The protagonist of The Light and the Mountain worries that becoming a mother will take her away from her spirituality: “nothing ties the Earth as much as a child,” one of her meditation teachers tells her. This novel by Soledad Urquia (General Deheza, Argentina, 1983), co-directed by Chai editor, moves between two opposites: the abstraction of spirituality and the materiality of motherhood. What could be tension between these two elements immediately becomes coexistence and these two facets of the narrator are perfectly integrated into her life and her writing, so that the book resolves, favorably, the search that is posed at the beginning: “What the stages of the ideal life almost do not overlap confirms that mundane and spiritual life are mutually exclusive. I suspect that there must be a possible integration, and that is my most urgent search”.
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Meditation is the central issue, they talk about books, yogi masters, the narrator’s trip to India -Urquia’s first book is Mama India-, her desire to retire and embrace monastic life, the reactions of others to that impulse, that is, of the coexistence of the spiritual search with the other aspects of his life, especially with the family.
The narrator’s dreams and some episodes from her past appear; she talks about her faith and relates it to her grandmother’s religiosity, and also a lot about books, because everything is passed through the filter of literature. The girl appears, whose needs may interfere with her mother’s meditative routine, but it seems that the effects of that routine fell on her, if we stick to the overwhelming lucidity of some of her occurrences. The mother-daughter dialogues punctuate the text in a precise balance, difficult to achieve. A crisis appears: was it a mistake to move away from Buenos Aires?
“I leaned against the stone and leaned my back, looking at the sky. There were no clouds, the light blue without pause was overwhelming but it was framed by the mountains. I felt that the mountains were always my refuge, my place to hide so that I could later go out into the world Now I share it with my daughter,” writes Urquia. From reading La luz y la montaña, one comes out with a peace similar to that sought in meditation, because there is something calming in Urquia’s way of writing and looking at the world. Surely that explains why he makes the spiritual coexist with the everyday as if nothing had happened.
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