GABRIELA YARELIZ

Warning-Ek minute: This is a personal post. If you don’t care, I don’t mind. I just wanted to immortalize the thought by typing it out. Simple.

“CERTAIN THINGS CAPTURE THE EYE, PURSUE ONLY THOSE THAT CAPTURE THE HEART-“ANCIENT INDIAN PROVERB

By: Gabriela Yareliz

You know that love? It’s the love that makes you nervous; the love that drives out fear; the love that makes you smile without reason; the love that makes you slightly suspicious; the love that makes you quiet; the love that gives you a new perspective; the love that warms you like the rays of the sun but can at the same time leave your frozen like the stillness in a forest in the winter; the love that is like tiny lights on a dark night; the love that makes the ocean seem small; the love that needs no words; the love that can at times leave you confused;–you know, the love that makes you feel pain and joy and everything you can only feel if your heart’s doors are swung wide open; it is when your heart is wide open and vulnerable; it is when you believe in everything.

That is magical; I had lost that expectation to ever feel like that. The difference between me on Tuesday before I stepped into the cathedral and today is hard to explain. It wasn’t anything I said, or anyone I met–it just sort of happened.

I sat there, admiring the gorgeous church. I opened a Bible in front of me to 2 Kings, which never fails to inspire me (especially the passages about war and people getting their heads chopped off–kidding)… and I looked ahead, and this is what I saw:

There was absolute silence. I sat there praying. Praying for family, friends, wisdom–I noticed in front of me, a young man got up to leave his pew where he had been praying, and he walked out. I sat there in the silence. Later that day, I was walking by a townhouse with a glassy front, and inside, one could see the walls were shelves and the walls were filled with books.

Like many things in the city, it was perfection, beauty and glamour. I stood there on the other side of the window feeling that I was almost inside because of the size and clarity of the window. I stood absorbed, looking in. Sometimes, when one beholds such perfection, all you can help thinking is– I want this. This is so beautiful. It was a moment that absored me as my eyes wandered the room from the sidewalk. I then went to rest my hand on the iron gate and with the contact of the iron and my fingers, reality settled in. I looked away and began to think, This is not why I am here. It isn’t about having all of these things. And I walked away. I didn’t look back inside. I just thought of everything frivolous, gorgeous and empty that we try to acquire in life to make some sort of little utopia for ourselves thinking that we are justified, choosing to forget those in despair, poverty and suffering. Even within those walls of magazine perfection, suffering can exist–but I know deep inside that to acquire that, to get a fabulous job and live comfortably, forgetting about the world around me in a small utopian world composed of a routine and grand staircases–that is not why I am here. Though that day I left feeling nothing in particular, I knew I had once again escaped the enchantment of beauty; I walked away different.

I was walking by a shop that looks like a jungle inside with branches, sticks, plants and trees lining the walls. They had a basket outside with gorgeous flower tops and it said “Take a flower.” I found a gorgeous, bushy rose and walked away feeling this weird overwhelming feeling of happiness.

Small things change us. A glance; a smile; a scent; an unexpected surprise.

I think about everything I have experienced and all of the people I have met in life; teachers, playgrounds, plays, books, churches, tests, nights studying, Cambridge, French, friends, enemies, Romanians, England, skirt-filled camps, moments on the cricket field grass, Stoneridge, UF, rain, airports, Paris, La Rochelle nights looking at the lighthouse, Bollywood moments, New York, law school dealing–we change.

Sad eyes, smiles, happy eyes, flowers, dogs, ocean, love; we keep changing, and we are never the same.

Der lagi lekin maine ab hai jeena seekh liya
Jaise bhi ho’n din maine ab
hai jeena seekh liya
Ab maine ye jaana hai, khushi hai kya, gham kya..
Dono hi, do pal ki hai ruttein
Na yeh thehre na rukein
Zindagi do
rangon se bane
Ab roothe, ab mane
Yehi toh hai, yehi toh hai,
yahaan

It took time, but I learnt to live,
however be the days, I
have learnt to live,
now I have known this, what’s happiness and what’s
sorrow
both are weathers of two moments
neither they wait nor stay
life
gets made of two colors,
now angry, now placated,
this, this is here..

-Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

People are made of places

People are made of places. They carry with them hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace or the cool eyes of sea gazers. Atmosphere of cities how different drops from them, like the smell of smog or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring, nature tidily plotted with a guidebook; or the smell of work, glue factories maybe, chromium-plated offices; smell of subways crowded at rush hours.

Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods; blueberry patches in the burned-out bush; wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint, with yards where hens and chickens circle about, clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses behind which violets grow. Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow.

By: Elizabeth Brewster

-With love,

Gabriela Yareliz