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The Garden

This morning I woke up dreaming of a garden. The dream unfolded calm and fluid. Shafts of milky sunlight illuminated flowers blowing in a light breeze, and in the dream, I knew it was the end of summer. I felt every petal and blade of grass intimately, the sounds of life around me, heightened. Behind me, stood my grandmother, her head bent modestly, an errant lock of  hair caressing her right eye as always, the faint smell of lilacs and egg white on her warm, white skin. In the dream, she explains to me how the red poppies grow and then, she points to the yarrow  growing around the garden and that it is known for it's healing qualities. Her words are rhythm only, like listening to a babbling brook of water gliding over stone. I understand everything and nothing at the same time.

Why is my beloved grandmother here, on this day of remembrance? On this day when I am in a space where I find myself  wishing to move on.  Yes, I will gladly say a prayer for the dead -  but then let me go, let's all go -  further than that one place of sorrow and shock.

She waits patiently, forming words with her eyes. She wants me to unlock the secret of the garden. 

How?

Grandmother was a witchy woman (she is crossing herself now, appalled that I would use this word to describe her) and she knew her herbs, the folklore wisdom of old Bosnia, deep inside her, even though she would not have admitted to it. Bosnia. The place, like other places, carries the shame of war memories whenever mentioned aloud. My Baka, felt this shame, more than most.

I go deeper into my dream, to look for meaning.  I want to know why she is whispering to me in my sleep about Poppies, which I don't remember her liking, indeed I don't remember any growing in the fields surrounding us when I was a little girl.  The Yarrow, though, grew abundantly and she never failed to point it out it better qualities.

Achillea Millefolium - the Yarrow. She would bring back bunches of it and spread it on newspaper on the kitchen table to dry along with other roots and stalks from her daily walks. From the dried pieces, she would make tinctures and pomades, wraps and powders. Tiny little pieces of white paper with abbreviated names indicating prescription. These were written in German but with Serbo Croatian accents over 'sh' and 'ch' sounds, as she was only patient with some things and not with others - so never bothered to perfect her Deutsch.

When we had bruises, stomach ache, head pain, cuts and fever she would rub and knead and administer with damp cloths or tiny droppers her magic potions and heal us whole. And so, a whole brood of us grew up with witchy blessings on our heads, crosses around our necks and herb tinctures mixed in our blood.

Here is a story.....As a young man, Achilles the famous soldier/hero of ancient times was schooled by Chiron the Centaur.  Chiron was versed in medicine and the healing arts and supposedly passed his powerful knowledge on to Achilles. In his turn, Achilles the leader/prince taught his troops to use yarrow flower to stop the bleeding and hemorrhaging of wounds received during their epic battles. Hence the Latin name for Yarrow: Achillea.

Soldiers, Hero's, War, Magic, Wisdom. There. I see a pattern emerging from the dream....

Poppies too, I discovered,  live deep in our psyche as a symbol of sacrifice and memory. Somewhere there is a poem about fallen soldiers and poppies that spring up around their unmarked graves. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead and by the Christians as a symbol of resurrection.

Red, Christ, Blood, Dreams and Memories, Acceptance, maybe 

I'm not sure what the dream aims to show me. Today is a ritual of remembering for many, though it is not about mourning soldiers or wise men or herbologist Centaurs, I know. 

It is about remembering ordinary citizens on that day, the 11th of September, going about their business of life one minute and then dead the next.

 I think about them in the city and the skies and at the same time, I think about all the others too -  the people caught in between ideologies and fantasies, dreams and delusions. I think about soldiers on foreign soil and how unbelievable that is, to me. 

 Ordinary people going about their business of life one minute and then dead the next.

What were the words she said that would unlock the meaning of the dream, unlock the meaning of the jumble that is life and death, war and peace, forgiveness and acceptance? I will never know. 

Mary Day Celebrations

Mary Day Celebration Candle

Every year some women friends and I celebrate the Goddess with in us on the 15th of August. It is the Catholic holiday set to commemorate the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of Jesus as she is whisked into the Heavens. I pick this day not because I am particularly religious but because it reminds me of my childhood. When I was a child, living in Bavaria, in southern Germany, Maria Himmelfahrt  was a really big deal. As I have written in other posts on similar topic, on that day of celebration, the whole town comes out, children in traditional costume and crowns of flowers on their heads.  The statue of Mary is carried through town from the Abbey to the main church. It is a beautiful spectacle and I always see it first and foremost within that childlike vision.

I especially always loved the way kids adorned their favorite cows with wreathes of herbs and flowers accenting their beautiful long eyelashes and luminescent big pink noses, gentle nature.

