The Forest of Enchantments

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Because a trained mind is your strongest ally—and an untrained one your worst enemy.’

I was in love, and love is wild and optimistic, especially in the beginning.

even the strongest intellect may be weakened by love. This struck me as paradoxical. Shouldn’t love make us more courageous? More determined to live according to our principles?

This incident taught me that the more love we distribute, the more it grows, coming back to us from unexpected sources. And its corollary: when we demand love, believing it to be our right, it shrivels, leaving only resentment behind.

But where love and sorrow bind people together, goodbyes are not so easily said.

I learned a new fact about love that day: it could kill. Sometimes it could kill instantaneously.

it’s not enough to merely love someone. Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we’re willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.

once mistrust has wounded it mortally, love can’t be fully healed again.

Such is the seduction of love: it makes you not want to think too much. It makes you unwilling to question the one you love.

I blamed love, too, for my silence. How it makes us back down from protesting because we’re afraid of displeasing the beloved, or because we’re afraid that our disagreement is the symptom of a greater disease: incompatibility of values.

How entangled love is with expectation, that poison vine! The stronger the expectation, the more our anger towards the beloved if he doesn’t fulfil it—and the less our control over ourselves.

true transformation can only happen in the crucible of suffering.

THERE ARE TIMES IN OUR lives when the hours are an unmoving icy morass and times when they fly past us in a blur. How ironic that the joyous times we’d like to hold on to are the most fleeting, while the saddest ones clutch at us, refusing to let go.

intelligence of the heart. But Ram didn’t

much. I knew now that love—no matter how deep—wasn’t enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

Sometimes I thought, it’s true what people say: every darkness is edged with light.

anger gives out a powerful vibration even when it’s wordless.

‘That’s love—golden ropes that bind you and pull you in different directions.’

And this is one of the final things I learn about love: it’s found in its purest form, on this imperfect earth, between mothers and young children, because there’s nothing they want except to make each other happy.

this is the most important aspect of love, whose other face is compassion: It isn’t doled out, drop by drop. It doesn’t measure who is worthy and who isn’t. It is like the ocean. Unfathomable. Astonishing. Measureless.’