Fear to Flow Friday
We are talking about Fear to Flow today and answering these questions:
How do you move from fear and feeling frozen into flowing with life?
How do you allow life to give you more of what you're wanting?
Watch the video or read the article below to meet my good friend, Baka, and learn her secret to a happy life.
Meet Baka
Ines Borko wanted to be called Baka, which means Grandmother in her native Yugoslavian (now Croatia).
She is deceased now, but she and I spent several years being quite close. She lived in my apartment complex.
Baka loved animals and welcomed my dog, Sophie, and me into her life.
Sophie, who is also deceased, loved Baka. Baka was her best friend. Sophie would walk with me anywhere, as long as we stopped at Baka’s house
Baka had a cat named Fritz and would let Sophie eat Fritz's food. Dogs aren't really supposed to eat cat food, but Sophie did with relish. They loved each other and were best friends.
Baka had a great sense of humor and joie de vivre (joy of living). She told me as a child in Yugoslavia her father left her family, leaving them at the poverty line. She often didn't have enough to eat. She said, “I remember just dancing and singing even when I was feeling hungry.”
She was a joyful person. I think that has a lot to do with how her life turned out. She was a teenager in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. She was conscripted by the Nazis to go work in a gas mask factory in Germany.
She lived there with her best friend in pretty poor living conditions - in a dormitory with bunks close together, holes in the floor, and rats.
They didn't have a lot to eat, but they took care of each other, and they made it through.
In fact, both she and her best friend married Germans. Baka had a baby and was happy in Germany. The war was over, and the Soviets had taken over Yugoslavia.
Baka’s brother was in the resistance there, was arrested, and put into a concentration camp along with Baka’s mother. Baka felt she had to go back to Yugoslavia. She took as much money as she could and tried to bribe her family out.
Instead, the Soviets threw her into the concentration camp where she broke rocks for the railroad.
Her husband, a German citizen, came to try to rescue her. They told him, “If you don't leave, we will take your passport and you'll be in the concentration camp too.” He left. I don't know if he and Baka ever saw each other again. I'm not sure that she saw her daughter again.
So Baka is in Yugoslavia. She and her family finally get out of the concentration camp. She becomes a community nurse. She was not a school-educated person, but she was smart and very cultured.
Like many Europeans she loved music. Even when she didn't have any money, she'd sneak into the symphony and the opera and listen, just because it filled her up.
In 1961 the President of Yugoslavia, Tito, visited the United States and met with US president John Kennedy. Kennedy said to Tito, “If Communism is so great, why don't you open your borders so your people can either stay or go?”
Tito came home, took the challenge, and opened up the borders.
By this time Baka had remarried and had another daughter. Her husband was Hungarian and had lived in New York City in his youth before the Depression had sent his family back to Hungary.
He had always wanted to go back to the United States, so their little family booked a voyage on a ship to the United States. They went to Chicago, where they both got jobs. Baka was a dental hygienist, and her husband worked at the University of Chicago.
They raised their daughter and had a very happy life filled with wine which they made at home, friends, and love of music and beauty. Baka always said that day that they landed in New York in 1962 was her Independence Day.
She also told me that she couldn't believe how much was in the stores here. She would go into a grocery store here and just marvel at how much was available there.
Coming to the United States was a dream come true. Her daughter became a dental hygienist herself, married, and had three children. As the daughter was going back to work, she asked her parents to come and help take care of the children. So Baka got to raise her grandchildren, and eventually, they all wound up in my area.
We got to be friends, and I would take her to the grocery store and help her get the wine for her wine spritzers (she would probably credit the pleasure she took in those with her long life ☺).
I would go to see her at least once a day so Sophie could have her cat food treat. As her grandchildren grew up and became seniors in high school, every Friday she would host them and their friends for lunch. Sometimes she would make pierogis, a traditional Eastern European dish. The kids loved that. She'd often fix a bean stew which she called Musical Vegetables because it would make the kids toot and a lot of ramen noodles. She loved feeding her grandchildren and their friends.
Baka was my first friend who had the experience of growing up in wartime. She didn't talk about it a lot because she liked to dwell on happy things.
I believe that her positive attitude and her ability to go with what life gave her led to her being able to come to this country and to have a wonderful family. Up until the last probably six months of her life she enjoyed pretty good health, and always, always, always had that positive attitude.
I wanted to tell you Baka’s story to show that flowing with life and being with what life gives you is a talent and a strength which each one of us can cultivate.
To end I want to share this poem with you:
Allow
by Dana Faulds
There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream, and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to a higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild, and the weak: fear,
fantasies, failures, and success.
When loss rips off the door of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.
I invite you to allow yourself to be with what is right now and allow yourself to go with the flow of life. Doing that will bring you to a new place. It will bring you to greater knowledge of yourself, and perhaps a greater evolution of your spirit.
Until next time, may the force of life be with you, and may you flow with it.
P.S. I’d love to know how you are allowing more flow into your life. Please comment or email me with your answer.