Seeing

"Perhaps if people were encouraged to draw something everyday, they'd talk a lot less. They'd begin to appreciate the importance of silence, of observation, of not getting entangled in the outward appearance of things.

By watching a pencil slowly follow the contours of the subject, they would learn to edit out the superfluous and the unnecessary; they'd perhaps learn to not just see things but also comprehend them."

Anvita Lakhera

In Silence: http://sometimesiwritesometimesiam.blogspot.in/2013/02/in-silence.html

October

Blue skies
And dragonflies,
October.

Notes from a Ritual

Note 12: Receiving

http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2015/11/12-receiving.html

Ritual

Started writing again here (http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in). Thanks to the giant silk cotton tree, its lessons.

Notes from a Ritual: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

Listen

Listen. At 6 in the morning, when all is still, you can hear the honge flowers falling, like the first drops of approaching rain.

From blossom to blossom

"There's a shadow in your ultrasound. We'd like to investigate."
"Sure."
"You've come alone?"
"That's alright. Let's start."

*             *             *             *
"..There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom, to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."

Li-Young Lee, 'From Blossoms'

From Blossom to Blossom: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106491954401233999557/albums/6084443235136463985

Konark, Table for One

Late September

I often think that the street sweepers must know, more than anyone else, which flowers bloom in which season. In this season their burden is mounds of orange and yellow ....


Late September

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106491954401233999557/albums/6061401261572532113

After the rain

If it rains in the night, the streets are plastered with fallen flowers and leaves the next morning. There’s a whole world of colour down there, cleansed and sharpened by water. I am intoxicated at 6.30 in the morning, because the rain is such an artist....

After the rain

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106491954401233999557/albums/6063456309089463601

Stories

"When you have no one  to tell them to, you forget all your stories."


The Lunchbox

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/13/lunchbox-bollywood-review-banked-emotions

Phil bhi dil hai Hindustani

 

The taxi driver to the airport from Shanghai to Pudong airport that day was a smiling friendly chap. He desperately wanted to chat, but we have no common language. We practise getting each other's names correct and then the conversation dies.

He suddenly remembers. "Hindu?"

And then he beams at me in the rear view mirror and sings the first line of this song......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdQwPwmsUC0

59 years, and still going strong.

Shree 420: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shree_420

September

The luscious Rudrapalaash, the African Tulip, has started to bloom all over Bangalore, its "finger tips on fire", announcing that it's September again.

I am eagerly waiting for the return of the dragonflies next. They come in this season, and stay until the end of October.

Now

Since Now is all we really have, just curious, what is Now for you, when you came to this blog?

Now for me is dusk in a small city apartment in Bangalore, with the wind blowing in from the balcony that offers a view of a small patch of sky between buildings. Nothing beautiful, but it is the season of winds, this monsoon time, and the huge new wind chimes I recently bought, sway gently from the balcony ceiling, reverberating like a Buddhist temple gong. Music all day.

The world outside, crumbling, coming apart at the seams, renewing, rising again. Inside, as always, I live and work in this small pool of light, day and night, trying to bring order into disorder, fix things - opportunities we all get, in whatever job we do. The flower, a recent addition to bring a patch of beauty into an increasingly functional life, frantic in its pace.

The last birds call, before settling down for the night. The evenings will start getting cooler now, the seasons of flowering trees and blue skies will be here soon. (None of which, of course, is promised to me). But for now, I have temple bells and the descending night and yet another day everyone I know made it through.

What is Now for you?

Lifebuoy

I used to do this as a child, make paper boats and send them into big muddy rain water puddles and push them with a stick close to drowning beetles, who'd crawl into them immediately. The beetle-ship would then be slowly pushed ashore before it disintegrated in the water.  I would wait until all the beetles crawled out and made their way to higher grounds. I guess my life hasn't entirely been in vain, though it seems that way most of the time.

