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

You must see how this could be you

For Steve, who chose to leave this week last year, who slipped from that thin line one cold dark February night.

I am walking to the bridge

http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2013/06/i-am-walking-to-bridge.html

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go, so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you, how he too
was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye (1953-)

Rain Tree Raagaas

Yes, there are traffic jams, there is pollution, there is noise. But then there are other stations you can still tune into. Other things you can still see.

I see rain trees. If I were to die today, I would go happy, replete.

Rain Tree Raagaas: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/RainTreeRaagaas

Independence

Independence Day. Independence. Which so many are sceptical about. While so many are giving up their lives for what we take for granted. Remembering the old man at the Tibetan Refugee Camp.

Home

http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2012/09/home.html

Uttaraayan

"The trees are coming into leaf,
like something almost being said..."*

A time of transition, in our city. The bare trees reveal the intricate patterns of their arms, the new buds "relax and spread", the flowers bloom all over - the annual yellow tabubeia flowers kept their February promise. 

You go to Lal Bagh Botanical gardens every weekend, in the heart of the city, to watch the young squirrels scamper all over 200-year-old trees. Soon they will be covered in leaves, all set for the summer sun.

Photos, on Picasa: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/Uttaraayan

Photos, on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106491954401233999557/albums/5833123102125674161
* Philip Larkin

Illuminare

"..Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Annie Dillard

Illuminare [pronounced 'i-lloo-mi-naa-rrey'] (Italian): To light, to give light, to enlighten, from Latin illūmināre to light up, from lūmen light.

At 9 AM on a Sunday morning in the park, it is too early for families, and too late for joggers. The familiar trees welcome you in a different way, "Hey, there's just us right now!", they whisper. "Lover of trees, found worthy of loneliness", you remember the words of the unknown dervish, and you smile back, stopping to watch a riot of squirrels careering crazily down a branch.

Some of the ordinary dark green leaves are no longer the same, in the slow dawning of a December morning. For Light passes through them. And they are transformed. Every vein outlined, every scar exposed. And how they shine. As we do, only when the light passes through us.

Is that why we are drawn to certain people, for reasons we cannot quite fathom? They remember to place themselves in the light at times, and it passes through them. Every wound exposed, every fragile thing that holds them together stretched out like yearning. And yet, how they shine.

Illuminare. Draw me into the light.  

For we have seen on our way

I have never been on a pilgrimage, nor have any plans to go on one, but am always deeply moved every time I cross, on the highway, people walking for weeks together to a holy place.

Is the very purpose of a pilgrimage to show us our own riches? Maybe all pilgrimages finally lead us to ourselves, the essential "innocent" self open to joy and beauty, not wearied and blinded by "knowledge", the "bluebird" whose song we stifle?

On Pilgrimage

May the smell of thyme and lavender accompany us on our journey
To a province that does not know how lucky it is
For it was, among all the hidden corners of the earth,
The only one chosen and visited.

We tended toward the Place but no signs led there.
Till it revealed itself in a pastoral valley
Between mountains that look older than memory,
By a narrow river humming at the grotto.

May the taste of wine and roast meat stay with us
As it did when we used to feast in the clearings,
Searching, not finding, gathering rumors,
Always comforted by the brightness of the day.

May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks
Remind us of everything we have lost,
For we have seen on our way and fallen in love
With the world that will pass in a twinkling.

Czeslaw Milosz
New & Collected Poems, translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

Micchami Dukkadam

Every year in August, a dear friend calls up to say "Micchami Dukkadam". 'I am sorry".  The Jain ritual of asking for forgiveness, to all your dear ones, everyone whom you may have wronged, knowingly or unknowingly, on the last day of the festival of Paryushana. Though you always joke about it, it moves you deeply, every single time. (Probably you joke the most about things that move you deeply, and do not want to acknowledge?)

For we cause the deepest hurt to the ones we care about the most, those whom we wished cared for us more, to complete the circle of reciprocity. For we suffer the most when we inflict suffering on them, seemingly with nonchalance.

For we expect so much more from them, than from random people who cut us in the queue or nearly hit us in the traffic. For it is on their approval, their validation, that we hang the meaning, the purpose of our lives, whatever else it is that we seemingly chase, in the mad scramble of our blind seeking. All roads, finally, lead to them, though we think we are firmly headed in the opposite direction. As always, intelligence, displaying its feet of clay, its powerlessness.

In the moments when you have jumped off the trapeze and are sailing through the air, and know for sure there's no one on the other side sending you a swing to hold on to, and no safety net below, this is what you would like to say:

Micchami Dukkadam.

Home

I have been wanting to write down this Tibetan man's story, for years. The search for Home. Something I deeply relate to. In all my travels, immigrants and refugees have fascinated me, I listened to their stories, I have suffered with them.

I did not succeeded in taking him home. A feeble attempt at telling his story is all I have been able to accomplish, not even worthy to be called a gift.

Home: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2012/09/home.html

The Indian Diaspora In Russia

I grew up reading the Soviet Union and Sputnik magazines, Russian folk tales in English, watching my father learn Russian with Linguaphone Institute records, on the old gramaphone. (I grew up at a time when the Sovient Union was big). From there on the transition to Chekhov, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Anna Akhmatova, and later on the movies of Tarkovsky ('The Stalker' still remains my all-time favorite movie), Tchaikovsky's ballet 'The Nutcracker'etc was but a natural progression.

An old article, but interesting  - from PetersbergCity.com:

"...there is a significant Indian and South Asian diasporic presence in Russia. A recent study sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences claims that Russia may indeed be witnessing the re-emergence of that once extensive Indian Diaspora that stretched from Sindh through Central Asia and into Russia."

