To Love Life

by Ellen Bass

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.” 

For Love of Suffering or For The Suffering of Love

by Richa Anand

Often the ones who love the deepest are the ones whose need for love is the strongest. Somewhere, in the confusion of suppressing their own deserved receiving, they give, in over abundance.

The first kiss of truly felt love may be a completely misled blueprint of a game of give and take, where the giver becomes the over giver and the over expectant. Of course, this expectancy is carefully hidden in the clever folds of the heart which sings, "Anything For You" as an anthem, as morning chai ching and as a night lullaby.

When the needs become imbalanced, suffering arises, which is swiftly brushed under the floral carpet of quick forgiveness and ubiquitous understanding. An all familiar emotion and cry of rejection shows up time and again, but is snuffed out by the sufferer, for the source of solace is still available. And when love goes unrequited, we seldom allow ourselves to understand, that it is us ourselves, who created this suffering in the first place. Some do it knowingly, but most invite it unknowingly. 

We can spend lifetimes asking the question, "Why did it happen to ME" or "Why does this repeatedly occur in MY life". Because I AM loving more than I can. And bingo. That's where we must catch ourselves. Loving more than our might can never ever bring peace in our hearts and minds. We need to understand boundaries. We need to respect our limits and most of all, we need to LOVE ourselves. And loving one's self does NOT translate to being selfish, but simply recognising our self sabotaging patterns and persevering in breaking them. It also means, looking at ourselves in the mirror from head to toe, and learning to embrace what reflects back, and educating ourselves to protect that what we must first love. And that brings us to the biggest, most revolutionary question  i.e HOW can I change?

Our main learning in our journey of healing can be through the efforts of replacing the should with could and the challenge to stop asking WHY but reckoning, now HOW.

We may slip and fall a million times, retrace our steps, move on, and trip yet again. But each time, setting small goals and reminders of a few basic rules will help us regain our balance.

A friend once quipped, "There can be only two kinds of people in this world, either selfless, or selfish". I do find that categorisation to be valid in my own experiences. Being human, the most dogged challenge the heart can ever face is transforming that anticipation of love from the source into an unconditional love from within, because the erstwhile source itself became incapacitated. This heralds the inner transformation which we have all come to this school of earth to study in, and it is, the inward voyage to seek love from within us and make it the perennial mountain spring of joy.

This epiphany does not come overnight. The change, the releasing, the forgiveness, the letting go all takes several years sometimes, and it is agonising, toxic and near impossible. But metamorphosize, it does, this thinking process, and for the better, if our inner child is precocious enough. And if we allow ourselves to feel and sink in the awareness of our feelings. Yet, I do, everyday, reflect in multiple moments for myself. Is there a love for suffering or is the suffering for love, really? And my answers come some days in the form of quotes as the one below.

“The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart even when they depart from you. The pain of rejection, absence, and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear.” ~ Henri Nouwen

If Life Was Easy, Where Would All The Adventures Be?

Photographed in Pondicherry

by Richa Anand

If Life Was Easy, Where Would All The Adventure Be?

I read this quote on a poster somewhere, and by far these have been the most promising and hopeful words in my journey of healing and looking forward to life. 

As I read more, on blogs, on posters and on social media (most of which I have consciously decided to shun), I feel more. For people, their journeys and their experiences. Of people who have felt depths and got lost in abysses. Of people who have felt like dying for no physio (logical) reason, but repeated failure in love and facing constant abandonment, and picked up threads of their life slowly and patiently, and learned and evolved through it all. Of people who are human and beautiful, as they have been vulnerable because they didn't know any better. Of souls who attached very easily, but detachment came with a hefty, life-threatening price. As I traverse through other people's losses, I have come to identify my own grief as parallel, and that I'm not alone. All this, after having felt completely alone and invalidated all my life. 

It is wonderful to see some of the work these "resurrection" agents are doing to heal other souls and hold their hands, ever so softly, to rescue them from the dark, lonely crevasses of the adventure called life, which the lost souls thought were preordained and manifested with patterns upon patterns of fossilised behaviour. They have several New Age names like creativity curator, soul fairies, wellness alchemists to more unconventional ones like voice liberator and archetype coach. I simply choose to call them life whisperers. And I have two by my side and they have been the messengers of God.

