3/12/25 A Story About Loving a Mango

On a whim, I decided to go to Saquarema to visit my friend Emma and her family.

I’ve been missing them, and I’ve also been missing the nourishment that comes from being surrounded by so much nature, and I wanted to play with the two little ones again.

I brought some paints with me, and I’m also planning to boil jabuticaba skins to make a kind of natural pigment, so we can paint together.

The two little ones in her family have completely different personalities:

The older brother, Ry, is calm, sensitive and cautious.

He loves creating things, and he likes discovering beauty and playfulness in small, ordinary details.

The younger brother, Seb, is full of big, expressive emotions.

He loves adventure, is very brave, loves exploring, and also really enjoys “messing things up”. He’s completely glued to his mum.

The journey here was mostly smooth, just a bit of traffic as I was leaving Rio.

When I arrived at the station, I called an Uber to their place. This time I had already downloaded Google Maps in advance, because on the way to their house there’s this long stretch with no signal at all.

As the car slowly drove out of the city, I rolled down the window and drank in the smell of paubrasilia blossoms and wet earth mingled in the air after the rain. My mind went completely quiet. I just wanted to close my eyes and breathe deeply. I wanted to invite all the freshness of this gentle night into my body, into my soul.

As soon as I reached the door, the smell of Emma’s cooking came rushing to greet me. Crunchy cabbage, with Sichuan peppercorns sprinkled in (for those of us living abroad, that’s such a luxurious spice), and pork belly stewed with vegetables. The whole house was filled with the smell of “home”.

I suddenly realised that lately I haven’t really had much desire to eat meat, and the last time I did eat meat was also here, in her home. I couldn’t help but laugh at that.

We ate and chatted at the same time, asking, “So, how have you been these days?”

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we realised it had actually only been just over a week since we last saw each other.

It’s no longer jabuticaba season now, but the liqueur we made last time, using both the fruit and the skins, has become incredibly good. The fruit aroma is strong, and the taste has grown deeper and more mellow than when we first made it. The colour has slowly turned into this beautiful, mysterious shade of purple.

I like to think we bottled that whole weekend’s memories into this little glass bottle.

Nature really has given us so many gifts.

She feels like a mother who loves to give, unconditionally, and never in a hurry, slowly kneading sunlight into the flesh of the fruit, hiding rainwater in the roots, quietly sending the nutrients in the soil towards each and every one of them.

Then we see them, touch them, reach up to pick them, and eat them into our bodies. Our whole being is really just these same rays of sunlight, this rain and these nutrients, continuing to move and flow inside us.

We are so lucky to live in a world like this, cared for by Mother Earth, fed and nourished by her.

You can feel that it’s mango season this week.

Emma’s home has several mango trees, and there’s pretty much an entire box of mangos in the house, all of them just fallen from the trees.

We planned that tomorrow we’ll go and pick up mangos together, and just picturing it already makes me so happy.

Sometimes it’s just walking barefoot on the grass, the soles of your feet resting on the earth, soft yet steady, and your body and mind start to quiet down.

You crouch down and carefully watch a tiny insect making its way from one leaf to another, listen to the sound of the waves in the distance, feel a breeze slide across the back of your neck, your hair and the fine hairs on your arms being gently stroked awake.

Sunlight falls on your shoulders and your face, and you can feel yourself being held in a soft embrace.

In those moments, it looks like nothing “important” is happening, but your awareness and your senses are wide open. When we really stay with the present and let ourselves feel everything around us, these little things suddenly have weight; they turn into energy that begins to move, to flow towards you, to flow into you.

After dinner, Kel (Emma’s partner) was in the kitchen tidying up and doing the dishes, while Emma and I sat at the table talking.

As we chatted, I took out a pair of trousers that had a hole in them and started mending. Then I noticed that my canvas bag was also coming apart at the seams. I bought that bag four years ago in Georgia, it has the Georgian alphabet printed on it, and I really love it. But the fabric is not so easy to sew, and Emma is so skilful with her hands, watching her, I could see that what she can fix in two minutes would probably take me twenty. So I simply handed the needle and thread over to her and let her help me with it.

Right around then, little Seb started to feel a bit unhappy.

He wanted to cling to his mum, wanted all of her attention.

He began to fuss a little, to cry a little, his emotions slowly rising like a small storm.

I looked at the loose threads scattered across the table, the needle in Emma’s hand, and this small child beside us who was like a tiny storm of feelings.

I really wanted to help, but I also felt a bit lost, I don’t have that much experience being around little ones.

Then I noticed a mango nearby. On impulse, I picked it up and said to him:

“Hey Sebi, look. Isn’t this mango beautiful?”

He stared at me, completely puzzled.

I went on, gently, “I just noticed how beautiful it is. Do you want to look at it together with me?”

