Tag: Family

Dialogue III — Two Shores, One Sea

“Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

GyaniNani and TD

TD: Nani, before we begin — I read the replies to last week’s question.

GyaniNani: So did I. Twice.

TD: Some comments are quite thought-provoking.

GyaniNani: That is why we are doing this in the open and not in a book. A book would only have had the two of us in it.

TD: Then let me start where everyone starts.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”

It is on wedding cards. It is on wall hangings. I have heard it read aloud at three weddings.

GyaniNani: And?

TD: And this time a different sentence stopped me.

“Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

Why a sea, Nani? He could have said a bridge. A bridge connects. A bridge is what we would have chosen.

GyaniNani: That is a good question. Let me ask you one back.

What happens if two shores become one?

TD: (hmmm)

The sea disappears.

GyaniNani: Yes.

TD: Wait.

Then separation is not the opposite of love. Separation is what allows love to exist at all.

GyaniNani: Not separation. Be careful with the word.

Individuality.

The sea does not divide the shores. It is the only reason they are in relationship. It touches both of them at once, all the time, and it asks neither of them to disappear.

TD: So love is not the bridge.

Love is the sea itself.

GyaniNani: Say more.

TD: A bridge is built. It is fixed. It has a beginning and an end, and once it is built nothing about it moves.

A sea is alive. It has weather. It has tides. It is boundless.

And the source and the destination remain separate — and are connected anyway. Forever.

GyaniNani: I wrote almost exactly that in the margin, years ago. The sea is boundless, huge, endless — the source and destination remain separate — beautiful.

TD: I would not have got there without the question you asked me.

GyaniNani: And I would not have said it as well as you just did. We are even.

TD: There is more in that margin, though. On the facing page you wrote two things.

Don’t control and confine your love — let it breathe.

And below the oak and the cypress: not to overpower.

GyaniNani: Those two notes are twenty years apart. I can tell from the pencil.

TD: What changed between them?

GyaniNani: The first one is about what you do to love. The second is about what you do to a person.

Confining love makes it stale. Overpowering a person makes them smaller. They are not the same failure, though they usually travel together.

TD: In my work we have language for the second one. Enmeshment. Differentiation. Whether two people can stay connected without one of them dissolving.

GyaniNani: And Gibran says: the pillars of the temple stand apart.

TD: The oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

GyaniNani: Which is the more useful sentence to say to a couple at the end of a long argument?

TD: (hahahah) Honestly? The trees.

GyaniNani: I thought so.

TD: But not because the clinical word is worse. Because the trees do not sound like a diagnosis. Nobody has to be the sick one for the trees to be true.

GyaniNani: That is exactly it. That is what poetry can still do that our vocabulary cannot.

TD: There is one image in the chapter I keep going back to.

“Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.”

Two strings. Never touching.

And the music only exists because they do not touch.

GyaniNani: Nobody quotes that line. It may be the best one in the chapter.

(Aha!)

TD: Nani. Can we go to the children now?

GyaniNani: Go.

TD: When I first read “Your children are not your children”, I thought Gibran was asking parents to be detached. It sounded cold to me. Almost cruel to the woman holding a baby who had just asked him a question.

I do not think that any more.

GyaniNani: What changed?

TD: I noticed what he does not say.

He never says do not love them.

He says do not own them.

GyaniNani: (quietly) Say that again.

TD: He never says do not love them. He says do not own them.

GyaniNani: That is the whole chapter, and I have never heard it put that plainly.

I wrote something under that passage in my own copy. In pencil.

Children are not our extensions. They are not our expectations.

TD: The second half of that is the harder one.

Because parents in India do not usually possess their children physically. Not any more. The children leave. They move cities, they move countries.

GyaniNani: And they are still owned.

TD: Through expectation. It travels by phone. It survives distance perfectly.

GyaniNani: It is the quietest form of possession there is, and it does not feel like possession to the person doing it. It feels like love. It feels like ambition on someone’s behalf.

TD: What I see most often is a parent who never asks, Who is this child?

They ask, Why is this child not becoming the person I imagined?

GyaniNani: And the child hears that question even when it is never spoken.

Which is why Gibran says: they come through you, but not from you.

TD: There is a line just before the Archer that unsettles me more than the famous one.

“You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

Not even in your dreams. He closes that door completely.

GyaniNani: And then he says the thing that people skip past.

“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

TD: Which is a sentence about grief, really.

GyaniNani: It is. Every parent is grieving a child who no longer exists — the four-year-old, the one who needed you at midnight. That child is genuinely gone. And we are not allowed to say so, because the person standing in front of us is alive and well and asking us not to fuss.

TD: I do not think I understood that until just now.

GyaniNani: You will understand it properly in about twenty years. That is not a dismissal. It is the same thing we said last week about love.

TD: Then let me end with the part nobody talks about.

Everyone quotes “your children are not your children.”

Hardly anyone talks about the Archer.

GyaniNani: What did you see there?

TD: That the Archer loves the arrow.

But He also loves the bow.

“For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

GyaniNani: And why did that stay with you?

TD: Because I sit with parents who are exhausted from trying to be good archers. They think the whole weight of the child’s flight is on them. Every choice, every school, every mistake.

And the passage tells them they are not the archer at all.

They are the bow.

They are being held.

GyaniNani: (after a long pause)

We spend all our attention on where the arrow lands.

And we forget who is holding the bow.

TD: The bending is not something the parent chooses to do. It is something done to the parent. And Gibran asks only that it be borne with gladness.

GyaniNani: Then parenting is an act of trust as much as an act of responsibility.

Perhaps more.

TD: We began with a sea that keeps two shores from becoming one.

And we are ending with a bow that is bent by someone else’s hand.

GyaniNani: Both of them are the same instruction, said twice.

Hold. Do not grip.

Reflection

Two shores that become one shore have lost the sea between them.

The strings of a lute make music because they never touch.

A child can be released from a house and still be held by an expectation.

We do not usually own our children. We own the version of them we imagined.

And the parent who is trying hardest to be a good archer has not yet noticed that they are the bow.

The question I am leaving with you:

What have you been imagining on someone else’s behalf?

A child, a partner, a parent, a student. Name the expectation — not the person. One sentence.

And if you are the arrow rather than the bow this time: what were you expected to become?

📖 From my copy

A photograph of page 13 — and in the margin, in pencil:

“Children are not our extensions. They are not our expectations.”

Until next Friday…

Dialogue IV — On Giving Gibran turns next to what we give and why. He has an uncomfortable question waiting: whether the giver is more blessed than the gift — and whether any of us gives without asking for something back.