Some meetings are life changing. Some people meant to enter your life to show you that nothing is random, that life has a design or like Mary Morgan quotes Rumi to emphasise just incase you missed the point, ” Someone else is driving the caravan.”
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I met her quite by chance last year and you may have read on this site about her work as a writer and activist so will fast forward this story to the fact that she is in Bangalore for a day. And the hotel room where I went today to see her, turned again into a life lesson..the kind she always imparts just by example when she meets even random strangers. Though she would insist on taking the word random out of every encounter and conversation.
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She began the conversation today like we have never been apart though she lives in New York and as she loves to do even in her mails, began to quote poetry that can run in your veins like blood and become a part of you. Poetry by Mary Oliver and Rainer Maria Rilke that inspires her but her own life is inspiring enough. She turned 70 last year… made peace with the number and learnt to dance the tango, has been travelling across the universe because the world seems to be too limited a word for her. From Istanbul to Thiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu, then Chennai where she watched over a sick friend, and a little village where she helps an NGO to take care of needy children and where a young girl who till last year was on the verge of dying because of a heart ailment, is now thriving because Mary raised the resources to help her through a surgery and decided to not look away. She has issues with that. People who pretend not to see the possibilities for the good they can do for others and themselves but the one thing she has learnt is to not force the issue in any aspect of life. And laughs when I tap too forcefully at her laptop. “Gently, ” she shows me how and says, “It’s how you have been taught. It’s okay. You will do it differently when you notice the pattern.”
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Patterns and afflictions. She acutely feels on behalf of those who suffer from them but she says, “You can never force yourself to outgrow a pattern. The only thing to do is to notice what you do again and again. And understand that what persists is what you are feeding. YOU. When you stop feeding a pattern, it loses its power over you. Then it leaves you instead of you wanting to leave it.”
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The key to a harmonious life, she says is silence. We must learn to stop the noise in our heads and “listen!” Not just to others but ourselves. To know that every answer is available and within us if we would only learn to be still, be quiet and not hurry all the time. “Listening doesn’t come naturally to most people, ” she says with a smile but if we cut through words to see a person for who he or she is..we would connect.
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We talk as usual about love and I forget her age because her blue eyes light up and her voice turns girlish though her wisdom is hard won. She says, “I used to think that love was about having your needs met and meeting someone’s needs but no, it is about holding the other person like a mirror to see the things you would not see or acknowledge in yourself otherwise. To face them. See yourself in entirety. Not just in parts you are comfortable with. But things you have buried. That is what a real relationship teaches you. Everyone who comes in your life is a teacher.”
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She recalls her first meeting with Dr Benjamin Spock, her late husband and says, “there was instant recognition and for two forces to come together and create a thunderclap, there has to be an equal force of attraction but sometimes meetings are not so dramatic. They happen quietly but grow into enduring relationships.”
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She knows that everyone fears impermanence in love but she shakes her head, “Everything is meant to be impermanent. Even this body. My body is 70 years old but I am more than that. Like Swami Nisargadatta Maharaj says in his book I AM THAT, who we are is timeless, ageless, beyond words and explanation. So nothing ever remains or passes.”