Cow & Friend

In the last 10 years it's been a way  to connect with women friends that are dear, share stories - some of them about being women, some of them childhood memories, others are myths we know or half know and want to explore.

Our Lisa is the story teller and fascinates us with her memory of women stories, both learned and intuitive.

We read our coffee cups and have  wine, let our daughters join us in the lighting of the candles and writing of secret messages on little scraps of delicate paper that we then send up in smoke to the sky, hoping that our daughters too will find some fascination in the mysteries and bounty associated with the Mother.

Adornments

Some pieces I have been working on that you can find on my Pinterest for now until I get the new website up

Once, in Zepa

                                  "...when Srebrenica fell, that automatically meant that Zepa would fall,” Palic said.
                                                                      Death of a community, the fall of Zepa

 The Serb army had just finished up their most recent killing spree in Srebrenica, as thousands - men, women, children, families and elders were fleeing for their lives from one village to another hoping to spare themselves the same fate. In a small village outside of the UN protected 'safe haven' of Srebrenica, some villagers took the road that led into  the town of Žepa.  There they were quickly repelled by the oncoming column of Serb soldiers entering the village from the other side. At the entrance to Žepa, in obvious danger the refugees fled to the hills,  into the forest,  to save themselves. 

Caught a short time after, the women and children were  put on buses and dropped off at the front lines. The survivors found their way to refugee camps in Bosnian held territory at Zenica. 

The men and older boys were taken prisoner and brought to concentration camps in Serbia. July 25th, 1995.

Some survived and were liberated from those camps by the Red Cross, who then gave them safe passage as refugees to host countries around the world. In Denver, eight months after Dayton was signed, I was visiting one of the refugee ghetto's on Beeler Street and bore witness to stories of horror and pain. The stories, whispered in long sentences between terse puffs of cigarettes in broken English and halting Bosnian affected me deeply and I would never forget them. 

In remembrance of friends and family now gone, and with respect to the Ramic family along with thousands of other people, like my parents and also my dearest grandparents who repatriated to countries, not their own and lived to bear witness. Lived to eventually reemerge victorious, if broken-hearted and create a new life for themselves and their families.  
Conquerors over death and destruction. Refugees. Survivors. 

Never Forget. 

Peace. 


"As in Srebrenica, Serb nationalist leaders offered to expel Muslim women and children from Zepa, but detain the men as "prisoners."Serb forces have blocked all attempts for aid workers to visit the Srebrenica men supposedly taken prisoner. 
  Serbs overran Zepa a few days after an emergency international conference called after Srebrenica was seized. The conference issued a warning to Serb nationalists that they faced serious consequences if they attacked the third "protected zone" of Gorazde. However, no mention was made of Zepa; the international community decided to write off the town -- and its 16,000 inhabitants -- as lost,despite a UN Security Council vote pledging to protect it. Gorazde is the sole remaining Bosnian enclave between the Serbian border and Sarajevo."

originally posted on SilvanaMondo 7/26/12

On Bajram & Kismet

Summer 

I have a friend. She is like my sister. Our grandfather's were very good friends too. They were born in the beginning of the 1900's in wild Bosnia, under Austro-Hungarian rulers and both their fathers owned large tracts of land. They were in business with the mills. Often, they worked together in the wild forests. They had different backgrounds but respected each other and by extension, each other's culture. Their friendship endured the two Great Wars and more. Hadji made his pilgrimage to Mecca, hence his name, and my grandfather, who was forced to leave Bosnia during the big war, ended up with his family, in Germany.

The summer of 1990 I went on my first visit to Bosnia with my grandparents. They came down every two years to take the baths, at the hot springs somewhere in Croatia and then went to their ancestral home in Central Bosnia. On this trip, I met Hadji, my grandfather's childhood friend, about whom I had often heard stories throughout the years.  I also met his granddaughter, Suada and as it was, we got on right away. She was the youngest of five sisters and had a fashionable 90's hairstyle though like her older sisters, wore the traditional dimije of the countryside.

She and her sisters were shy with the exception of  the oldest one, who had the most experience.  Smoking cigarettes like they were going out of style, she laughed and told jokes and pressed me on every subject; married or not, kids, school - the whole litany.  The sisters had clear, happy eyes the color of sky light.  I could see they treated my grandparents like royalty throughout our visit.  Given the history the two old men shared and the sacredness of Bosnian hospitality this was natural. Everything became even more special because it was also the first day of Bajram.

My grandparents and I left for Germany the next day and Suada and I promised to keep up our friendship. Unfortunately, not soon after that summer, in the spring of '92,  the dark period came to Bosnia and we lost all communication. There was terrible fighting, all around my family's town too. We had no news for almost a year.