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
Thomas Lux

For some semitropical reason  
when the rains fall  
relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise  
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long

and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown—but  
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,  
a reward for not loving

the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,  
rats) creatures, if

you believe these things, then  
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning  
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,  
as individuals, would not turn up

again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even—
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams—
they may tell the others

in a sign language  
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s

that you are good,  
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

Snow is falling

Migration is a subject that fascinates me, not so much for the reasons, but for what it does to your concept of Home, the Center, your sense of belonging. During two very cold depressing months in Canada, I spent a lot of time reading up about the immigrant experience in newspapers, and talking to immigrants, in the suburbs of Toronto, the world's most multi-ethnic city. Most of them spoke about how, before landing in Canada, they never knew how harsh the long winters could be, and what the lack of sunshine could do to them.

I remember telling this Argentinian taxi driver who got so engrossed in telling me his story of regret that we got lost, that no, I would never trade sunlight for all the money in the world. And I mean it. (But then, I don't have to flee poverty, persecution, war, I have choices.)

And oh yes, the Arctic tern fascinates me no end. This poem reminded me of stories I haven't told anyone in years, and which, therefore, are fading.

Migration
- for Cathy

Snow is falling, snagging its points on frayed
surfaces. There’s lightning
over Lake Ontario, Erie. In the great central
cities, debt accumulates along baseboards
like hair. Many things were good
while they lasted.

Long dance halls
of neighbourhoods under the trees,
the qualified fellow-feeling no less genuine
for it. West are silent frozen fields and wheels
of wind. In the north, frost is measured
in vertical feet, and you sleep sitting because it hurts
less. It’s not winter for long.

In April
shall the tax collector flower forth, and language
upend its papers looking for an entry adequate
to the sliced smell of budding
poplars.

The sausage man will contrive
once more to block the sidewalk with his truck,
and though it’s illegal to idle one’s engine
for more than three minutes, every one of us will idle
like hell.

After all that’s happened. We’re all
that’s left.

In fall, the Arctic tern will fly
12,500 miles to Antarctica as it did every year
you were alive. It navigates by the sun and stars.
It tracks the earth’s magnetic fields
Sensitively as a compass needle and lives
on what it finds.

I don’t understand it either.

From 'Pigeon', by Karen Solie

"Home was the centre of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys."

John Berger - 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', 1984

April

Cassia javanica, the pale pink and white gentleness offsetting the harshness of our summers, the delicate blossoms covering the branches like ornaments on a wrist.

The sprinklers are on in the park, gently pushing down the bright red whirl of the gulmohar flowers against dry fallen leaves, crimson against brown.

The searing heat burning away all the flimsy layers of protection built up over the self, to justify continuation, waking up in the morning, facing an uncaring world. April, the cruellest month*. Aprils, that punctuate our downward spirals.

*    *     *     *    *     *

“But who will catch the catcher in the rye?” That was his last message, she said, before he walked into the sea.

“A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.”**

*    *     *     *    *     *

The frangipani turns headier in the heat, all its moisture drained out to retain only the concentrated essence of its fragrance. 

The crucifixion re-enacted every summer, the devout waiting for the end of His suffering and the glory of His rebirth. The lingering evening heat spreads the fragrance of the frangipani over them, when they come out of the church. A reminder that summer, at least, will resurrect every year.

*    *     *     *    *     *

Reciprocity, the most difficult thing of all, he said. To still be sure of one’s existence, in a world that does not reciprocate, when the mirror reflects nothing.

I have often longed to lay my head on the shoulder of the stranger next to me on the tube, he said, just to feel accepted in the circle of the living. There are days my eyes fill up looking down into my book, because the need is so strong. When I was a child, a kind woman once allowed me to put my head on her lap and sleep, while the long-distance bus hurtled through the darkness, and my family ignored me. I search for her on the tube, all over the world.

"...The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother."***

..................................................................................................................................................

*  The Burial of the Dead. From 'The Wasteland', T.S.Eliot
** ​Part IV: Death by Water. From 'The Wasteland', T.S.Eliot
*** Choruses from 'The Rock', T.S.Eliot          

When you respond

"So what purpose does Beauty serve? This is something I have been chewing on for a while. I know I am a nicer warmer kinder person when I am in the presence of beauty, and sharing it with another. When I send you a poem, I am filled to the brim, I am open, unafraid, I am reaching out to you.  When you respond, I am connected, I can see the Circle we are part of, I can feel the warmth of the fire we are sitting around, I want to save the world, I want to give more of myself.

