When I was younger, I didn’t fully appreciate or even apprehend the rich cultures that I am blessed to be a part of. Sometimes I admire some other cultures for their rich traditions and heritage and forgotten that I have my own to appreciate and learn from. Of course, there are things that one doesn’t like about his/her own culture or what we perceived to be from part of that culture. (Gasp!) I won’t explore that here. If I do, it will be in my memoir or something. Lol. What I will touch on here is the part that I embrace…

Chinese Lunar New Year happened a few months ago, and I have written a post about my wishes for this year, etc. We are now almost at the half-year mark, and I started thinking about the wishes that I did make earlier this year (here’s that post) and just doing some benchmarking on how far I have come. (Still need to work on living healthier and lose some weight. Reminder to self: more walking and yoga and less fatty foods.)

Many people know that Chinese people, rich or poor, business people or working people, like to say, “Gung Hay Fat Choy” during the new year which roughly translates to “Congratulations or Wishes to Be Rich.” That’s in Cantonese. In Mandarin, it’s “gōng xǐ fā cái”. On the surface and many will take it as such, it seems incredibly shallow. Like, all these people just care about money?

Well, yes and no. Many do care because money in itself is a part of our physical and transactional life here on earth (and some beyond if you believe that.) But our relationships with money is a very personal one in which I will not explore here because I am not writing a finance or a money psychology blog. What I will say is that it dawned on me when I think of those New Year wishes how multifaceted it really is in terms of language usage and how easily it can be, like in many things, easily misconstrued if one doesn’t understand it.

I realized that in the Chinese language, just like it is in English and whatever other language you speak, some words can have multiple meanings if used a certain way. The word “rich” in Chinese means more than materialistic things. It’s a term that can mean, rich as in health, rich as in blessings, rich as in beauty, rich as in abundance and not wanting, rich as in harvest, rich as in knowledge, rich as in happiness and love, so on and so forth and in the way it was meant, not just the surface part of the language, but the deeper meaning of that word, it’s supposed to encompass all those things…

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So for this half-year mark and in celebration of my 500th post. I want to wish all of my readers a fulfilling life full of life’s riches. Thank you for being amazing and supportive blog friends.

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Along those lines, thank you to dailyfrosting, for awarding me with the ABC Award and to Choc Chip Uru  at Go Bake Yourself for awarding me the Beautiful Blogger Award. Thank you so much to both of you and I will pass these two awards along to whomever that wishes to partake those awards.

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And of course, I can’t do a post without a picture! So here’s one that I hope you will like. This is a Passion Flower. I think a lot of places in the world have this flower, but it’s so pretty, I have to take a picture of it. I also took pictures of other things, but I will share those later. 🙂