Homecoming…

I build. I break. I love. I berate. 

When birds build a home, they travel far… far away to distant lands. They fly to the highest branch of their favorite tree, only to find a void left unhealed, just for them. 

How do you know if you weren’t shying away from healing that one last wound in your heart in the wait for your person to come back home and caress it?

Someone once called love the greatest healer of all times. Years later, poets began writing verses about how love broke them. So, is love a beautiful irony that breaks you and heals you in the same moment, or do we admire our scars so much that breaking away from them is the kind of bereavement we can’t take?

Four walls, two windows, and a heart. That is all it takes to build a home. Then why does it feel a little less complete in the absence of someone to share it with?

People are lonely. Their hearts are lonelier. Smiles, sadness, storms, or suns; they need someone to share them all with. But then, they fear- what if that one hand that they want to hold for the rest of their lives chose to part ways one day?

Well, there is nothing scarier than fear itself. It can make you fight demons that weren’t even at war with you in the first place. It can make you lock the door that could have taken you to your bliss. It makes you believe that every person who has your back will stab you one day. It can make you change paths right before you were about to catch the road back home. 

Why would you want to make friends with something that keeps you away from home? Why leave hands only because you fear they won’t keep their promises?

Why not love fearlessly…. like a wanderer would? The one who knows he is to part ways one day, no matter how far that day is?

No matter how scared you are, bring comfort to your heart, and make it feel safe to love again. No matter how many times you had to leave hands you didn’t want to, find the courage to hold another, just for one more time. 

No matter how many times your nest was broken down to shambles, build again, only because you deserve its warmth. 

And lastly, no matter how many times fear made you turn the wrong corners, take the road back home. Embrace your homecoming. 

– Gauri Walecha

Happy Second Anniversary… and a special announcement!!

I am spellbound. I have been writing and posting for the loveliest bunch of readers for two years now… it has been such a magical journey.

Thank you so much for being here and sticking around to support my work. All of you don’t even know how much that means to me. I feel so blessed.

On this special occasion, I did something I had been planning to do for the longest time. I started my YouTube channel today, and it will honestly be a pleasure and honor for me to be able to bring my art to you in more and more ways. I hope you like my work there too! Do stop by! Much Love!

Glad to share my YouTube Channel with all of you… Much Love!

To the one who is afraid to heal…

You know, our ego does this strange thing. It tries to build an identity around our traumas. It wears scars as badges of honor and flaunts them in front of carefree smiles. We define our worth from the tears we shed each day. Pain validates us, we go around collecting it just like a kid with a newfound interest in collecting pebbles. Except, for us, the jar never fills. Our heart is like a deep well where we keep throwing stones just to check if it has run out of water yet. Sadly, it never does. No matter how many years we spend trying to empty it out, each thrown stone makes it weep a little.

Such identities are scary though. Not only because they are too fragile when built on loamy grounds but also because they are afraid of losing themselves in the web of their own lies. Lies about how our beloved trauma is our ultimate story, about how what was once broken can never be healed, about how the grudge we pamper each day is the lesson our trauma left us, and also about how letting go is a crime against our heart.

But the question is, do you really want to spend the rest of your life hurting yourself like that? Isn’t it an act of self-harm to be clinging to pain longer than how much we can endure?

Don’t get me wrong! I am not asking you to stop feeling what you feel. Rather, I am asking you to drown deep into your emotions once and for all.

Reach for the deepest parts of your heart. Take hold of every string that connects you back to your pain. Hold it with love, kiss its broken ends, knit it back where necessary, and break it off where not; do that and a lot more but once and for all.

I know stories of pain are strangely celebrated. Scars are decorations in our strange strange world, but you don’t have to follow suit.

I don’t want you to live a life full of agony. I don’t want your trauma to define you. Instead, I want your smile to be your sigil in this world of royal battle flags; I want your smile to shine not only because it speaks of a prettier story, but also because it celebrates the spirit with which you overcame everything that fell your way.

Yes, life is a war and you are a warrior, but even the most ruthless of fighters are allowed to return home once in a while.

Then, why do you feel the need to build your home on the battlefield of a war long dead?

– Gauri Walecha

Such is life…

If I could, I would turn back time; but then, if I could, I would never let it pass so quickly. 

The man who invented the hourglass must have been very clever. He gave us the harshest truth trapped in a glass that lies to us about how we can turn it in our favor. Yet, can we?

Then again, the mind who brought polaroids to the world was such a brave rebel. When life taught him how helpless he was, he helped himself with a tool to capture it. Yet, could he?

Life is strange in its ways. A fine storyteller who lures you to the battlefield with its tales of encouragement and a skilled warrior who then slays your courage like a hungry predator. 

Funnily enough, it’s never done playing its games. It will knock you down and down again only to offer you hopes of victory once you don’t want to stand your ground anymore. 

Should you believe? Do you have another choice? 

– Gauri Walecha

The Truth

Memories have a strange habit. They fade away… and they do so faster when you don’t want them to. Maybe that is why people came into the habit of writing whatever happened around them. Writing was their helpless attempt at trying to hold quicksand.

Words lose meaning once they stop carrying stories around… but if they truly wanted to tell those tales, they would have. Why didn’t they? 

Every heart in this world speaks in the tongue of an artist, and yet you don’t have many to celebrate; mostly because they are afraid to scream and a world that is full of noise fails to hear their whispers. 