He quieted down and started listening carefully.

“See? The colour is so bright, isn’t it? And the shape… it’s a little bit like a heart, right? What if we use our own hearts to get close to it, to give it a hug?”

I hugged the mango first, then passed it to him.

He copied me and hugged the mango too, and in the very next second, he threw it across the room. Then he ran to pick it up, and threw it again with all his strength.

I laughed and said,“That was really good, Sebi. You already gave the mango a hug, and it can feel your love and your heart. That’s wonderful. But when you throw it so hard, it also hurts, right? How about we pick it up and try taking care of it a bit more gently?”

He thought for a moment, then ran to get the mango and handed it back to me.

“Thank you for bringing the mango to me,” I told him.

“Now I’m going to hug it again, because it was just thrown and it probably feels a little bit hurt. We can give it more love and let it know it’s still loved, okay?”

I closed my eyes and hugged the mango very seriously.

Then I handed it back to him.

He copied me again, closing his eyes with great ceremony and hugging the mango.

He’s only one year and three months old, and the mango looked huge in his little arms, but he still held on tight with his small hands, pressing it close to his tiny heart.

“Amazing! The mango can feel that it’s loved by Sebi. The mango is very happy right now,” I said.

He looked like he wanted to throw it again.

So I added, “Sebi, maybe we don’t throw the mango this time, hmm? We don’t want it to feel hurt, right? You like being held and loved, and this mango is just the same. What do you think?”

He blinked his big eyes, looked at me, then at the mango, as if he was really thinking about it.

Then he slowly put the mango down on the floor and lifted his head to look at me, and in that moment, I felt my heart completely melt.

“You’re doing so well, Sebi. You were really taking care of this mango just now. It can feel that, you know. And you can also feel that it’s safe and happy now, right?”

He looked up at me with his big eyes, half-understanding, half-not, but staying there very quietly.

After a little while, he seemed like he wanted to throw it again.

I said to him softly, “Sebi, I know you’ll make a really good choice.”

So he slowly put the mango down on the floor, then picked it up again and gave it another hug; then he handed it to me, and I hugged the mango carefully too; then I passed it back, and he hugged it once more.

Like that, we took turns, you, then me, holding this mango close to our chests again and again, very seriously.

After a while, older brother Ry came over and joined us too.

It was a mango that was already fully ripe, its skin slightly split open (probably mostly from all the times Seb had dropped it earlier).

I held the mango in my hands and said,“Shall we give this mango a kiss?”

Ry shouted,“The juice is coming out!”

“Wow, you’re right! This mango has just felt so much love from Sebi that its sweet little heart is starting to spill out for us to see.”

Ry carefully peeled back a bit of the skin, and we each took turns tasting it.

The mango was really, really sweet.

Tia Shikin went on, “Sebi, look, this mango is super sweet, isn’t it? While it was slowly growing, it received so many warm hugs from the sunshine, and so much nourishment from Mother Earth. And just now, it also felt all the hugs you gave it, and all the love and sweetness coming from your little heart. So now it’s sharing all that sweetness with us. We get to say thank you to this mango, because we just co-generated so much love and beauty together, right?”

Seb looked at me with his sincere round eyes, kinda-understanding, and then he started to smile.

His eyes curved into little crescent moons, and his dimples were full of honey, pure and impossibly sweet.

In that moment, on this soft, rain-washed night, Tia Shikin’s heart completely melted.

I feel very lucky to be able to share this kind of slow time with this family.

Their home is surrounded by nature, full of green, full of childlike wonder.

I look at my friends Emma and Kel, they are such a good team, living under the same roof, moving through all the little details and currents of life together, in a comfortable way.

Two children, a home held inside nature, each other, isn’t this exactly the scene that Beans and I dreamed about again and again?

My heart still can’t really imagine building this dream with anyone other than him.

But my mind seems to know that this has already passed, that he, and the “us” we once were, are slowly dying in my world.

Now, this dream feels like it has been placed somewhere far away;

Beans has also moved to a gentler, more distant place in my life.

Spending time with my friends and their family, on one hand, everything feels so beautiful, like a movie trailer, this is still the dream that belongs to me;

and on the other hand, I know very clearly that it is not the answer for “right now”.

I still need to experience, to explore, to really take care of my own healing.

I think that when I am truly ready, when I meet the future partner who is willing to walk together with me, when the timing has quietly ripened and arrives gently,

naturally,

effortlessly,

these dreams will find their way back to me in a new form.

In different circumstances,

with a different person,

it might become a different version of the dream.

I don’t know when that moment will come, but I also know that I don’t actually need to know, right?

What I do know is that when that time arrives, I will meet it with patience and with love.

And I will teach my children, slowly and tenderly, in that soft motherly way, how to love a mango well.

That’s all I wanted to write down for today.