It’s Friday and I’m in love…with life, the universe and everything!

Today is my grandmother’s anniversary of her passing. We both have the same birthday. I was 18 years old when she passed away. It was the first time I experienced loss. I am the first of my generation here, my grandmother’s first grandchild. I grew up seeing my grandmother almost all the time. I was very close to her.

My grandmother was mentally ill due to the tragic and unexpected losses of her six newborns and infants. Also being hospitalized for years. Luckily my mother was the first child to live otherwise I would not be here. I always felt a strong connection to my grandmother. She inspired me to write my very first story “The Unlived” when I was a young teenager. A story based on my grandmother’s struggle with her loss and what this meant for the ones that did not have a chance to live.

I realised on the day of my grandmother’s passing, every moment is a gateway to another moment where anything and everything is possible. It was from this moment onwards I began to understand how life is a collection of moments. All connected, intertwined and important in every way and always leading to something more, some small tiny detail making up the big picture.

I learned that it was only through moments in time we create our own stories on Earth. Our memories are defined by moments. I learned how every morrow captures the beauty and ugliness of the world simultaneously. Also how we author our own paths towards a direction of our choosing by allowing ourselves to grow, to make mistakes, to overcome obstacles and to self-discover the wonders of life.

Recently someone dear to me unexpectedly lost someone very dear to her. Loss can come in all forms. We have all struggled with some form of loss. This short precious life is what we make of it…a story we will always keep telling. To live life is to also give meaning of life to the unlived. To know loss is to know sorrow, pain and love. Before our own departure, every passing moment is a chance to change the future, to change how our story will continue on in the hearts and minds of those we leave behind.

The Sun is beaming down through the white clouds on the town, the city of my birth, childhood and first half of my life story.

Being over 15 years away and now being back, I feel like a stranger in my hometown, like a spaceman visiting a familiar world. I also feel like a child rediscovering a very important and unique part of my space-timeline…the very beginning of my journey around the Sun.

Coincidentally today is Pi Day and Albert Einstein’s Birthday. Also today the universe lost a very special cosmic mind, Professor Stephen Hawking. His Birthday is the same day Galileo Galilei passed away. Hawking was an inspiration to many. His contributions to science were magnificent and will continue to be tranforming. His legacy will live on to the ends of space, time and beyond.

For me Hawking was not just one of my childhood heroes, he was also living proof of someone who lived his one brief life being grateful and appreciative for experiencing the cosmos for what it really is. I was 16 years old when I first read Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”. I was already in love with the universe but it was Hawking that made me fall in love with Cosmology. A journey that lead me to study Astrophysics. A journey that will always continue to the stars and be my defining passion to know the cosmos.

Hawking aspired for the theory of everything. His life’s work is a story of hope and wonder. He lived to tell us the greatest story ever told…the story of the universe. Ultimately the story of the universe is the story of all of us on this tiny speck among the stars. Hawking was like a child exploring an enchanted forest, playing in the cosmos, discovering the true magic of all of time and space – science of the universe.

On a side note since it is also Pi Day, in the novel “Contact” written by another one of my childhood heroes, Carl Sagan, who also wrote a heartfelt forward to the first edition of Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, Pi had a very special meaning. *SPOILER* In the novel “Contact”, the transcendental number Pi contained a hidden message in it’s sequence that all of the advanced alien civilizations struggled so far to decipher yet it was a message so distinct it implied the unification of everything and how everything was connected beyond our current understanding…like a theory of everything.

I am grateful to Hawking for everything he was and for everything he did for our understanding of the universe. His dream to understand why the universe exists as it is and why exist at all is also my dream and the dream of everyone who wander in the cosmic playground. Hawking would want us all to celebrate the universe after his passing, to keep looking up at the stars, to venture beyond the spacetime singularity of our minds and unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Rest in peace professor Hawking. You are one with the cosmos now.

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“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
– Stephen Hawking

To self-reflect is to travel through time, to rediscover the connections between points on our timelines. By doing so, we discover something new about ourselves, something unique for this time…our time.

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#starday #sunday

Listening to your inner voice can transport you to worlds on a bridge between dreams and reality. As a storyteller and cosmic wanderer I find myself exploring this bridge and discovering a garden made up of starlight always radiating with awe and inspiration. It is by all definitions, everlasting. My very own personal space-time portal to a multiverse of wonders anytime anywhere.

The bridge is always overlooking the garden. It is a projection of where life takes you at any given instant on your timeline. It is a two way conversation between the mind and heart. Thoughts, dreams and feelings…a continuous cycle that can spiral anytime into chaos shaking the very structure of the bridge. Then find yourself falling and landing somewhere unknown in the garden. But whenever you land you always discover something new.

I’m slowly returning to this blogging experiment while working on readjusting to life in England. Being back to my original home, Nottingham from New York city where I have lived most of my adult life has been far more challenging than I first thought. I have never lived in the “real world” in England since all my real world living has been across the Atlantic.

I feel like a stranger in my own hometown yet I’m rediscovering myself. I’m exploring the garden of cosmic speculation, finding old and new paths to venture. One day soon I will return to the city that never sleeps, my other home, NYC. As I spontaneously write this on a 3 hour coach ride home from London in the rain I remind myself of how life is full of surprises and discoveries. Being in Barcelona for the past few days was not only fun it was also me continuing to rediscovering myself.

Life is a fuzzy canvas until we bring it in focus and reveal the open windows. I believe the only way we bring focus is with love and kindness. As authors of our timelines we have the power to change the course of our histories. For every open window revealed there is a pathway to self-discovery and the discovery of others…on the bridge above your garden of cosmic speculation. And it all begins with listening to your inner voice.