Through all the difficult and painstaking therapy work that I am doing to understand my archetype, my behaviour, my reactions, my attitude, my genetic and subconscious patterns, I have unearthed many mysteries, of past life, afterlife, and an understanding of intuition. There is still a long long way to go and I have barely touched the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

But one thing that I have come to grasp thoroughly is that awareness of our experience in any given moment is a vital tool to tide through our forays into hopelessness, through our slips and falls into helplessness. And the one and only thing that pegs us when we are plunging headlong into another pit of oblivion is that experiential awareness must be recorded and felt. This holds us rooted in unique objectivity in our largely subjective existence.

And in all this exciting, interesting albeit exhausting adventure of my inner travels, I have realised this. If life was easy, where would the adventure be? Reminds me of Enid Blyton's "The Enchanted Wood".

More later. For now, I change my motto in life from "Life is short, wear party pants" to "Life is an adventure, don your prettiest hat".

Yes, that's how I see myself now, wearing pretty hats day after day and wowing the world.

The Love Roads

by Richa Anand

So many many thoughts

like the songbird.

Words come to me wrapped in melody.

Am writing them somewhere.

My untold story

I fear travelling those love roads that took me home.

Some days like today that i must, I do

A certain maddened drive with a waterfall in my eyes..I balance.

In the depth of our pathos and the height of our desire, vulnerability finds it unspoken voice.

There is no definition. Reason too loses its grip. We fall.

That hurt that inspires the genius.

Irony.

That pain that is meant to be endured and celebrated

with a gusto that

gives power from where power is taken. Paradox.

Perfection and imperfection.

That inspiration rising from the subconscious

and an illogical realm.

The star that shines. The light that glows.

Each in the hearts which they so love.

The Truth Is Not So Bad

 by Richa Anand



After feeling complete and real moments, and uncovering they were illusions, the truth, is not so bad.

It is the worst, the most insane, the most bitter, and abjectly surreally venomous, when it first starts getting underlined. Slowly, meticulously, callously, carelessly, swirling, twirling, like the snake coiling, it grips the life out of you. More with fear of a certain part of you dying, you begin to face death in lust. You fall deeper and deeper, as the first brush has been so alluring and charming, that you lost the anatomy of your brain in it.

You forbade the heart to cease, and gave the soul a new life. The soul that was just a wayfarer till then, in some mindless jangle of  sojourn after sojourn, never seen the mirror. Then it stirred. To the jingle bells of the unknown past life. It blinked to the whispers of soft songs sung into a naive ear. Am I alive? You thought.

You must have been.

For the Universe changed all its colors. It was like the inamorato and self, possessed the same cone photo receptors by default, along with almost parallel taste buds. Food became so real. Water became elixir.

And yet, it wasn't true.

You were you, and they were them. Tricksters, the heart and soul. Should have thrown them in the prison of unhappiness and abstinence, for they together couldn't have measured up to the infinite realms of pathos to follow. The irrigating passion and then the parched pathos. 

You welcomed the disbelief, the swing of emotions. Made life incredibly interesting. Which part of Am I, was the truth. The retinal receptors unearthing facts or the melody that still played on in the ears.

You were crazed, stung and strung, galvanised to errata without suspicion to the truth. You cannot be, you cannot be, you screamed to the mute truth. I may be, I could be, I might...errr...well, I am, it responded softly.

You walked the dire slow straits with the balance of Robin. The breast was pricked and it bled and got bleached of many truths on the way. Then there it was. The truth, after the truth. In that moment. In this moment. In now. And it's not so bad.

Because it's your truth. Your very own brand, your own light, and your own fire. And self preservation has laws that won't let you burn yourself. The truth in its glory wearing the crown of solitude. And it's not so bad. In fact, it's peaceful, it's calm, it's loving, it's guileless. It's simply, beautiful.

I Don't Miss It

BY TRACY K. SMITH

But sometimes I forget where I am,

Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,

Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,

The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.

Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.

And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is

I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.

Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe

In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want

To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,

Knowing perfectly well what they know.