The Forest of Enchantments

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

plain spire thrust itself unapologetically into the sky, demanding to be noticed by the heavens.

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

resonance to them that seemed to lodge deep within my body.

The lights twinkled in the balmy evening as though a cosmic hunter had caught the stars in his net and brought them down to earth to greet me.

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.

Ah, what a chameleon thing love was, lifting us up one minute, casting us down the next.

If love can change so quickly into hate, I thought, looking at her face, what are we to depend on?

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

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.

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.

No. Love is the spade with which we bury, deep inside our being, the things that we cannot bear to remember, cannot bear anyone else to know. But some of them remain. And they rise to the surface when we least expect them.

Ah, such is the paradoxical power of the mind. When we control it, it’s our best friend, but when we allow it to control us, it becomes our worst enemy.

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.

Motherhood taught me something new about love. It was the one relationship where you gave everything you had and then wished you had more to give.