There’s a gloom to the English weather, when the sun hides, that goes against everything I packed in my suitcase. Which wasn’t much. I’m sitting in an internet cafe, wearing a hot pink man-made-material sari, bright as a zinnia. The only thing else I brought to wear was another sari. I lay in bed this morning and thought about the fact that I am here in England for a week, prior to moving location to Varanasi, India, and the only thing I really packed beyond that was:
- a brilliantly stocked first aid kit
- two small Indian cotton blankets
- one red Indian khadi shawl
- a pair of underwear
- a little black notebook that I filled with recipes, a calendar,
- my tabla notes, and extra paper for lyric writing
- a handmade stack of cue cards in the Hindi alphabet
- two Hindi language books
- a pair of bed sheets
I suppose I could wear the bed sheets if push comes to shove.
But I miss my steel-toed boots. What a person wears sometimes helps them to remember who they are and what they need to be. I get dressed in the morning based on what activity I think I’ll engage in that day. I think this is common for most people. If I think I’ll be needing to make some tough business calls, I throw on a pair of pants.
This idea reminds me about a story I once read about a woman tourist in Argentina. She needed to purchase underclothes, and was going to go with her typical choice of the plain, white, stoic cotton variety. In the end, when the counter lady convinced her otherwise, the woman writes of how she found herself with a new sense of confidence and vitality. She carried herself differently. She took chances. And this was simply because she was wearing sexy underwear. Go figure.
I will have to fight for a sense of what is still in me.
There’s a book by an Afghani woman named Latifa called “My Forbidden Face.” (Info can be had about this book at www.virago.co.uk) It’s the story of a young girl growing up under Taliban rule, and I finished reading it last night because I couldn’t sleep. After I finished the last chapter, I laid awake some more, thinking about the nature of freedom and free will.
I’ve spent more than the last six years in a wrestling match with myself about why God allows bad things to happen. My brain has always understood the logical arguments, the simplified answers that claim that the choice to love or hate is the only way a human can be human. I find it hard to accept that one person’s free will can cancel out another person’s free will. I see the pain in the eyes of a friend who has suffered at the hands of her father’s abuse. Many times the abused becomes the abuser. I end up feeling answerless and frustrated.
The sound of my eyelashes against the pillow makes a loud sound in my ears. Chris is sound asleep beside me. I am thinking about life in Afghanistan. My heart feels more and more like God wove free will into our world because he had no other choice but to give us ours. I discover this as I read about a people that have experienced more suffering than I may ever know. I pull this conclusion from the writings of Latifa who has spent her entire childhood not being able to live in the freedom that I have known for my entire life. At the end of the day, I am not forced to wear a burqa or chador to cover my face, even though I feel as if I have forced a certain kind of weird purdah on myself in packing only Indian clothes.
Life is like a Mary Poppins bag. You think you are pulling out a small handkerchief to blow your nose, and your hands grasp a roaring tiger instead. Do you think about the choices you make? I wonder if we could be more aware. I need to be more thankful. Isn’t it crazy that someone else’s hell reminds me of this?
I hope we can both think more about all these things, and that we’ll turn the thoughts into something we actively do. Keep growing in the direction of love and the choices that bring more of it to the people whose eyes will meet yours today.
peace to you
m.
