Good things are often said to come in small packages. Standing at 4’ 11” this would seem an appropriate expression for my grandmother, and, if a homeopathic remedy is a disease distilled to a level of perfection in order to aid and heal others then perhaps this could also serve as a suitable analogy. A sage, a guru, to me she was someone who, despite her size was one to look up to. Never really able to call her grandma I used to refer to her simply as ‘Ma’; this maybe explained by her youthful demeanour and that to me from an early age it was as though she had skipped a generation.
Far from effete or demur she was one to dig deep and get her hands dirty. From tending a three-acre garden and orchard with care to gutting freshly caught fish from her fishing boat this was a woman who would absorb and indulge in all that life had to offer. The end of a day would often be sounded with her trumping in fanfare fashion and saying with ease as natural as the action itself, ‘better out than in!’
Ma was one to fly in the face of fear, a thrill seeking individual who constantly wanted to take her living to fresh heights. At the age of 71 she flew a light aircraft under instruction and was quite put out when the tutor prevented her from ‘looping the loop’. When stormy seas deterred the local fisherman from spending a day at sea she would venture out, and, elevated to windscreen height with the aid of three or four cushions she would throw her Rover 100 around the bends in the way rock stars of that time would drive their Bentley’s. She won the respect and admiration of many and encouraged me throughout to live a life extraordinary and without regret.
From how I have described my grandmother one maybe led towards picturing her as someone seeking a life outside her and devoid of contemplation. However her self-fulfilment also came from stilling the mind and finding a peace within nature and her universal forces. It was in her sixties that she became a teacher of BKS Iyengar yoga and stilled the mind to such a degree to allow her to take several feet of linseed cloth down her digestive tract as a form of internal cleansing. Tai Chi, shiatsu, Alexander Technique and reflexology were all interests of hers at a time when they lay alien to the majority of Westerners. Fascinated with her mystic nature I would lie on the floor as she would suspend a pendant in dousing fashion above my chakras and calculate my positive and negative energy.
Thanks to my grandmother I came to walk what Buddhists describe as ‘The Middle Way’, the precipice that falls between self-indulgence and sensory pleasure and that of wisdom and self-cultivation.
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