The rest are stories everyone knows.  Soon it will be the anniversary of the concentrated horror that happened all over Bosnia; Omarska, Srebrenica, too many others.

No one knew anything about the old man or the grand daughters. Relatives living in Bosnia said things were different 'than before'. It was fierce for those who lived through the war. Regardless of which 'side', the lines were drawn. I lived in America, it seemed far away.

After Dayton, I asked about visiting our friends.

 I went on a trip to see my grandparents in Munich and slipped into Bosnia via Zagreb.  It was the longest and saddest bus ride of my life. I was going to Sarajevo, hoping to film and get some documentation for my book.  I would visit the family in Central Bosnia on the way there.  It was  also important to me, to find out what happened to my friend Suada, Hadji's granddaughter.  When I asked about her, everyone had tense, worried faces, their heads shaking.

Don't look for her. We haven't seen them in years. No one knows if they are alive. You don't know if there are mines on the road.  You won't be welcomed. We had a war. It's too early. You don't understand.

I understood. The fighting and upheaval that had just ended a short two years before was still a terrifying ball of pain in everyone's stomach.

When I arrived at the bus station in Vitez, my gentle cousin told me to ask the unprofor soldiers or the police for information if I wanted to know. I naturally shrugged this suggestion off.

Arriving at the front gate of my grandmother's old house, from the road that leads into Sarajevo, I was greeted by my Bosnian family. The neighbors were hanging out of their windows, peering from behind doors.  Off to the side by the shed there were three people delivering wood ordered for the coming winter.

After a decent time interval I began asking about Suada, trying to find someone who would give me information.

To no avail.  I realized I was being annoying. And rude. We sat drinking coffee and rakija, exchanging pleasantries. I asked again.

Imperceptibly, a space opened and though nothing out of the ordinary happened to indicate a change, suddenly, she was right there.

  My friend who I had been looking for all those years, was part of the crew delivering wood to my Auntie's house.

Quiet, as always, going about her business with the wood, Suada spoke up only after she heard me asking about her over and over again. As we hugged and laughed, time was suspended. It was magical and surreal, not to be questioned.

We had called each other through the unseen and been brought together again.

It could not have been any other moment but that one.

Sudbina, as my grandfather would say. Kismet.

August, 1997. Central Bosnia Hercegovina
originally posted 1/16/13

Didn't I see you in Sarajevo?

Be the Change

A big protest was called for in Sarajevo, Bosnia on the 1st day of July. I got this information from Twitter and Facebook. Even after three weeks, most mainstream media hadn't picked up the story yet and best bets to find information were on Twitter. The protest seems to have developed organically from an original gathering on June 5th regarding a lag in the issuance of identification, or pin numbers. Temporarily, this group of baby-carriage toting mothers (and eventually other hundreds of ordinary but supportive citizens)surrounded the Parliament, complete with Parliamentarians inside and pushed their weight around a bit. They were angry, frustrated, fed up. Justifiably so, considering that Bosnians are treated like shit, very obviously taking the back seat to the Croatians, the Serbs and often, even the hate mongering rattlers in the neighboring canton, Republika Srpska who are routinely invited to the party, as if nothing had gone on, those long, 22 years ago.

Eyeing a great opportunity is not enough, action has to be taken. So it was that someone, somewhere convened under the #JMBG hashtag, promoted it through Social Media, got a few more thousand people excited, called for a non violent /’let’s show them who we are’ mash up and soon, a revolt, of sorts, was born. Similar to Bulgaria,Turkey and Brazil, there was a collective consciousness that moved people into the streets. It is not clear if there there is anyone person or tight group guiding anything at this stage of Bosnia’s nascent activism. No one at least, who was willing come out to stake a claim or take the lead at yesterday’s protests.

Unlike Bulgaria, where citizens are just not giving it up, the ‘official’ day of civil disobedience scheduled for yesterday in Sarajevo was a bit of a flop. Someone lamented on Twitter that, no real goal was attained, a golden moment possibly wasted.

Truth. There were the 15 people in front of the UN HQ in New York, holding up signs in solidarity which was posted online. Then, of course, the adorable underwater divers carrying JMBG cards, the video of the lone plane that dropped a case load of flyers onto the city, letting people know to ‘come on down’!, the hundreds of well wishers from St. Louis to Korea who posted on FB and more. There was support.

But.

Where was everybody else?

The original ‘up to ten thousand’ from the 11th of June?

The famous Sarajilje….. We saw you there, right?

Call me a crazy romantic. I believe in you. Make it happen Bosnia.