zondag 26 juli 2020
Who will you love if not yourself?
Other people?
How can you love someone for anything but their raw, naked humanity?
How can you say you love someone if it is not for their flaws and quirks, snorts and hurts, triggers and tears?
Anything else is not love.
It is idealization.
And, as long as you do it to yourself, you will do it to everyone.
You will not love anyone or anything until those eyes in the mirror soften up and embrace the beauty that is already within.
- Vironika Tugaleva -
It was only many years after, when
my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I
finally came to realize that my grandmother, after all, also believed in
dreams.
There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening
at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the
biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: “The world is
so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die”.
She didn’t say
she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard
life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the
grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty
revealed.
She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can
imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep
with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry
to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo,
my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to
arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one
by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn’t see them
again.
“When I was a little girl and my teachers sent notes home complaining
that I was as loud as the boys, that it wasn’t lady like for a girl to be this outspoken, this raucous, instead of forcing me to tone it down
to the timber of a stage whisper, just a few notes above a whimper
you took me by the hand to the hilltop by our house,
told me to use my voice by shouting to my heart’s content, told me never to forget that I was a girl not a mouse
and if I believed I had to change myself to suit anyone else I shouldn’t,
that no matter what they said my voice was so important.
You then visited my school, called a meeting with my teachers
sat them all down and said that you were raising a rebel girl
to be a warrior woman, and if she could not speak,
the same way boys are allowed to, if she had to turn her voice into sighs
then how will she utter the battle cries that were needed when her warrior sisters called upon her to help them defend the daughters of this world.”
Nikita Gill, Thank You, Papa
that I was as loud as the boys, that it wasn’t lady like for a girl to be this outspoken, this raucous, instead of forcing me to tone it down
to the timber of a stage whisper, just a few notes above a whimper
you took me by the hand to the hilltop by our house,
told me to use my voice by shouting to my heart’s content, told me never to forget that I was a girl not a mouse
and if I believed I had to change myself to suit anyone else I shouldn’t,
that no matter what they said my voice was so important.
You then visited my school, called a meeting with my teachers
sat them all down and said that you were raising a rebel girl
to be a warrior woman, and if she could not speak,
the same way boys are allowed to, if she had to turn her voice into sighs
then how will she utter the battle cries that were needed when her warrior sisters called upon her to help them defend the daughters of this world.”
Nikita Gill, Thank You, Papa
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