What can I learn from the loss of my mother?

This picture was before her surgery.

by Somaly
Namaste wonderful souls and dear readers, 

After I graduated from my study, we brought flight on August 2024. We visited them on 17 October 2024. I had two major health appointments between August to October 2024. I only asked my work leaved as my planned.

My mother had type 2 diabetes. she was careful on her diets and took her medication regularly. unfortunately, she got sick on early September 2024.  She got a bumps on the heel of her foot. she visited doctors, took blood test, and ultrasound on our local clinics. They said " Everything is okay".  She got some lumps in her head, one side her leg and hip. It was emergency. My father and siblings send her to some big public hospitals and private clinic. The doctors took blood tests and ultrasound. the private clinic send my mother to one of big Cambodia public hospitals. then She got head surgery " remove lump on her head without doing biopsy". The doctor send my mother home, so she had to waiting results. The doctor prescribed her some medication. It took three weeks to get results. 

I did not realised " my mother illness was serious and critical situation" as I live oversea. I only see her through video callings. I only hope that I could brought her to other hospital. she will be okay.

When I arrived to my hometown, she was in critical condition. I brought her to the same hospital as they already had her file. She spend one day in emergency unite and three day in ICU emergency. Doctors could not help her. She passed on 22/10/24. It was the most difficult moment. I had spent the last few days with my beloved mother. She was my everything and most care person in my life. She loved me unconditionally. I always remember her in my heart. I could not change the outcomes. I learned to accepted the facts and have been dealing with grief, anger, and guilty.  

When I arrived in Australia, and I could not feel the same.  I managed to go work, but I only told some co-workers about my mother's death because I did not want cried at my workplace. I lost my trust with some Cambodia health hospitals and doctors since my mother's death. I thought that if I brought my mother to Thailand or Vietnam hospital sooner, my mother might be stay with us little longer.I felt very lost and blame myself.

I felt safe to cried at home. I cried every-time that I am thinking about my mother.  I could not find the word to describing the grief process from one person to others. My husband sister passed away on 14 November 2024.  I never meet her, but I felt sad and worried about my husband who could not meet and joined his sister funeral. for my experiences, I feel empty and confused with suddenly death events. I felt very tired, intense, sore some part of my body, and lost motivation from October until Early December. I avoided to join party and any happy events. I did isolated myself from my daily round and creative activities. I took time to relaxing, allowed myself to do nothing, and recognised the feelings.

I felt little better since 15/12/24. I started accepting the facts and forgive myself. I talked with my father, siblings, and friends. I returned to doing my garden. I felt release and relaxing after my yoga and acupuncture sessions. I sometimes cried because I miss my mother and worried about my father's health as well. I remember about her beautiful smile, beautiful heart, kind, hard working, strong wills, responsible, and selfless person. I felt blessed to be her daughter. " thank you for being my mother." It was hard without you, but I know you always in my heart and memories. May her rest in peace! I love you.

What can I learn from the loss of my mother?

First,  I learn that healing is from within. I believed that I could deal with my emotions. Until I willing to tried the body psychotherapy for the first time. I learned and understand " how to healing my body, mind, and spirit? and how to released the energy blocked and break the old pattern in my life?". I believe that healing was within my body, mind, and spirit. I need to understand the root cause and be honest with my feelings and body needs. 

Second, I learn that my emotions and mind could created illness without me realise it. I used to compress my feelings, put others' needs above my own needs, and avoid the complex with others. Now I embrace my own powers, needs, and learn to express my voices.

Finally, I learned to enjoyed my time, listening to my body and feelings, forgive myself for making the wrong choices and bad decisions, let's my flow with universe, and let others to be free for who they are.

 Thank you for your previous times to reading and support our writing. 

🌟Thank you for being part of our community. 

🌟 Thank you for your likes, shares, comments, and follows. 

🌟If you feel it might be not resonate and align with your life, please leave my stories and experiences behind. Thank you.

🌟Send a lot of love, hugs, peace, miracles, and blessings to you and your family.

Copyright by So and Jo Stories:

 ©2024 by So and Jo Stories. All right are reserved

Egyptology: Artisans Lecture with Dr. Serena Love

 by: Icie

Brisbane has some interesting stuff in its museums. Recently, the Dutch Museum of National Antiquities (Rijksmueum van Oudheden) partnered with Queensland Museum Kurilpa to showcase Ancient Egyptian Artifacts from Pre-History to the Roman Period. The exhibit is open up to the 17th of August and oh holy hell, I wanted to go so bad!

A ticket costs $30 per person to see the exhibit. I checked the website to see if there were any talks and yes, there were. For 4 Saturdays from the 2nd to the 23rd. I missed the one that was done in the second which was about the mummification and funerary practices, so I booked one for the 9th which was about artisans and brickmakers. Perfect! I learned about some ancient Egyptian art during my art history semester and I wanted to enrich myself with more knowledge. I sent $15 for the lecture (different from the collection ticket) and listened to how ancient artisans did their trade through a PowerPoint presentation while Dr. Serena Love explained each picture, slide, and her own experiences in encountering them.

