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Moving Tapestry of Awe
I am so often in awe. Of another being’s endurance or grace — perhaps a lover, a river, the sea, or even time itself. I want to learn how they do it -from borrowing calm, to letting life flow through, to finally resting in stillness and reverence. To see life as a moving tapestry of happenstances, tragedies or esctasy; living through them, but not allowing any of these to change the essential core of what they are, why they are. They seem to allow both beauty and pain to go through them - such that they are touched and changed, but not rendered cynical or bitter or stormy or intractable. To be that indestructible rock which is soft to touch; to be that bleeding evening which heals; to be that person who is stubbornly calm and unchanging amidst every provocation we might throw at him. I want to be that person who recognizes the essential fragrance of the unseen flower or is hurt but does not drive into a town like a storm. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the grace we encounter in our lives - Her Grace Without Notice Rediscovering Heaven Sipping Tea in a Rumi Morning Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Lonesome by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/lonesome Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Are All Lovers Pilgrims?
We give up on those we profess to love too soon. There is something primordial, something gossamer, to do with the body, to do with first inchoate impressions, which attracts us to one another in the first place. Because relationships often begin in shallow waters. As things start to become serious, the couple traverses depths. It's not easy. And unexpected. Murky, weed-laden, algae-full. The clear eyes and the pellucid surfaces of early days is suddenly overladen with things about each other we don't even recognize. It is difficult to swim through the muck. For it seeps into our pores, into the day-&-night of our lives, into our senses, and suddenly everything which was golden turns murky, overladen with offal. What attracted now repulses. This is when things start collapsing. We completely forget what brought us to each other in the first place. In the old days, when coupledom, marriages, were unending, and meant for forever, this was a phase which was meant to be borne, till it passed - and one learnt to live with it. Often, things remained as they were, however deep the relationship went. Toxicity was the norm. Individually we were supposed to grow, as a couple we were supposed to fly. Instead there was claustrophobia and a sense of doom. But the tragedy often was elsewhere. The tragedy was when we never gave a chance to time and change. Because as one swam through the muck, something magical often started to emerge. Pellucid waters. Depths which captured light like mussels catch pearls. Where the muck was the rough exterior but grace and beauty were permanent residents - albeit hidden. For the couple, there was a sense of transcendence. And since it was reached with patience, forbearance, commitment, there was a sense of gratefulness and wonder which filled us. So, beyond anything and everything, relationships need the patience of space. Time's hard knocks are a phase to build resilience, to understand the other, and more importantly, for us to uncover layers in ourselves we didn't know existed. Discovery and understanding are both the magnet and the glue which holds a couple together. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the passages of relationships - Lovers Who Synchronise (and those who don't) Return to You I Said I Love You First Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Satisfaction by Sascha Ende Reaching the sky by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Satisfaction Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Reaching-the-sky Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Replay - Letting Go (a childhood song)
This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it, Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands. Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt as big as childhood’s sandpit, even as we tell ourselves that leaving is the best thing to do, we feel bereft. What is it about childhood that we carry it inside us wherever we go, however far we might go? We carry it often as benediction, often as an abomination. If we are lucky, it’s the sunshine of those years which light up our later years, if all our growing is done in shadows, what we have inside is a throbbing hurting night. What do we make of ourselves because of those years when we were open and ready to receive and vulnerable? What is it that we take forward and what is that that we desperately want to leave behind? What is it that we wish was different, what is that we feel should be changed but now can’t? Is there an unwarranted guilt? Is there an anger, a sense of being cheated, a feeling that someone didn’t do their given duty, of giving something as elemental as caresses of breeze and drops of sun? Because only too often, we live only in the continent of regret, bereft of the balming buffets of past winds, and stigmatise our entire lives to the memory of what can never be changed. Only when we quietly let go of what we have accumulated throughout our lives and find possibilities to remake ourselves in some form of a sunshine, can we come out as full individuals, tempered, touched but not scalded. We would finally find a new home. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the love, longing and loss of childhood - When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train My Little Zen Warrior Kripa (a blessing from a daughter) Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com. The following music was used for this media project: Music: Heaven's Gate by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gate License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Finding Home in Places We've Left Behind
Revisiting a place where one has one's roots is tricky business. On the one hand, there is enough familiarity - relatives, school chums as unrecognisable adults, hazy lines of playgrounds, peacocks, changing views from rooftops, familiar cracks now deeper - and on the other, one enters the familiar as a complete stranger. The air is lighter, the light is sharper, the language is alien in spite of familiar intonations, and one sits on judgement. And a sense of superiority emerges - as if the place I've settled in is not only different, but also way 'ahead', whatever the meaning of that word is. But the bigger tragedy is how we look at what was hometown, nay home, is now a place to judge, to compare, to find it falling short. We move on in life - whether it indicates moving forward is a moot point. What does linger is what we leave behind. Sometimes as a place stuck in a time-wrap, sometimes merely reluctant to find new beats, happy in its anachronisms. Sometimes as people, who are happy to remain what they are, tiny dreams ensconced in comfortable immobility. And that is a choice to be happy in one's own quiddities, within one's particularities. And who are we to judge, just because we have found different dreams, racier trajectories, more informed choices. If finally what we as human beings seek is serenity and fulfilment, how do we even know whether that is there in the places and people we have left behind? In our desire to know ourselves better, it is often a good idea to haul ourselves back to our roots, and then just sit back and see ourselves implode, explode, sink or float. If nothing else, we will get to know ourselves better. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ways we find and lose homes - Finding Home in Broken Places Finally Home A Home as an Open Dream Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Rising Sun by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Rising-Sun Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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When it Rains, Love Slips
Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances. Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is presumption. Of course we know when we are in love and when we are pretending: when we carry wounds like a fireball hidden inside. So much of love is the warmth of a glance as also the heartbreak of a look avoided. The shadow of love is often fraught with short-term memory. We remember the last outtake, the last remark, the last deed. The fractured nature of our feelings, invariably, leads us astray into judging love as a finality, defined as that last piece of interaction, forgetting the warmth, the light and the wonder of what it meant for so long. Of course, we drift, of course we are flooded, of course we are castaways in our own opinions, of course we are prisoners of minutiae, even as the big picture looms large beckoning us into its now-fading glory. Our obsession with the now and the just-elapsed, makes us error-prone, subsuming us in its shallow currents. We lose the perennial for the ephemeral. And even as we sit at the shore, we drown in innocuous backdrafts. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the way we romance rains and storms - Dancing in the Rains Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms & Lovers in Spate Waiting for a Storm Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Artemis by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Artemis Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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