“What if all our lives were simply attention to them both?” This statement sums it all up Nia. Most of us are so deep in slumber, so blissfully unaware of the wonders and the horrors of human existence, that we sometimes tend to lose our tendency to empathise, to understand that others too mirror our experiences of joy and pain alike. We are all alike.
Thank you dear Nia for being a part of this conversation. Your thoughts are valued deeply. 💜🌼
Swarna, there are no words to express the heartbreaking beauty and truth of this piece. So many gorgeous images of the soul's dance. My Tibetan teacher always repeats the Buddhist philosophy that you reflected, "Compassion is both the path and the result of a spiritual practice."
"Maybe death is all but a transformation from one form to another, a total metamorphosis to strip familiarity and hence evoke a love beyond attachment."--- your wisdom meets your writing genius.
I cannot even begin to tell you how this both wrung me out and filled me up again. I think a lot about grief and how little the dominant culture allows for true mourning, for space and relationship of any kind. There is so much *power* in your writing about all of this, Swarna. I've come back and reread it three times now and it still won't be enough. And that rose seller ... I thought immediately of smiles I exchanged with a rose seller in Russia in the depths of winter on a rutted road behind the Moscow train stations. Beauty and grief, all around us, all the time. What if all our lives were simply attention to them both?
This was so moving--the rose seller, the necessity of witness, of finding room for compassion and pain in a world that demands that we pretend otherwise. I loved this line: "It is ‘we’ who suffer, it is for ‘us’ that we heal."--that feels like the sum of everything about living in this world, but that is so neglected. Thinking of you and sending love.💜
“What if all our lives were simply attention to them both?” This statement sums it all up Nia. Most of us are so deep in slumber, so blissfully unaware of the wonders and the horrors of human existence, that we sometimes tend to lose our tendency to empathise, to understand that others too mirror our experiences of joy and pain alike. We are all alike.
Thank you dear Nia for being a part of this conversation. Your thoughts are valued deeply. 💜🌼
Swarna, there are no words to express the heartbreaking beauty and truth of this piece. So many gorgeous images of the soul's dance. My Tibetan teacher always repeats the Buddhist philosophy that you reflected, "Compassion is both the path and the result of a spiritual practice."
"Maybe death is all but a transformation from one form to another, a total metamorphosis to strip familiarity and hence evoke a love beyond attachment."--- your wisdom meets your writing genius.
Sending you light and comfort🌺
I cannot even begin to tell you how this both wrung me out and filled me up again. I think a lot about grief and how little the dominant culture allows for true mourning, for space and relationship of any kind. There is so much *power* in your writing about all of this, Swarna. I've come back and reread it three times now and it still won't be enough. And that rose seller ... I thought immediately of smiles I exchanged with a rose seller in Russia in the depths of winter on a rutted road behind the Moscow train stations. Beauty and grief, all around us, all the time. What if all our lives were simply attention to them both?
This was so moving--the rose seller, the necessity of witness, of finding room for compassion and pain in a world that demands that we pretend otherwise. I loved this line: "It is ‘we’ who suffer, it is for ‘us’ that we heal."--that feels like the sum of everything about living in this world, but that is so neglected. Thinking of you and sending love.💜
This was beautiful. Thank you for sharing this. The rose seller...