Faded photos

They never tell the whole story do they. When the pain has eased and the memories are not quite as vivid and when the good moments somehow overshadow the bad ones, the faded photos remind you of what you left unspoken. The mind plays tricks on you, tries to convince you of your own frailty, tries to get you to ignore, to gloss over the truth. And those faded photos guilt you into agreeing with your mind. You gaslight yourself, convince yourself that it wasn't as bad as you thought, maybe it didn't really happen, maybe it was just your own darkness that took you over, maybe you weren't really pulled apart from limb to limb. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a lie you told yourself, all a lie that no one ever believed anyway. Maybe it really wasn't the way you remember it. Was it? 

Faith

Faith is not in your temples 

It's not in your mosques or churches

Faith has no place no house no dominion

None save the boundaries of your mind

Faith is not found in the following of tradition

Nor in the ritualistic consumption of evangelist propaganda 

It is not in the rules and books we read

Only in our own hearts

Faith has seen stronger hearts and deeper wounds

It has seen into the emptiness of your being

Faith has held you when you're at your weakest

And sometimes abandoned you in your blindness

Faith has brought hope and despair and love and hate, and all those complexities of human emotion

It does not ask, it does not command

It only wishes you be true to you

No, Faith has not given me a path

But only given me strength to choose my own

-Ritu Valluri Rao

Spouse bashing

The deepest most intimate conversations are never had face to face, always with a screen or a blank page. Maybe it's the fact that our bodies pick up signals from the other person that steer our conversations. Take that out of the equation and what you get is a beautiful expression of the scars below. The gradually decreasing weights of our phones and tablets and their ever increasing presence in our lives may have rendered us as a species incapable of truly talking to one another. A strange feeling then to find yourself in the midst of a slightly intoxicated conversation defending a very random practice of spouse bashing via jokes and banter. Perhaps to lighten the mood in a semi social gathering, perhaps just to lend a bit of an icebreaker. But then again true intimacy is hard as they say, and if you really don't have true intimacy in your life, is there such a thing as a true union?

A slightly intoxicated me wonders why we take so casually the institution of marriage and why we so easily assume that lightweight spouse bashing is all "just in good fun" 

A slightly intoxicated me looks around the table staring at these fine young men and women some who proclaim their undying love in one breath and talk about drinking behind their spouses back in the other

A slightly intoxicated me heads home writing this post in the taxi, making silent promises to myself that I will never be like that. 

But then again, some of those jokes are funny

Words

Words have power. The old saying sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me, truth is words hurt more than deeds. Bodies heal for the most part, wounds of the soul not so much. Words can move nations, they can build bridges, they can incite passions. They can move ordinary people to do extraordinary things, or horrible things. Hitler was the best example of that. His words moved an entire nation, an entire civilization and led them into the darkest hours of humanity. Words, have, power