Please Checked more interesting Pictures in our Tumblr Account: "https://www.tumblr.com/blog/yinandyanglifestyle"

The lecture started at 10:30am and lasted for an hour. I saw people of all ages come to see what's up. Some of them brought their laptops, the others brought pens and paper, others like lazy little me, just brought an old phone.

Dr. Love started the lecture about The Satire of the Trades from the Ancient Egyptian scribe Kheti to his son Pepi. Kheti just wanted his son to follow his footsteps as a scribe, so he described how the laborers and other artisans and tradesmen smelled like fish excrement, always tired, and suffered from violent beatings. But if you're a scribe, you'll be fine because "there is no scribe lacking sustenance". I guess secretaries were well fed at the time.

She started with the coppersmith, what their life was like and how important the whole copper industry was to their civilization. She went onto detail bout copper is pretty much what they used to do a lot of labour from stone cutting (cutting off limestone) to making mirrors. And as people know, that metal is soft. The copper tools get blunt easily so the coppersmiths work tirelessly day and night for centuries before moving onto bronze. Then she showed some pictures of artifacts that were also in the exhibit of some copper and bronze artifacts and their uses.

Did they seriously use copper chisels and shit to cut off granite?!!! Egyptologists think so. They recreated the technique using a copper tool and a small bit of limestone to see if it could be done. Yes. It could. It would take about 20 strikes for a copper tool to cut a chunk of limestone. Imagine doing that to make the pyramids. You will needs millions of slaves to cut all of those limestone with subpar tools. The scale of it was astounding if you think about it. Poor slaves.

The copper industry was also closely related to Egyptian faience. Faience was also related to jewelry making as it was an early attempt to imitate stones, particularly the Lapis Lazuli.

Dr. Love talked about the famous hippo statue "William", how it was so cute and that they all had copies of it as paperweights in their office.

www.metmuseum.org

We moved on to the bricklayer. Our boy Kheti also bashed the bricklayers to Pepi. Don't do it son, they work naked, they knead shit and they only wash once a day. To put it into perspective, clothes were expensive in Ancient Egypt and since the brickmakers put straw and dung in the clay they make. It makes sense, you have something expensive so you gotta protect it. Off with the clothes! Practicality is king.

Dr. Love didn't have any brick artifacts, so she showed us some pictures of the Pyramid of Amenemhat III.

The vintner was next. Kheti told his son to not make wine because they make deliveries and they die on the way more often than any profession. There were no artifacts of these as well, but Dr. Love told us about some grapes that have existed for thousands of years and there's wine from it. yeah right, she didn't want to believe it so she texted a colleague to confirm it and colleague said "yeah that's true". And now she has a bottle of it. She then talked about how some hieratic script came to life and that is because they had to label wine. Ooh... (checks hieratic) Vintage 4200 BC, delicious.

Kheti hated the weavers too. He told his son don't become one, it's a woman's job. They are not allowed to leave the weaver's den and if they want to go out to see sunlight, they have to bribe the guards with food. Going back to the brickmaker, we learned that ancient clothes were expensive and you are rich if you have full body and translucent clothing. The weavers mostly worked with linen and there were weaving tools and techniques that are still used today.

They were not restricted to making clothes. Linen was also used to make cartonnage which is linen or papyrus strips stuck together with plaster or resin, kind of like an old timey papier mache. As we know, this is utterly important.

Here's what inside a cartonnage looks like.

Leathermakers were also dissed. Kheti said the were gross and they chewed their material.

What?Can you imagine chewing on leather day in and out to create sandals? My jaw hurts just thinking about it.

egypt-museum.com

But the leatherworkers came up with this beauty: King Tut's infamous sandals. There were figures there that represented his enemies so King Tut can symbolically step on them every day. I aspire to be that level of petty.

Then there is the scribe. So Kheti told Pepi, "I have placed you on the path of God... Honor your father and mother who have placed you on the path of the living." In short, since time immemorial, parents have pushed their kids to follow in their footsteps. Dr. Serena Love explained that being a scribe in ancient times was a trade that was passed down through scribe families and that only about 5% of the population were functionally literate.

There were scribes who were called copyists. They only copied what they saw and was given to them by the functional literates. Dr. Love also talked about the two types of writing the Ancient Egyptians had: hieroglyphics and hieratic. Hieroglyphics were used for religious text and hieratic was used for everyday things. The process of making the papyrus was also shown with some artifacts to show us what they look like. Unfortunately, because of time, decay, and the material itself, some papyrus writings have been destroyed, broken, are in bits but some of them were also well preserved because of the arid conditions in the desert.

