Part II
Today, I arrive at my grandparents’ meagre home in a small village. I see my ninety year old grandfather after a decade. My eyes crack open with tears of joy as his palms feel my face, my cheeks, perhaps he is checking whether I am real. Am I really here? He is old and cannot hear me, but there is no need for words. What could we tell each other after so long? There is only feeling. I hug him and hug him and we cry and he points at the wall where there is god painted and he nods and cries and hugs me again.
These moments are holy. My god is not in the churches, in the grandiose paintings and golden chandeliers. My god is right here, in my grandfather’s eyes finding me after a decade.
I spend my days with so much slowness, I feel as if the time is almost stopped. I watch my grandmother cook, how she kneads the dough with her small hands, I watch her twist and turn it, compressing her loving into the food she makes, blessing it each time she presses her knuckles. Every now and then she murmurs to herself gratitude for the flour, the oil, thanking the seed which sprouted into this grain that feeds us. I watch her with shivers on my skin: this simplicity of her heart that harbours such a deep love for god and reverence for the every day life.
Next door lives my uncle. When he was eleven, he was told he won’t live for much longer. With diabetes and a lot of other complications, the doctors reduced him from a person to a deadline for dying, squeezing all his dreams, passions into a box of medications to be taken daily until death. He’s over sixty now, and he died many times throughout his life, his wife finding him cold to touch in the mornings, yet somehow he would make it back. Somehow, his soul was refusing to leave. Or perhaps it was my grandmother’s prayers from next door that kept him here.
She tells me: I don’t want my son to go before me. Every day I pray to god that he takes me instead of him. He leaves us both.
Today those that are crowned as heroes are men starved for power in bright shirts and ironed suits. Those that are endowed as heroes are nothing more than hungry men, greedy and filled with lust. My uncle is a real hero. I watch him laugh and joke with my grandparents, I watch him walk and cook and eat, I watch his aliveness, his joy for life in spite of all the hardships and the illness within his body. To him, every day is a gift, for he is never guaranteed to make it through the night. He’s accustomed to Death and her ways of working. Each morning, he is grateful to see his wife for one more day and daily he cooks for them as a way to show his love.
Somebody told me once that the birds sing every morning to signal to each other that they have made it through another night. Every morning my uncle would come over to greet us and I would remember the birds, their blessings for another day. What a miracle.
I’ve been living so accustomed to this daily rut of waking and going through the motions, again and again, awake yet lacking presence. Spending these few days with my family woke me to the realisation that dawns are gifts and each dusk is a gratitude prayer, and that in-between the dawn and the dusk, we have a choice, always.
On the last day, I tell them all goodbye. I am certain of the uncertainty. I might not see them again. My grandfather squeezes my face and blesses me. I hide my emotions within my belly, distracting from my pain with jokes and laughter, masking my grief for leaving him. I tell him Don’t worry I’ll be back sooner next time, not after ten years. Unlike me, his eyes are tearing and I can hear the pain in the space between us like a weighted energy. You will come back, it is me that will not be here when you return.
I am home now, filled with love for my grandparents, my land and also filled with longing, a restlessness to be back there again, to spend even one more day in the presence of my grandparents. I will not forget that simplicity and I will not forget the promise that I made to myself to live with ease, to greet the morning, to sit with silence, to love fully.
***
I wrote the following poem on my journey home, flying back from Romania, feeling overwhelmed by intense feelings of love for my land, for my grandparents and family and for the little girl that I was growing up there.
***
When I loosen the grip on the workings of my life
I am no longer frightened of Death. The grandiose departure from this world.
What else can I do except surrender to the motion of my aliveness?
Surrender to the divine desires.
Is this how He sees us? Small trinkets of light.
We made beauty out of everything. Look at us
paving our paths with light, intertwined. Striving to survive.
And suddenly,
everything I am leaving behind seems so insignificant.
I no longer miss and no longer crave the ghosts of my past. As if renewed by some miracle,
I am fully here, now,
as I am.
There’s a longing that is another face of loving.
You cannot love without the absence of love hurting to the bone. It is in this absence that our love strengthens, in the moment of separation that we deepen our feeling, in the grieving that we make space for this arrival. Love isn’t in the losing of self into another, the forgetting of our edges, the merging. It is within our very edges, within the boundary that borders our intricate hearts that we find this visceral love, a love that is real and not the illusion which numbs so many others.
I believe in a love that is hidden in our very own exile, hidden in the years of longing stored up like red bricks building the foundation of home. I believe in a love strengthened by this longing, seeking the stranger whose palms mirror your own, seeking the heart whose rhythms are in perfect synchronisation with your own, and has always been. Longing is the secret way to love and this wound, the door.
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