The Indian Diaspora In Russia

http://petersburgcity.com/news/city/2004/11/23/indian_diaspora/

Walk Away

In the dead of the night Siddhartha got up and walked away, from everything he knew. You often think of people who disappear, who go away on their own will, vanish. All of them may never see the light, return with riches, not even be aware of what it is that they seek. Most of them, probably, will just unravel. It kills you.

You who only ever wanted to be the catcher in the rye, going about the soul-deadening drill of earning your food, while thousands fall off the ledge, every day. There are people who want to receive, and those who want to give, probably in equal numbers. But so rarely do their paths cross. In the meanwhile, for so many, there is nothing left, but to Walk Away.
.........................................................................................

"Every year thousands of men and women disappear. I don't mean the ones who sell up, move away, remarry, get a job in Acapulco, go into a nursing home or mental hospital, or even out on to the streets. I mean the ones who are never seen again. The ones untraced and untraceable. Faded photographs, out of date clothes, the years piling up in the place left behind. The place where they walked away, without a suitcase or a passport, bank account untouched, appointments still fresh in the diary.

I think of a see-saw. At one end, life's accumulations, at the other end, the self.  For many, perhaps for most, the balance can be maintained. The not too unpleasant ups and downs of day to day, a little loss here, a little gain there, the occasional giddy soar or painful crash.

What happens when the accumulated life becomes so heavy that it pitches the well-balanced self into thin air? All the things that I had and knew, crashing to the floor, myself shattered upwards, outwards, over the roof tops, over the familiar houses, a ghost among ghosts. I might as well be dead.

I shall be treated as dead. The dead have no rights, no feelings, the present deals with the past just as it likes. I shall become a thing of the past, worse than dead, a living dead, to be avoided or forgotten, to be abused because I shall have revealed myself as someone who can't cope.

We have to cope, don't we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society.

It cares very much that we should all be seen to cope."

Page 194, 'The Green Square', from 'The World and Other Places' by Jeannette Winterson (absolutely stunning writing)

On reading the Koran

Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/lesley_hazelton_on_reading_the_koran.html

"And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.

Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation."
 .........................................................................................

A beautiful Fatihah I found on the Net, I have no idea which ones are the best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvmyqKZILoU

Independence Day

What are you doing this Independence Day? Help build our country, become a Rang De social investor!

Three years down the line, as investor and volunteer, there is nothing that gives me more happiness, more purpose, nothing that makes me feel so connected to the exhilarating process of nation-building.

Rang De! http://www.rangde.org/ - what you receive is much more than what you lend.

Oh Phaedrus

While rightful immigrant angst bursts out in fire, while people starve in remote places, while villagers lose their long-awaited crop and their hopes to floods, while yet another child is sold to prostitution, you cut orange carrots and soft yielding mushrooms and sharp pungent lilac onions and frilly-skirted green cabbages to make dinner, and plan what to make for breakfast.

Life is such.

Oh Phaedrus, brother.

The Taste of Cherries

In Abbas Kiorastami's film 'The Taste of Cherry', an Iranian man drives his truck across the countryside in search of someone who will bury him under a cherry tree after he commits suicide, he is tired of life. No one is willing, except an elderly taxidermist, who agrees only because he needs the money for an ill child. Yet the old man gently pleads with him to choose life, to embrace the joys of earthly existence, to remember the taste of cherries. He narrates to him how he had tried to kill himself 37 years ago.

He had intended to hang himself from a mulberry tree, and when he climbs the tree to secure the rope, just before dawn, he happens to see some ripe mulberries, and he eats a few. And in a flood the splendour of the natural world comes upon him and fills him to the brim, and he starts noticing the sunrise, he is spellbound as he sits there on the tree watching the light, he is "blown open". Later little children pass by on their way to school, and they stop to ask him for some mulberries. He gets down from the tree, offers them the fruits with a smile, and returns to his life.

Albors Pascal Askari, with his short pieces of fluid beauty, comes to me on the darkest of mornings, reminding me, briefly albeit, of the taste of cherries.

My Reason to Be: http://soundcloud.com/dreimalbla/my-reason-to-be

"...You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open."

Postscript, Seamus Heaney, from 'The Spirit Level'

Sometimes I get up early, and even my soul is wet...

 "At the time (in my youth), I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace." Jorge Luis Borges

You find yourself waking up earlier and earlier. You were never a morning person. Now you are.

Went for a walk this morning, at 5.30, before the world was awake, while the street lights were still on, the leaves, dark against a sky already turning blue...and you remember the Neruda poem you read yesterday...and the sea, and love, rise up within you, in waves....
.............................................................

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Pablo Neruda, 'Here I love you', Translated by W.S.Merwin

Photo: A gift from Martin, of the stunning photos, here. Early morning at Aachen, Germany.

Old friends

Cat came to me about 18 years ago, my friend Karthik brought him for me from the US. Snowman I bought in Boston, Christmas of 2000. Yes, they’ve had baths since then.

They’ve sat at my various desks all these years. I guess they should be counted as old friends by now.

I who have lost my way

Behind her words, her eyes, her "I don't cry easily", you see the deeper request, the unspoken plea, "See me as I once used to be, this is not me........" 

Is there a greater gift, than really really listening?

My Grandmother's House
Kamala Das

There is a house now far away where once
I received love...That woman died
The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
Among books. I was then too young
To read, and my blood turned cold
like the moon.

How often I think of going
There, to peer through the blind eyes of windows, or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door,
like a brooding dog.....

You cannot believe, darling,
Can you, that I lived in such a house, and
was proud, and loved....I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers' doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?

Now

Thursday. Was ill. But listened to the windchimes all day, from my sickbed. The wooden ones. The Egyptian wooden chimes. Gurgling like water.

The wind is back. My oldest friend. All those who plan to abandon me, do it now. While the wind is here, with me.

Afterwards, I will be defenceless.