PAIN

By Ilija Saula

Life is relentless toward us, just as love is relentless toward it. Experience is an artist — a painter and a sculptor — shaping and revealing every form of life in its true light and expression. Experience is an inheritance no one puts in a will, though it should stand at the very top.

Pain is a color whose shades are altered by love. We deceive ourselves, thinking pain disappears — it merely grows quiet, always ready to place us back in chains. Some people laugh loudly when struck by deep pain; experience has taught them how to strip it of its power and turn it into alstroemerias, until the moment it becomes pain again.

A sob is a glance at a starless sky, and a sigh is the birth of a new day. Even in the Vedas, one finds black and white — symbols of day and night, light and darkness, the cycle that reveals a secret and immerses it into the experience through which we must endure all changes born of God’s love for life.

To love means to keep pain in captivity, to let it out for a brief walk during the day and then return it to its servitude. Mute needles dipped in alcohol keep me from approaching the crematorium of joy and freeing it with the love I believe in while I love.

My finger has sunk into the light — I think dawn has already broken.

Good morning, my friend.