Cultivated Darkness

#41: 100-words of a dark tale

Today for a dark tale. Why not? We are capable of truly awful things—along with our infinite capacity for glorious goodness. The tale is fictitious but it’s based on a true incident I heard about a long time ago.

“There was blood…” PC: Reena Kapoor. Instagram: @1StarDusty

Cultivated Darkness

Simple, obedient Sana, charged with murdering her parents, wouldn't defend herself. The village shunned her. 

Sana’s aunt, who’d left the village in disgrace decades ago, arrived. Speaking in Sana’s defense, she revealed Sana had three college-educated brothers, and two high-school educated, married sisters. But her parents didn’t educate Sana, even rejected the humblest marriage offers. They kept Sana an illiterate dependent, focused on taking care of them.  

Long ago the aunt had suffered similarly, and run away from her home and village. 

The judge awarded Sana a ten-year sentence—and a majority of her parents’ estate for education and living independently.

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reena | 04.05.2024

Looking back…

In my last post, I shared two poems with you about mortality and death, the certainty of it all, and ultimately the meaning giving power of that phenomena.

An only certainty

Past the age of 40 (I think), it’s as natural for us to grapple with big questions about the two punctuating events of our life as it is for them to occur. Meditating on these events will lead us to the ultimate choice we all face—one between despair and integrity. That’s a formulation (I wish were my own) is one I recently read, and was deeply moved by.

Plus this quote, which is one of my anthems, as I traverse the writer’s life at this stage of life.

“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!”

—Rainer Maria Rilke