There is a picture of me at five years old, arms flung wide, like I’m flying. Most likely, I’m dancing.

I love to dance. As do my daughters. As do my sisters.

Recently, at the wedding of a friend of my youngest daughter, the bride’s father came up to me to tell me that they were all standing in awe, watching my daughter and I dance together.

I laughed. It’s just what we do, I told him.

Dance. Laugh. Play. Eat. Share. Be. Love. Together.

I am blessed.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of being at one of my mother’s family events in Paris and dancing and spinning and twirling about to the music that blared from a cheap stereo that never stopped playing the songs of my mother’s complicated history. French. Indian. Spanish. Portuguese. Hindu. Tamil. English… A beautiful potpourri of sound that flows wildly through my body today.

She was always a complicated woman, our mother. Yet, in all her complexities and insecurities and the sadness that invaded her pores like soot clinging to a chimney, she constantly taught us the value of family, of being connected, of being and loving together.

Yesterday, as my eldest daughter spoke on the phone about her Nana, I listened to the loving and compassionate words of wisdom my daughter shared and wondered, when did she become so wise? So loving. So caring.

And I knew.

The wisdom, the love, the willingness to give and to care deeply are woven into her DNA. They are threads pulled through from the warp and weave of my mother’s tapestry of life. It is the tapestry that created the warp and weave of my life, my sisters’ lives and my daughters’. Those threads of gentleness, kindness, compassion, thoughtfulness… they have always been running through the threads of my mother’s loving hands weaving, weaving, no matter how bent and painful arthritis has made them. She has been quietly weaving her story and the stories of her mother and her mother’s mother and countless women of our family before her, into our DNA.

I am thankful.

These threads that link us are what make our family, our family. They are the story of our lives; colourful, textural, beautiful, woven together, taking separate paths, creating unique patterns and pathways into the future and always coming back together in the loom that is our family history filled with the DNA of wisdom, love and the willingness to care deeply from our hearts and live freely from our feet up through our whole bodies dancing our way through life, committed to feeling every moment, intensely, deeply, in Love.

I am blessed.

The warp and weave of my life was woven from a history of fiercely loving women who danced together, laughed together and above all, Loved together.