Harsh's Writings - Bandages and Flowers
Here is a piece of my mind in the last fortnight! Do give it a read and tell me how good or bad was! I really appreciate honest feedbacks and my letters are all about saying things straight from the heart, without any filters! It is a sunny morning of spring. I look at the trees from my balcony. It is a nice view. But then, my mom comes around and starts arranging things in my room as well as the whole house. And as soon as she is done, she arranges flowers in various places in the house. Be it the centre table in the hall or the side table near the door, she makes rangoli in the house with the flowers. Then I am called to review it. I say it is nice or not based on how it looks but more importantly, I see how it adds beauty to the house. I then resume the tree-watching session from the balcony. The flowers in my house do look beautiful but somehow, they do not seem as beautiful as they are on the trees. I wonder about this. Is it because the flowers I have at my home are already stale and dead? Or is it just because I am so close to the flowers at my house that I see them very clearly with every detail and meticulousness? There is only one way to know this- to go down and see it through my eyes. I venture out of my house to the garden in my society as well as outside.
Raj’s Version
When we see the wounds of people – mental or physical – acknowledge them, accept them, and empathize with them, it allows us to become a less performative society. Sometimes things need to be defined to be understood, as bell hooks argue in her book All About Love: “if our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying”. Pain and love are generally mystified to make the concepts of impenetrable obscurity, and how that leaves us helpless and broken is quite evident on the faces that you see on the streets. They seem to be wanting to shout, some managing to even shout out through their faces, but nothing audible comes out, for we have not the space or the language. How will then anything but weeds spring out of these cracks? These wounds and cracks are inevitable, whereas what springs out of them is something we can influence, like ‘kintsugi’ with pottery, can we work towards creating such an environment where flowers bloom out of these cracks of our wounds? And as often happens with the ideas we like, but it seems far-fetched, we develop an itch for it whereby we strive to reach or achieve it at least symbolically if not practically, it then inevitably becomes a tattoo concept. I was mildly surprised to learn (while writing this very piece) that there already exist a variety of tattoo concepts (and illustrations by artists) that bring together band-aids and flowers. Upon trying to understand the meaning, it wasn’t far away from the point where I began: kintsugi. The internet expresses the meaning of these tattoos and illustrations as: “This might be a physical wound or an emotional wound, but the Band-Aid tattoo represents a wound that is present or a wound that is healing. Talking to people that have this tattoo, many of the ones will say they have it because they have an emotional wound that has not healed.” Flowers are a sign of hope and beauty. They have inspired songs, plays, novels, lovers, gods, and demons, across literature, architecture, history, philosophy, and other fields that you can think of. How the bees and butterflies hover around it and how even the mention of flowers conjures up a nice and sunny image in our minds but then again I feel we betray the essence and only the tangible beauty is admired while the soul of the flower often dies alone in silence. Recently I posted something about it on my Instagram; Looks like even the flowers that rein the lands of beauty need the bandages when the sun sets in their kingdom. So this relationship seems quite mutually dependent on healing and well being. We always try to preserve the beauty of things without really acknowledging them in their entirety. How often do we stop to think about the entire life cycle of a flower? How often does art explore the “non-beautiful” parts of the flower’s life… I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but the simple thing that bothers me is why do we need to camouflage our wounds, our past, our cracks? And the other thing is that how come only the flower that blooms gets all the praise, who will cry for the dead flower and the unborn bud? Ayee! Thank you so much for reading and I would be so happy to know what you think about this letter. Do feel free to give me any constructive feedback. I would really appreciate it! If you have a topic in mind that you would like me to write upon, do write below.
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