Keep your feet on the ground and your heart open.
I wrote that in my notebook in a noodle shop in Thong Lo a few minutes before leaving. I stepped out the door into a sea of neon lights. Soon, I felt the dense humidity hug the tears in the corners of my eyes. Instead of ordering a motorbike or taking the SkyTrain, I soaked in the city’s stimulation. I want to walk home instead.
I guess I was crying because generally, I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I was crying, what to do or what to accept. So I started walking 5km home. I didn’t know if I was sad, overwhelmed or drowned in uncertainty. Maybe I was just sweaty. Feet on the ground. Heart open. There’s no rush: just a long stroll on the brightly lit and littered streets of Bangkok.
I walked for about an hour. I got confused by Google Maps. I guess that way? It was less brightly lit. Steel slanted roofs, resembling an abandoned street market; closed I suppose. I am now in an alleyway. Is that a stray dog? Feet on the ground. Then, suddenly, from the corner of my eye, a woman panted as she ran towards me. My heart jolted — will I die in an alleyway listening to Jealous by Labrinth? I really should have learned Muay Thai. Ok, feet on the ground.
I looked at this woman. She looked at me. There was a single incandescent lightbulb on the road. But I didn’t need any more electrons flowing to see the care in her eyes. She didn’t need any more to see the redness and confusion in mine. She had jackfruit for me. I tried to decline, I tried to pay her, even if it was just all the little coins in my pocket. She wouldn’t let me.
A woman, who runs a fruit stand in an alley, insisted I take a slice of her living.
My heart jolted open and eventually I accepted. I tried to thank her in her mother tongue: ขอบคุณค่ะ (khoob-khun ka). She tried to say goodbye in mine. I felt a new surge of tears mix with the air that felt a little heavier than before; maybe it was the lighting. Or maybe it was because if I smelled deep enough, I could catch the sweetness of the marigolds hung on her closed fruit stall.
Now I knew why I was crying:
How can it be possible that I, a girl with everything comparably, deserved the fruits of her labour? Or, in other words, why was she so kind?
But this is the clicking point. Kindness has no why, it has no audience, it does not discriminate on the receiver. Kindness respects our dignity as human beings.
Walking out the other end of the alley, I felt like the world gave me the most massive hug.
Everyone deserves this feeling: to be held, free of doubts, for a moment.
I wrote that in my notebook going to bed.
If every day, for the next 80 years, I perform one deep act of kindness, I can transmit a spark of warmth to almost 30,000 people.
So many opportunities to pick up the phone, send a detailed postcard, share an observant compliment, stop a misplaced girl crying in an alley with a sweet snack. To plant seeds of love that bloom in the hearts of others.
My mom and dad have been together for almost 40 years. They really do still love each other like teenagers: anyone can see it in their bickering, in their excitement for Costco on Saturdays and how they search for each other’s stares in a crowded elevator.
I asked my mom how she knew my dad was the one. She told me she first loved his shoes. Red sneakers.
For a long time, this felt like a remarkably sappy and impractical origin story. Like, I exist because my dad when he was 18 had a good taste in shoes, according to my mom?
But that is Love. Love appears in unusual ways, usually small instead of grand, and it zaps your attention to something peculiar. To love is to notice. A magnetic attraction that fills your life with inspiration and alignment.
I now quite like my parents’ story because it reminds me to keep my feet on the ground and my heart open.
Love: someone who grows flowers in the darkest parts of you.
Perhaps the way I am most like my mother is in how much I love flowers. I am generally a very enthusiastic person, but if there’s one way to crank up my spirits it is through a colourful bouquet. I think it’s because flowers can be so intimate.
Every time my dad —an extremely pragmatic (and colour-blind) man — swallows his pride to select a pretty posy for my mom, I understand the mechanism of love a little bit more. He might think roses and orchids are silly, but he knows they’re her favourite gift in the world. That is love: suspending your judgment to make someone’s heart pump from the elixir of flowers.
Flowers are beautiful but temporary. Or are they beautiful because they are temporary? Like love, flowers cherish replenishment.
There is much to admire about renewal:
When I look out at Bangkok’s skyline, I am struck by the greenery and fleeting strides of people. When I visit Buddhist temples, I am amazed by the marigolds and offerings that will be different tomorrow. When I conquer the 12 hour time difference to call my mom I am most excited to hear about the new flower selection at Costco. If we pay close enough attention to our world — to love is to notice — our observations feel like an ever-changing anthology. The moments and sights and sounds around us are like a collection of music, poems and prose. Trees, faces, mangoes, paintings, candles, catalogs. Amazingly, the etymology of an anthology is “a collection of flowers.”