And on days that Beauty does not touch me, I am dry, hard, cold, defensive, aloof, overly anxious about protecting myself.

Are we innately wired to rejoice, to revel in Beauty, is that why all our search for purpose and meaning leaves us still dissatisfied? Maybe one half of us just needs to be filled with the taste of cherries, nothing else will do?"

Respond. Resonate

Words are not innocent. You say something into being. Or into non-being.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *
“You’re making good progress", your physiotherapist says. “You’re not fighting with the machine and giving up in frustration, like most people do.”

Oh. When did you learn that?

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

"To pursue beauty to its lair."  Oh, you do. The ordinary still leaves you breathless.

It helps to know you're living on borrowed time. It helps to be so poor, to have nothing, and therefore have only beauty to turn to.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *
It’s a very ancient Portuguese instrument, she said. And it has these sympathetic strings. “Sympathetic strings or resonance strings are auxiliary strings found on many Indian musical instruments, as well as some Western Baroque instruments and a variety of folk instruments.”

The musician never plays them, but they resonate to the notes played on the main sting, they will “vibrate in response, providing a lingering halo of sound.”

Respond.

Resonate.

Wave after Wave

Every evening, at sunset-time, hundreds of bats fly out of Cubbon Park to dot the sky in a silent drama that never fails to fascinate you. To be there, under the bare rain-trees, and see them fly out silently against the darkening blue sky, in wave after wave.

Today watched them gather at the fruiting silk cotton tree.

Don't have a camera great enough to capture that movement, so just go see it yourself. In this season, 6.30 PM, the gate next to UB City.

Go. And tell me about it.

A November evening prayer

Riding into the city after nearly a month of illness and withdrawing, you are startled to see the tree covered in pink flowers, at a bend in the road. November. The pink of November. You had completely forgotten. You, who had watched the trees on the way to work every day for the last 20 years in this city, noticing every single change in them. You who had decided on your last job because it was right next to Cubbon Park. You are shaken up, in tears, you are choked up with guilt, horrified by what you had almost lost. How could you have forgotten November, its very brief splash of pink?

Twenty years later, you now live in a different part of the city, where the road to work passes through unending ugliness. You know you have lost something vital to your existence, you have not stopped feeling empty and lost for a minute, you are diminished, the face in the mirror grows stranger day by day.

You spend the entire weekend riding around in the perfect November sun, visiting each one of your trees in pink, asking forgiveness. You visit them in the morning, and then again in the evening, you know how they blush under the sun's gaze in different shades, at different times, a love that never grows stale.

In the evening you sit for coffee at the restaurant from where you can watch the trees in Cubbon Park, across the fountain. You remember an old friend who said that you will never make it big, because you never chase fame or wealth, all your goodness will never be recognized because you don't fight for the badges. The friend who on another day, remarked, "You are the Keeper of Seasons in this city", and understood, in a way, that if you ever make it to Heaven, you will have a feeling of déjà vu.

You watch the light turn golden, and for a brief moment you wish you had a friend to sit silently with, a friend who has nowhere else to go after this, whose phone will not ring, and whose gift of presence is complete.

You want to sit here forever, anyways. But then it is time for the sunset. You remember the old wandering seer in John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday". "I have to go to the sunset now. I've come to the point where I don't think it can go down without me. That makes me seem needed."

You ride into the park again, under the canopy of the ancient rain trees, and go around the circle of trees with pink flowers one last time, as if around the stone gods at the temple, worshipful. A November evening prayer, which you almost forgot.

Just look at September, look at October!

A time to remember the Zenrin poem again, that this moment is enough. And a time to watch the light of October.

The Light of October: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/TheLightOfOctober

Just look at September, look at October!: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/2010/09/just-look-at-september-look-at-october.html