embracing comfort in discomfort
ocean hug
Ma always gives out heartfelt hugs, with her body completely responding to mine and focusing intently on nourishing me the safety that had been robbed by elongated periods of discomfort. The moment she extended her arm to envelope my body, the tension instantly poured down like beads taking a fall off a broken string. I was rightfully broken, right there inside her embrace. My shoulders had been holding a cargo of boulders, all of which now clambering down my arms and smashed upon meeting the freshly mopped floors. She placed her right hand delicately on my back, stroking it with the most loving rhythm — there, there. Her left hand rested on top of my head, vaguely chanting an olden hymn to smush my worries and crush them through her five fingers. I visualized ribbons of grey smoke springing out of my head.
Shortly, the warmth of ocean waves came by. Unlike the blaring roar of the beach we stopped by in my childhood during the course of the summer’s peak, the waves she carried outpoured calmness down my spinal column like the dusk’s ocean — dainty rays of pristine sunlight permeated through the fine clouds and found their way to enwrap me. Taking a gesture from Ma’s right hand, those bodies of water cascaded through my body, massaging it on their way down whilst each bit of the atom muttered their good wishes to my ears —hang in there. I wholly resigned my body to hers, allowing every inch my of bones and joints to concede to Ma’s curves and nooks. Just at the moment she hugged me, I was inside a huge and soft mantle where nothing could possibly hurt me. With that hug, it could be that her hands had prayed to protect me in the same manner that her womb had strongly done so twenty years ago. Warm, and entirely selfless.
detachment, wholeness, all at once
The thought of my father being six feet under the ground baffles me up to this time. A dense growth of flowering shrubs enclaved his grave, carving a sweet elegy into The Void. And so it is — death is indeed a daunted chunk of brutality; there is no sentiment of pretending otherwise. A human being is hauled away from us, and all that’s left is the icy stillness of death. From another viewpoint, however, death emerges as a joyous event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding bell, a mysterium unification.
The soul attains,
as it happened,
its missing piece,
it reaches wholeness.
In a miserable bunch of quantum field excitations, a bag of bags of quarks, and a sequence of binary sparks, we’re just Zorba’s dancing atoms, when we die, we’re still dancing. in a slow ballroom dance on the universe’s floor.