Gifting someone flowers is intimate because there is usually not a rationale (they’re not practical like a book or gift card). But that’s also exactly why they are such a powerful present: these are for you simply because I think they are delightful and you deserve to have their beauty. And they won’t last forever, so I’ll have to be back.
A very simple thing I do every morning on the Bangkok SkyTrain is smile. The kind of smile that lets all my happiness and gratitude and joy radiate.
Amazingly, as I move my head, I see more and more people light up and smile too. It’s almost difficult not to smile back when someone is beaming right at you. I find the generative nature of a smile another reason to smile a little brighter and for a little longer.
What do people bring out in you? A smile? Joy? Inspiration? A magnetic feeling?
Love: someone who grows flowers in the darkest parts of you.
People make us grow and glow in either a generative, or destructive, way.
If you feel believed in, flourished, inspired or nurtured, you are around a generative person. They make you look up at the stars and marvel at this precious world and the privilege of your delicate next breath. Generative people leave you with hope. They help grow flowers in the deepest, darkest parts of you. They are like standing on top of a mountain, feeling the heat of the sun, hearing laughter, banter, applause and awe. They make you want to climb it all over again. They zap your attention towards the abundance in this life.
Destructive people on the other hand deplete you with perfectionism, criticism, jealousy and the assertion of their expertise. But they don’t leave you with a nudge of momentum or cardinal realignment. They zap your attention towards the scarcity in this life.
Be a generative person. Even to destructive people. Everyone deserves love. Everyone deserves respect. Everyone deserves to feel held, free of doubts, for a moment.
This post is about love. And if there’s one place in the world I have learned about love, it is Cambodia.
Following the Cambodian Civil War (1967-1975), the Khmer Rouge took control of the country and performed a systematic genocide of the Cambodian people; 1 in 4 were murdered from 1975-1979.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to turn Cambodia into a classless agricultural society. To achieve this, they forced people into physical agricultural labour and eradicated anyone against their vision. Educated people (professors, doctors, lawyers, etc) held ‘dangerous outside ideas’ and were the prime targets for execution — along with their entire families to prevent future rebellion. Even people wearing glasses were targeted simply for their association with intellectualism. Their slogan was: “To keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”
“The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 ‘Year Zero’, the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money – only work and death.” — John Pilger, Journalist (source)
The history is heart-shattering, and frankly, it feels like a fiction plot that went way too far. How could human hatred reach such depths? How did the world sit and watch this happen? How was the Khmer Rouge government recognized by the UN? It all feels unfathomable. It’s even more unfathomable after interacting with locals — how can this past exist when hospitality, love and kindness radiates in their society? I don’t think I’ve ever met nicer people.
I’ve been to Cambodia twice, most recently a few weeks ago in Phnom Penh, the capital. A place with strikingly few elderly people.
I spent five hours taking a tour of a former prison and a Killing Field from the genocide. These are carefully preserved nightmares. On the floor, you could still see blood. On the windows, barricades. On the ground, remains of human bones.
Walking around, I felt numb. So many pictures of people who died nameless and innocent. At the mass graves of the Killing Fields, my body internalized that this was not just an evil idea: it was an evil, horrifying and true reality. In shock, all I felt were tears.
In the area of a kid’s bedroom in North America, hundreds of children were tortured to death. 100, 300, 400, 600 bodies were beaten, burned, and buried together. Bullets were too expensive so children’s heads were smashed on a tree instead. As they died, a loudspeaker played music to mask their final screams.
Standing before that tree, I felt a sorrow so deep I can only describe it as a responsibility: to lead a life that honours those children—the stories they never heard, the dreams they never chased, the hugs that never melted their hearts with warmth. The fact that the last thing they experienced in this world was hatred.
Despite the haunting memories etched into their history, the Cambodian people have chosen to embrace life with an open heart. Their smiles, their warmth, and their generosity are not just acts of kindness but profound statements of resilience. It's as if, in the aftermath of unimaginable loss and suffering, they have found a deeper understanding of what it means to love.
