A Woman With Two Lights
There is no one left to speak with now. In company, and even in families, we do not converse. We merely chatter. Words are thrown like pebbles across a lake : they skim, they hit, they skip, they vanish. None of them sink to where the heart keeps its water.
In the overwhelming noise created by the mismatch of delivery and expectation in our relations, sincere communication has dried up. We say “I’m fine” when we are breaking. We say “It’s okay” when nothing is. We speak to be heard, not to be understood. And so we are surrounded by voices, yet alone. A soldered connection is rare. The kind that holds, that does not come apart under heat. The kind that was forged without asking for anything back. When it does come, it does not arrive with fanfare. It arrives as fog. Slow, soft, absolute. It spreads without announcement until it engulfs and envelopes. Beneath that fog the world goes quiet. Communication ceases to be audible. It becomes silent, searching, profound, and visible only to the two souls inside it. No audience. No witnesses. No supporters . And no. detractors .
That is how it was with my mother. We spoke little. The house did not need many words, because her presence was already a sentence, complete. The moment I sat before her, my heart was full. She required no explanations from me. Her gaze did the work of paragraphs. The quiet steadiness of her listening was a language older than speech. It was a bouquet of assurances and promises .
She had endured more sorrow than one life should bear. It came to her early and stayed late. The world asked too much and gave too little. And still, that sorrow never extinguished the luminous world within her heart and mind. She was a woman with two lights. The first was lent by nature: the sun, which rises each morning without complaint, which gives without keeping account. The second was her own: an enduring inner luminosity that asked for nothing and gave everything. By that light she could see clearly. She could discern the precious gems of truth among pebbles of falsehood. She could hear truth beneath noise. She possessed a rare suppleness : not weakness, but the moral courage to remain tender in a world that rewards hardness.
Forgive and forget was not a maxim she recited. It was a life she practiced, daily, without audience. She forgave, because to harbour bitterness would have dimmed her. She forgot, because love demanded more of her attention than injury did. I, however, am not made of the same substance. I am of this noisy time. I forget, but I don't know how to forgive. Forgiveness, I believe, is the province of saints. I am not a saint. Perhaps she was.
Now the world is loud again. Full of expectations that deliveries can't match . Full of words that do not arrive from the path of silent empathy . For me, her absence resounds more clearly than any voice. Sincere communication is scarce. It does not reside in words. It resides in presence : in the simple, unguarded act of being-with.
I am not a lover of darkness. I have never courted it. And yet I know the cost of keeping a light alive when existence sends its tempests again and again to put it out. Quite often , the wind is relentless : it takes, it breaks, it asks for nothing and gives no reason. And still I shield what little flame is left . If any light remains in me, it is not mine. It is borrowed. Half from the sun mother loved, that merciless and faithful rising. Half from the steady fire she kept burning in her chest through every storm, without complaint, without reward. She did not give me the world. She gave me light to walk through it. And in a world that insists on darkness, i dare and carry even a borrowed flame . I cannot be what she was . But I can remember. And in remembering, I exist .
( Avtar Mota )
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