Papyrus artworks are still available today with current artists making their works based on ancient artworks.

What Kheti didn't talk about was glassmaking. This was after his time and according to Dr. Love, the glassmaking industry virtually appeared overnight in Ancient Egypt because of the artisans who were captured by Thutmose II. The artifacts she showed us looked so big in the presentation, like your average vase big, but in actuality they were so small. They looked like they can only hold about 15ml of perfume. The way that they did it in ancient times with subpar tools is again, amazing, but I pity the poor artisans and their hard labor.

Because of the love that was given to making glass, it was considered as an artificial semi-precious stone and were given as presents by the rich to the rich. Interesting to note is the patterns on the glass which were made by dragging a thin stick on bands of color vertically up or down in an alternating pattern, a technique that chocolatiers still use today.

It has enriched my knowledge of what I know about Ancient Egyptian artisans from my art history class. My old college class focused on the patterns, their significance, the types of furniture and the rooms that can be found in a theoretical Egyptian palace. We did not know anything about artisans and what their life was like. The lecture definitely put things into perspective and I learned to empathise with the ancient artisans. I know how hard traditional art can be while using subpar tools as a challenge. It must have been so terrible doing those grand things every day and get beaten for it if the quality of your work was not up to standards.

At the end of the lecture, I was able to learn 2 old timey words: "ba" meaning soul and "ka" meaning spirit. I also became familiar with the hieroglyph for scribe.

🌟 Thank you for your previous times to reading and support our writing. 

🌟Thank you for being part of our community. 

🌟 Thank you for your likes, shares, comments, and follows. 

🌟If you feel it might be not resonate and align with your life, please leave my stories and experiences behind. Thank you.

🌟Send a lot of love, hugs, peace, miracles, and blessings to you and your family.

Copyright by So and Jo Stories:

 ©2024 by So and Jo Stories. All right are reserved

Sydney is GOTH!

 Especially the buildings.

by: Icie

Namaste wonderful souls and dear readers, 

There were may wonderful things about Sydney that I liked when I visited there for 3 days. And boy, do I love that city! It truly is a global city worth going to and I love how it has embraced art.

Oh yes, I will still talk about art, but this time it's going to be about the living, highly functional art, which is called architecture. Specifically, about the gorgeous 100-200 year old buildings in Sydney.

We begin on one cold day as my partner and I walked down Hyde Park to reach AGNSW. I saw something grand that caught my eye. I can spot a Gothic tower anywhere and that right there are gothic cathedral-like twin spires trying to reach the sky.

AND IT'S GOLD. 

Please Checked more interesting Pictures in our Tumblr Account: "https://www.tumblr.com/blog/yinandyanglifestyle"

I told my partner, "let's take a look at that cathedral for a spur of the moment side-quest before heading to AGNSW". He agreed and lo and behold: St. Mary's Cathedral.

Great! it was 8:30 AM on a Saturday, meaning there's no church service. So we went close to the steps and saw other tourists taking pictures of this beauty that was made by inmates back in the 1800s. I couldn't resist taking pictures! I love the Gothic style as much as I love Art Nouveau. The people who created this marvel didn't skip on the details. There was beauty in the fences, the doors, the columns, and the windows.It was so amazingly beautiful.

The best part of this whole cathedral is, we could go inside to take pictures!

It was far more golden inside the building than it was outside.

Later in the day, I found another Gothic offshoot building. When I spotted the Registrar General's Building, I hoped that there would be more Gothic beauties around the city.

Surprise!

The hotel we stayed at was a quirky Federation Gothic building peppered with Art Deco and 1980's elements making it an eclectic haven for people who looked for something out of the ordinary. It was next to a small theatre that showed kitsch things as well, but damn, were they beautiful! We definitely enjoyed our stay. Alright, I wanna move to Sydney now just because of the buildings. And that was just day 1 of our trip.

On the last day of our trip, I saw more Gothic inspired buildings. I wondered why that was the case? I looked up the time when Sydney was founded and I connected the dots to my Art History lessons.

Ah.

Yep.

Victorian People loved reviving old styles and anything Gothic. Their love moved from England to Australia because it was the style of the time mostly because the old timey governor Lachlan Macquarie who, as a Victorian Scot, loved Gothic stuff. But this type of architecture in Australia had some twists. Australian Gothic is so gold and compact, not as tall as the ones in Europe (I assume. Feel free to correct me), a little simpler, and somewhat lighter.

Then I started seeing those small Gothic monuments and details everywhere.

I didn't complain. I love this style! I wanna move to Sydney and see more Gothic Revival buildings every day. Gosh, Brisbane only wishes we had buildings like these.

As per Somaly,

🌟 Thank you for your time to read and support our writing. 

🌟Thank you for being part of our community. 

🌟 Thank you for your likes, shares, comments, and follows.  

🌟Send a lot of love, hugs, peace, miracles, and blessings to you and your family.