Why whisper the truth, you ask? What would you do if you were standing in a crowd full of thieves who prey on secrets?

Truth is not lost, it has simply been silent. 

– Gauri Walecha

I will miss you, Naanu…

Fires warm your nights at the cost of burning you. Sometimes I wonder if that is how everything good in the world works. Do good things really come with a price? Or, is the pain just about the guilt and shame that comes with having better than others? 

Some storms don’t come to kill you; but if they don’t kill you, do they always make you stronger? Do storms also feel proud to have killed more people than the others? Why do we wear our traumas as a badge of honor? Is that why we fear good healers? Have we really begun to identify ourselves through the scars we wear on our skins?

Strange world, isn’t it? 

People lose their lives to death. People lose their loved ones to death. Some people lose their smiles to death. Or, has it always been the other way around? What if it was life fighting to keep its best soldiers alive? What if we are the delusional ones who mindlessly gravitate towards our own ends?

I recently lost my Nanaji (That’s the Hindi word used to address your mother’s father). This was my first time processing death so closely. The experience has left me wondering why people tend to hate their lives so much. I mean, life doesn’t end until it ends. You have the world waiting for you while you are still breathing. Every moment is a new opportunity and every person brings along a new kind of love, yet we toss our lives into a can of garbage just because there aren’t people around us who chant our greatness each day. 

I doubt if the great ever cared about the applause roaring around them. In fact, I believe, it is truly their nonchalance for the praises that makes them even worthier of celebration. That is the kind of man my Nanaji was. Subtle, humble, elegant, yet confident, wise, and full of life. He taught me how you don’t have to beat yourself down to have a bigger heart. Sadly, the lesson truly struck me after I lost him. I will miss him… forever. He was my guiding light in life… my biggest motivation to go out there and achieve every big thing… he was and he will always be! I miss you Naanu. 

Craftsmen are Mystics in hiding…

It takes the heart of a mystic to lay your bare hands on an abandoned rock, bring it home and spend several blue moons trying to carve a paradise out of prunes.

You hold that disowned wonder in your hands, right in front of your eyes, letting your soft gaze take a gentle stroll across the uneven scriptures that sing years of pilgrimage.

You let your rough but brazen fingers trace its thrashed and wounded skin that speaks of a long violent story in the most silent way.

You take the courage to find beauty in the brutality of scars and find the strength to reach for it… You reach for it, violating its existence; stealing parts of it, and keeping them for yourself.

It takes the devotion of a pilgrim to work under the amber of a dying oil lamp, toiling to find God in grit.

You let your chisel guide you through the darkness… you follow its sharp ends as they dance in all their glory.

You let the night owls sing and wolves howl, pleading with you to give up… but you don’t- you flow… you flow with the unknown to the unfound… you flow through the rocky edges and the softened carves… you flow until you are one with grace- and once you are- you are free forever!

– Gauri Walecha

Old and Enchanted…

I love walking down the woody trails of old and enchanted forests. The sound of twigs cracking under your feet, leaves rustling to the dance of lost winds, thick fragrances of mosses hanging in the air, a river flowing afar, and the way everything falls into symphony- a symphony to drown into- a symphony to rise from!

When the night falls supon, and the wolves begin to tread the hearth- wise men settle, hermits sift, and the brave wander- the alchemist though; she does neither!

She smiles to the moon, sings to the fie, weeps to nurture her garden and dances to the roaring clouds. She yearns for the day yet celebrates the night; she puts her mind to sleep and awakens her soul. She is the long eloped princess, the new found mystic; she pauses in peace and flows with intent.

She was the woman who was once shunned for who she was- she is the woman who prays who are still caged away from themselves- “Break old man, break away; the night has come to seek!”

– Gauri Walecha

Every Other Night…

Every other night, she sits on a forgotten field, under a lost sky- as full of stars as it shall be. With an old brook, far away, flowing through the creek and crevice with some mountains, standing still in the stillness of the night- she feels small, as small as she must.

What good shall it serve to be brimming with pride in a world so surreal?

Every other night, the moon shines, just as it has shone since the fall of the very first night- It is amusing how, each day, we mock its beauty with our old oil lamps!

Every other night, she lets the grass grace her bare skin, as the wind flows through her unkempt tresses. She lets the insects crawl on the hind of her hands as the crickets sing in a forlorn sweet chorus.

Every other night, she finds herself in all that is lost!

– Gauri Walecha

Sometimes I wonder…

Sometimes I wonder if the leaves have stopped rustling with you not being around. Did you take the wind away or is it just the silence you left behind? Flowers have wilted down, and those standing have lost their charm. Did you crush them under your spiteful steps or is it just the love you took away?

When people pass away, they inherit their life down to those who stood the closest to them. You chose to abandon, and my life has since been a staircase spiraling down to the hollows; an unending funeral in my heart since your feelings died. Is it the void that they bequeath me of?

Sometimes I wonder if the music has lost all its melody since you chose to take that step away. Have my ears deafened down, or are they just not brave enough to hear any lies anymore? I wonder if it is about the lies or just the ones that you spoke.

Sometimes I wonder if it was just the more of you or less of me, or simply not enough of everything- that made you- that made me- lose the fight?

– Gauri Walecha