Remembering my father, Count Arthur Tarnowski, on his 12th death anniversary and the 21st Time Day
On this day, June 30th, 12 years ago my father, Count Arthur Tarnowski, died. He was 82. He had lived life as one of our great ancestors, positively transforming the lives of over 2 million disabled and leprosy patients in Anandwan, India with his adopted father, Baba Amte. Dad lived for impact. He was born 1929 into a life of great wealth and privilege. The only son of one of Poland’s wealthiest noblemen. After the war broke out he became a messenger boy in the underground army. After a horrific war experience he escaped and came to London as a refugee. There he set about traveling across Asia writing the early guide books for how to travel overland on a budget. In 1959, as he was compiling the first guide book to Bali he contracted Polio and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down.
After coming to terms with his disability he lept into action and completed the world’s largest study of disability by crossing 100,000km overland in his wheelchair. He made multiple documentaries for the BBC and wrote for the Readers Digest. He published a well received book of his adventures called the Unbeaten Track. He then continued to visit Anandwan every year (44 times) until the year before he died. He is buried under a teak tree in the Joie de’ Vivre garden next to my adopted grandfather Baba Amte, his wife Tai, and my sister Sheetal Amte-Karajgi.
But who was my father to me? He was the embodiment of love. He was wise beyond time. A linguist of 7 languages. A historian of civilisations. A systems architect. A filmmaker. A philanthropist. A gardener. A animal lover. A writer. A poet. A visionary. But most of all he was humble and driven to improve our world as a service to all that is sacred.
He raised my brother Sebastian and I with three lessons:
1. Never think the worst of the Nazis were any different than you or I. We are all capable of absolute evil, in as much as we are capable of absolute Love. This is what makes us human. Separation from ‘the other’ is both naive and dangerous. Our path to unity is inclusion.
.2. “Society is one missed meal from anarchy”. My father stressed the fragility of our ‘civil’ world. Never, never, take our freedom and liberties for granted, for they were created with the blood of our ancestors.
3. What makes a Tarnowski is that when others are running away from the fire, we run into it. To live by noble courage. He taught me that our privilege was nothing to do with our titles, palaces, and wealth but rather to do with the privilege of service.
My father raised me with a mission to serve the world. It is my honour to celebrate the 12th anniversary of my father’s death on this Time Day in the 21st UP Game. The element of Time in United Planet is the Zero Point element. It is the element that is the dimensional gate to all the other elements.
This Time Day 48 Gaians gather once again for the Kismet Unions UP Game at Hekamiah in Ibiza where we will step outside of linear time and into quantum time. We do this by having a symbolic death ceremony. Marcel Hof, Wim Hof’s brother, is leading us in a breathwork and drum ceremony that will open our connection to both our Ancestors and our Descendants.
I am looking forward to connecting with the spirit of my father on this portal day. Even more potent is our intention of Kismet Unions where we will explore relationships written in the stars. We dive into a collective quest to story from the future of love and relationships. We will be having an embodied journey into the deep now of the frequency of love and its unbridled capacity to transform every aspect of our world. We are exploring the fractal nature of relationships built upon a foundation of love and trust. These blueprints will allow us to explore how we design civilisation in the future with these principles.
The exploration of Kismet Unions is very much the union I share with my Father. Our souls are forever entwined. With that I would like to share ten of my favourite quotes from my father to honour him on this day:
- On giving love:
“To love is to yearn to give love; to give of the Self, of this heart stripped bare into the vulnerability of its sears and failures — down to the sublimity of its spirit. And upon such exquisite foreplay attain union. Union of two hearts thirsting the divine thirst to give themselves. In their union lose themselves, in union emblazon themselves. And in this orgasm create each other into life sublime.”
2. On giving of self:
‘There’s much that overlaps in loving and giving. The only thing I truly possess, I claim, is that which I’ve given away. By which I don’t mean that my possessions consist of the sum-total of presents I ever gave. No, what I refer to is the content of the self, what I pour of my inner self into each gift I make. The higher the gift’s content in the self which my heart thrusts into it, spiritually the richer I become. Pari Passu.”
Read more in the Joy of Giving: https://luciant.medium.com/the-joy-of-giving-heart-gift-88b54596e8a8
3. On life as an adventure:
“To journey, to witness — in heart’s freedom and wonderment, to reach out across far horizons beyond the murky confines of parochial mediocrity — ’tis to LIVE, ’tis to LOVE.”
