When we arrived, someone asked greeting her, how are you doing? And she said kindly, Alive! With her singular answer she left us her pearlite smile, and in that expression, the teaching we understood later, with gratitude towards life, with the energy of who is aware of what we don’t always see.
Then I thought, what is the color of life? Nature’s green that we raze and turn more arid every time. Maybe joyful red of parties, that turns out to be the same one that is spread by violence from here to the other side of the road. It better would be white of snow, like the radiant snowflakes in the clouds in the sky. Maybe black in the storms that grieves our mood sometimes. Better blue, that in the past had fish stocked at the time they went up the river. Or better yellow of mangos and pineapples transcending all. Maybe ocher that forms a memories tapestry we see in the autumn of our existence. Or perhaps which, if life doesn’t have the kindness of teaching what she shows us, if we are weak in love and fragile in hate, in our conquests through beatings, if we collapse in front of the smallest adversity and even pride is a shell that crushes humility.
This is why when other asked, what is happiness? And she answered, it is my life, many of us were surprises to listen just from her lips, until we finally knew that the happiness she was talking about, wasn’t the absence of obstacles or a garden without thorns, but being amazed by wonders, enjoying the least and smiling to the basics.
And then, we found, that she was a happy being with the flight of the butterfly she felt but didn’t see; that she enjoyed the drops of dew that caresses the soles of her feet, that felt like her hands, the individual features of her close world; that enjoyed the singing of the birds that incite the magic of her earing; that recognized with joy the company of the people beside her.
It is true that she had difficult moments, she stumbled several times, she felt as many, and she slipped I don’t know how many. But the day she stop screaming at that dark world that goes with her and start enlightening her life with attitude, she turned without knowing, into light for others and source of hope of her own destiny.
With time, she discovered that the acuity of her hearing allowed her contact with that external world that listened to others, the same one that was ratified by her hands that read the form of the things around her. Then, that voice of silence stopped being weary, the one that has been her friend since she was a child, and in return started enjoying the harmony of the musical notes she learned to play and turned out to be an unknown facet of her own artistic skills. But her life changed forever, when she banned that anger about everything and nothing with everyone that came to her, when she started playing with herself identifying the steps of who approached her, and sensing the sweet fragrance of flowers, the smell of tangerines and guavas.
Her world has always been framed by x-ray plates that form a curtain in her sight, stopped in time. She hears about places with colors, unknown and interpreted in the imagination that only she understands; about a world spoken to her and sensed with the harmony of listening, in the marks of smells and in her artisan hands of everyone else’s reality. However what she doesn’t know is why they say that the real flashes of light are in her smile that reflects inner peace that allows her to act as a noble hearted person.
Frisking the maze of her memories, there is an inventory of life filled with childhood silences, with half-truths and words whispered in her ears to hide truth. Even so, that functional absence as part of her life, stopped being important when she accepted her condition without despair; when she stopped saying I want to die and decided that while that uncertain day comes, it’s not about prolonging life but living it completely and in the best way, with the inevitable dose of her disability state, but with the least amount of unhappiness;Photography: Nessa Twix © Solkes 2015 when she faced the suffering that harasses the mind that doesn’t accept pains and sinks in them, at that time she understood that only with the power of faith and magic of love she was able to be happy despite the adversity.
Knowing the experience she was able to make us understand, that the wise is happy because has no attachments accepting the ups and downs of destiny without nagging, because the light of happiness is in our own control of growing emotional intelligence, although that fullness was born in her when she decided to face the enemies of happiness and her inner peace: pride, hate and anger.
Definitively, we have to ban the poison that surrounds pride, the fire that anger has, the look planted in hate and the anchor placed in the past that is only beaten when you achieve profound and generous forgiveness.
Seeing her happiness, she taught us that living was existing having worries being part of life, that the formula for happiness doesn’t exist, and that material goods can be broken every day, but not the attitude. After listening to her, and after saying goodbye, someone said: taking life as if we deserve it, is a mistake. Thanking since you wake up until you go to bed, even the smallest details, is a way of understanding that you are alive. But it was thanks to her that we understood that there are beings that give us energy that seem to be from other worlds and we call them angels.
What we suffer is a cursed poverty: the one of whom suffers not for being poor but for not being rich. The one of whom tolerates all shared misfortune. The one of who doesn’t want to stop it, but to abolish the good he envies. And we so clumsy, imagining the blindness of the one who lives with it, and we have it when we stop seeing the neighbor that dies of cold, hunger, misery and we only have eyes for our measly problems and small pains… Only visiting the mind, the thinking, the experience, the senses and the reality, we understand the journey of the sensitivities of others.
