Denying the Tibetan people to have their children learn their own language in school translates into despair. Humans are defined through their use of language. Language is the keeper of culture memory as well as the tool to express individual, social and political identity. To deny a people to master their own language means to eradicate their true existence.This is especially true when their identity is based on an ancient religious narrative and practice. Linguistic concepts are corresponding to unique cultural concepts. Erasing the Tibetan language from the official education of Tibetan Children is a conscious act of aggression against the Tibetan people. I support the Dalai Lama’s appeal to grant Tibetans cultural autonomy within the one state solution.

One especially intriguing aspect about the practice of Yoga is that the realization what practice could mean to a person’s life can become apparent the first time one engages in it – and I think that the main lesson my grandfather tried to bring home to me and that I – eventually – have taken to heart is that yoga is not necessarily a journey of linear progression from beginner to advanced. We are never beginners or advanced in the skill of living, every day requires renewed humility, gentleness and compassion. Who says we can not learn from a newborn or the very feeble?

Do not concern yourself….

I started practicing yoga ever so many years ago as a four year old. It was my grandfather who taught me the yoga skills he considered basic: the handstand, the plow, the lotus and the sun prayer. It has been a long journey since then, I actually wrote a novel about both my grandfather and his practice of yoga and what it represented for both of us. Far from resolving all conflict yoga lead me deeper into the heart of it – which by now I am sure is the only way to eventually find a way through. Yoga for me has been a source of insight as much as of pain and doubt and my relationship to yoga is still unresolved many years after my grandfather’s passing. Recently I have discontinued the practice of the plow because of alarming medical reports about the pose. I am however still intrigued by the practice after all these years and about the fact that you never “get it right”, you just continue your path stubbornly, gently, fiercely – depending on your own temperament.

Toulouse.

The fact that it seems a frightening and atrocious trend to single out children as stand-in victims for their parents’ assumed allegiances seems to attract little attention in the majority of the comments to the school shooting in Toulouse I have read this morning. France, Afghanistan, Norway, Palestine, Uganda: Every child is YOUR child – if we forgo this most basic mandate of human decency, we loose our humanity. Children all over the world experience violence, dread and death in the name of incomprehensible adult interests every day. Is this indeed to be our heritage to our children? Just look what kind of world we have created with our hate, intolerance and righteous pursuit of our own interests. If we don’t protect our children, no matter of which descent, then there is no hope.

They did not talk to me, they did not adopt me as their friend and benefactor. And why should they? If I credited them with any humanlike behavior I would have to ask myself indeed why they should decide to become friends with me just because I kept them captive in my world. Where were they meant to be born, I suddenly wondered? Was there a place that would have felt natural for them? I thought about my dreams of the lake. The whisper had started again. Phoebe would have maybe understood their conversation. Maybe it was not her age though, maybe it was because she was not responsible for their situation. Then again, these creatures would not even exist if I had not brought them home and built them a nursery. They would still be but shimmering pearls in a paper envelope. And yet, I asked myself, who would choose non-existence over an existence in the wrong place? Who was to say what the right place was, anyways? Chances are that we are born into a fairly hostile environment. Chances are that conditions for survival right where we are born are not what we would wish them to be. Is it a consolation to have made it into life when life turns out to be such a confined, maybe painful experience? My head was spinning once again. Every human, I could imagine, would defend the narrow space they had carved out simply by coming into life. Most humans probably felt that a fellow human was entitled to circumstances that enabled her to have a basic decent life. But who was to be held responsible to give it to them? These thoughts were entirely too big for a lonely fourteen year old sitting up at night. But for once I just endured them. These thoughts were too big, but I held them in my mind for a while as I was watching the grey light. I think I was growing that night just by enduring the thoughts I was too young to have. The whisper changed as I was watching. If I couldn’t make out words I did feel something like a pattern, a rhythm in the restless sounds. And finally something like a melody emerged, not based on any harmonic scale I knew but somehow comprehensible to my sense of musical logic non-the-less.