The Faraway Nearby

And I met Rebecca Solnit again, while she was wondering about what to do with the huge pile of apricots she received as a kind of inheritance from her mother. From there, we went on a journey together, flipping through a book of stories that we have been telling ourselves since childhood. Those were stories of resentment, of helplessness of childhood, of places getting attached to our core of being, of pain and its necessity in life and of a million other things that I am yet to find the right words for.

I realized that our shared stories about mothers are revelations themselves when I am mature enough to keep the resentment at bay. Neither of us had the memory of the sweetness of mother's love, but we do hold on to the bitter memories more tightly. We are similar in never wanting to become our mothers, and yet finding the bits and pieces of our mothers in ourselves as we grow older. 

"When I am most aggrieved, I feel most like her, with her sense of having been shorted, of being the victim, and not being her was always my goal. In this sense I saw, late in the game, I too was seeking to annihilate."

The stories we tell ourselves are the ones that have the most power over us. Resentments make you embellish those stories with finer details each time you think about them. It is a never-ending process until we are self-aware enough to know the impact it has on us and decide to let go of them. Forgiveness still seems to be a long way from where I am standing. But we all have to start that journey somewhere.

Apart from the extremely relatable chapters of Apricots and Mirrors, the chapter that inspired me was "Wound". We live in constant fear of pain, trying to find ways to protect ourselves or numb ourselves out. Without pain, there is no sense of self. Without pain, we will end up damaging ourselves like a leper. With pain, there is a chance that we might feel for ourselves and sometimes for others, too.

Solnit emerged as a different person at the end of the book and the journey continues for me. Forgiveness and letting go is an exhausting uphill climb. Some days I feel that I am almost there, then the mind starts telling those stories again and before I realize I am thrown back to the base of that summit. I am yet to find my Iceland from where I can gain distance from those emotions.

Words fail me whenever I want to describe the impact Solnit's writing has on me. Sometimes the beauty of her allegories make me stunned and I keep re-reading those passages again until I can fully appreciate them. In a way, I am meditating with the help of her words, gaining distance and perspective on everything that is troubling me. I know that I will come back to this book again for I am sure that there are missing pieces that my simple mind was not able to connect to the bigger narrative. This journey with Rebecca Solnit shall continue.

"Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The birds sleep on, inadvertent givers. The moths fly on, enriched. We feed on stories, on the spaciousness they open up when they let us travel in our imagination beyond our own limits , when they dissolve the boundaries that confine us and urge us to extend the potentialities of our imperfect, broken incomplete selves. Those apricots my brother brought me in three big cardboard boxes long ago, were they tears too? And this book, is it tears? Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?"

I almost missed the above parallel narrative of "Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds" in the book. Some of us, the moths , live because of the sustenance provided by such tears. And I had my fair share of Rebecca Solnit's tears.