Count Arthur Tarnowski, crossing the Himalayas in his wheelchair in 1964
Words to live by: https://luciant.medium.com/heart-gift-14-words-to-live-by-22c0fd58764e
4. On desert symphonies:
‘On another occasion, I lugged a gramophone into the desert outside Bagdad to play Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies at full volume. The cascades of sound billowed across the solitude, impassive, enduring, as the dunes surged and rippled into the distance, into the expanses of grandeur. As if both were drawn from the Absolute, the sound and the stillness coalesced to conjure up moments of that rare ecstatic rapture, when one’s spirit transcends time and identity to partake of the Divine.’
Beethoven in the desert: https://medium.com/@luciant/heart-gift-20-beethoven-in-the-desert-9b69a3b9d957
5. On language:
‘Language is the unwitting culprit — and the life-sucking harpies of lassitude. To be intelligible words must convey concepts fixed and circumscribed — but in a deeper sense eventually dead, dead to heart’s afflatus.’
Reflections on language: https://medium.com/@luciant/heart-gift-my-fathers-reflections-on-language-d02dd98f4918
6. On consciousness of birth:
By virtue of being given love elevates and purifies one’s spirit, ennobles it, bestows harmony and fulfillment onto the consciousness of ‘I know why I be born.’
My father’s last letter: https://medium.com/@luciant/heart-gift-10-my-fathers-last-letter-804b2e8639a8
7. On transforming society:
‘Help and alleviation of this wretchedness can come essentially from a better understanding of its causes, nature and extent, and in this every one of us can help, can contribute his humble little brick.’
My father’s letter in 1953 on social injustice: https://medium.com/@luciant/heart-gift-8-our-humble-little-bricks-a-letter-from-1953-3cbe5a444133
8. On Anandwan and Baba Amte:
‘The essential realisation of what Anandwan stands for was realised through no other than the power of pure love, of active compassion, of the creativity in giving. And there is no otherworldly aspect to this since Baba Amte, if born a Hindu, does not practice his religion. I ask you, isn’t it all too seldom that we may encounter such manifest transformation in people’s minds and hearts, in their welfare and in the scale of attainment generated by the powers latent in human love and compassion? A profoundly uplifting and inspiring scene to virtually all of us.’
On Baba Amte and Anandwan: https://luciant.medium.com/heart-gift-12-take-heart-baba-amte-and-anandwan-c612ca3f251d
9. On heart’s beating in unison:
‘All I can assert in unquibbled assurance about my story with the bustee people of Calcutta is this:- In this Gehenna, as nowhere else, I met a man who gave me half his worldly goods and delighted over it; there I had heard more laughter, spontaneous, unaffected laughter, than in the salons of Paris, London or New York; and I left the place in spirit enriched, humbled in flesh. And there, amidst the midden-heaps, the suffering, that sore-blown desolation, a man had told me with utter conviction:- “God good, life good, eat!”. What triumphant affirmation of Man, the glory of Man Alive…”
Dad’s reflection after sleeping on the streets of Calcutta with Ramu: https://luciant.medium.com/heart-gift-2-when-our-hearts-beat-in-unison-spending-five-days-in-the-slums-of-calcutta-75d9e92af4bb
10. On purpose of life:
“Panache and fantaisie have been foremost in directing my steps across life… To drink deep of the bitter-sweet cup of life. To seek out its challenges and measure oneself against them. To dream its wondrous dreams. To scale its peaks. To stride through like with eyes of zest and wonder. And youth of heart. Nothing stands ‘larger than life’, for life is as large as one’s urge, vision and daring forge it.
Chase butterflies and dream and wonder. Reach out for the stars. Avec panache et fantaisie. Sunlight in my lungs, marvel in my eyes. It is in this spirit that I went up the Himalayas and thumbed my nose at the wheelchair.”
My father’s reflections on the beauty of life: https://luciant.medium.com/heart-gift-1-my-fathers-reflections-on-the-beauty-of-life-d1420e2ef55e
My father was my best friend and teacher. I live in deep gratitude for the foundational lessons he taught me and lived by example. He was a truly remarkable person and father. Both he and my mother are enormous sources of inspiration for me while my love for my daughter and the planet is my driving motivation for United Planet. I wrote this tribute for my father back in 2020: https://luciant.medium.com/remembering-my-father-count-arthur-tarnowski-96f4ba3e680f
I will keep my father and my Kismet Union alive as Tatiana and I journey together into this topic at the heart of our hearts.
