More - Me

Sharing With a Friend for her 50th Birthday:


Each decade causes me to reflect and realise that I am a better me than before. 


I know more, understand more, realise more, have more sympathy, more compassion, more shared laughter with people and with a I, that only I know of, inside. 

I am stronger inside, have more clarity and am more inclusive. Sometimes I worry that I do not love my family sufficiently, only to realise that others are becoming my own - so I love more and many more. 

I love being where I am in life, doing what I have chosen to - for now. I have less anger, but more pain. I have shed most fears - or so I think, because, what are fears but imaginations set to restrict you to a comfortable path?

 Till about a year, I also felt better physically, stronger and more flexible - could do more swimming, more yoga, walk more, talk more, drink more. Since I was sick last summer, my body has had a hard time recovering its strength and resilience. I accept this, even while I fight this.

My face is more wrinkled and more drawn, my hair is very grey - yet with long stares at my mirror I see that I have lived so far - not just preserved, and each moment of this life has been precious. I have chosen to laugh and weep rather than choose a comfortable path - my face shows my half a century of this laughter  and crying. I have thought my thoughts and decided to become what is deliberately - me.

I know that I am nothing, and there is no grand purpose to life - and I accept this; and yet in this nothingness - I am also everything. I am a piece that makes the whole, Whole. 

Arati @ 52

Kashmir Dreams

Memories and nightmares my days sustain
Kashmir re-surges in my blood, thick with pain

Torture cells around the crystal lake abound,
while dead disappear below without a sound.

Snow capped hills bear a silent testimony
to firings, rapes, and repressive hegemony

rolls of barbed wires cut every street in two
dicing minds, people, cultures and memories too

Young hands pick up stones and throw
at soldiers, police, and every Indian foe

Mothers beat their chest and wail
at dead sons, bruised, bloodied, cold and pale

Lands shrouded in deep, merciless snow
silent, as the dead pile un-named below

no spring will melt heart's winter ice
where Azadi is claiming a lover's price

Oppressors, that is the name for you and I
a sentence, I will shamefully bear, till I die.