Love, in its purest form, thrives in everyday interactions: in fruit and shoes and flowers and smiles and eye contact. Walking through the streets of Phnom Penh, amidst the vibrant markets and the serene temples, it’s clear that love is not just an abstract concept. It’s a lived reality, a choice made everyday. In their resilience, the Cambodian people teach us that even in the face of the darkest history, love can flourish and light the way forward.
When she was 16, Hout Bophana fell in love with Ly Sitha. In their Northern Cambodian village, they became engaged.
A coup and civil war then stripped them of their life. Bophana escaped to the capital and Sitha became a monk to avoid the draft.
They lost contact and each assumed the other was dead.
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge stormed Phnom Penh, overthrew the government, ended the civil war, and began their revolution.
Captured in the capital, Bophana was sent to the countryside to work. The labour was rigorous and the daily food rations couldn’t keep up. She reached the brink of starvation. This was the cost of the Khmer Rouge classless agricultural society.
One day, as Bophana worked the fields on the verge of death, Sitha appeared. To her surprise, he was not just alive; he was now a Khmer Rouge officer.
Bophana, still a slave to the Khmer Rouge, reunited with the man she was engaged to years ago. His rise to power within the regime allowed him to locate her amidst the fields and to arrange for medical care, saving her life. Soon, they would marry. But revolution, again, would separate them from their life as Husband and Wife.
To bridge their segregation, Sitha and Bophana exchanged passionate love letters in Khmer, French and English. But not without risk.
“In the middle of one of the 20th century's worst instances of mass murder, here was a beautiful young woman secretly writing love letters to her husband, knowing full well that in the closed Khmer dictatorship, she would be killed if they were found.” (from a stunning NYT piece on Bophana)
Eventually, their letters were discovered.
Their correspondence exposed their multilingualism: a sign of education and a reason for imprisonment. However, even more threatening to the regime was love. For love could inspire a loyalty beyond their control; love was the greatest crime.
Bophana and Sitha were both tortured, tried and eventually executed on the same day for their letters.
Bophana’s mugshot at the S-21 prison — a place where 20,000 people entered and only 12 survived — shows her resilience. Her gaze has no regrets.
Without love, she would have died of starvation in the fields. Through her letters and prison confessions, her memory lives on: reminding us to love despite the risks. It’s an experience that prolongs and enriches our lives, turning fleeting moments into lasting legacies.
Love: someone who grows flowers in the darkest parts of you.
The name Bophana means flower in the Khmer language. She signed her letters The Flower of a Dangerous Love.
People can sense fear in your eyes but they can also sense respect.
Imagine if every time you locked eyes with someone, you saw them as a mosaic of two people who loved each other, and four people before them, and eight before them, and sixteen before them. Now you are only at their great-great-grandparents. Each person is a monument: how can you not feel a surge of awe for the miraculous chain of love that makes life possible?
Lock eyes:
Maybe you’ll see the care in someone’s gaze. Maybe you’ll see their fear. But everything about your world will change when they can see your respect — your respect from the fact that they are a mosaic of thousands of people who have loved other lives enough to nurture and foster humans who go on to nurture and foster more humans, generation after generation, enough times to eventually make this person, right in front of you: alive, admirable, and worthy of love.
I am inspired by the things that happen when two people love each other. One day you’re complimenting someone’s shoes, and then, before you know it, you are planting marigolds in the front lawn and your kids are smiling, snacking on jackfruits. (At least that’s the vision…)
In this life, we get the opportunity to be absolutely struck and inspired by nameless people. We also get to be those nameless people.
This ~12 minute post would not exist in the same way if that Thai woman in the alley looked away. Or, for the record, if I didn’t walk alone at night. But something tells me to keep my feet on the ground and my heart open.
Love,
Isabella Grandic
The bonus section:
Another one of my favourite articles on love is Escaping Flatland’s Looking for Alice
Cream cheese macarons are one of my most recent great delights (omg banana nutella cream cheese macaron … I can’t even explain my shock and enjoyment)
I have made the most elite recommendation document for Bangkok (it’s been a great 2+ months, I have only a few days left in BKK)
Another fun thing I realized as I wrote this reflection: all fruits develop from flowers.
Thank you to Grace, Ula, and Cassia for reading drafts ❤️
Thank you for this poetry, Izzy ❤️ Such beautiful writing
wonderful, please keep exploring more and documenting your experience , thankyou so much for remembering them and looking at the future with positivity for future generations 💐