, the stronger it becomes

All the behaviours, I like,
I pray for the strength to practice them
All the behaviours I detest,
I pray for the strength to avoid them in myself
I pray for the strength to understand them when I see them in others.

Flowers on net

If you are sitting in a hotel room
and the day has been one of meetings
taxi drives and concrete meals
the chance is that you have not seen
a flower today

you may have passed by some flowers
but did not notice the exquisite beauty.

I wrote the above two paragraphs using the pronoun, you,
but actually it is more about my day today.
For awhile I felt stupid about it,
about having a day without beauty
while there are so many flowers in the world.

Then I turned on the internet and went to google groups
google communities, collections, other social media
with the word flower in it
and I made some time to observe, to truly look
at some wonderful pictures of flowers.
There were single flowers, groups of flowers
bouquets, fields of flowers, ...

I turned on the music, a Tibetan meditation music, and kept looking
at pictures of flowers, from wonderful souls who had taken pics of them
and were so generous to share them for free on the internet.

Somehow it made me feel good
It brought some peace to my mind
some love to my heart
some serenity to my soul.


 -------------------------------------------

For each simple and random kind act

A small flower grows in my soul,

For each beautiful flower observed

A random kind act grows in my heart