Musings

Children

My children - Diya and Deep. That's Diya holding her three day old brother. Sometimes I wonder how I could become a mother. To become a mother is to first become a child. When I look into their eyes so full of trust, so full of love, I feel I have been given a responsibility that I have at least never felt myself to be capable of. They have unveiled to me my most vulnerable self. They have showed me that if I have to be a mother to them, I cannot turn away from any other soul in the world. I thought I had wanted freedom in life, but my children have showed me that what I had thought was freedom was anything but that. Freedom can only come from giving away freedom, from living in the exact opposite, a cocoon of love, of awareness of existence alone, from agreeing to live for everybody, from the realisation that you are actually nobody. You just have a role to play, but to do that, you have to be able to contain every emotion, every bit of pain and pleasure, desire and aspiration, within yourself as if they were nothing. That perhaps becomes the biggest challenge and also perhaps the only route to freedom. Sometime my own children seem like strangers to me, I look at them and think..why do I feel so weak about them, who are these people, why do they have so much power over me...and I am amazed that I care so much. And then I realise, I really have nothing to do with them, it is a game within myself. They are here so that I can open the doors of my heart to myself, be ever more truthful to myself, find all that strength from somewhere that taking total responsibility is all about, and realise how silly, how trivial every desire in my life has been and life becomes, perhaps not free from desires, but definitely free from the desire to fulfill a desire, and I learn to live a life that is no longer propelled by the fulfillment of desires but a life that can reside in the security of existence alone.

posted by Bidisha @ 8:11 AM