The Cat's Whiskers!

And its beautiful, luminous eyes!

A number of readers have been delighted with these posts that 
emerged from the Cat Naming Contest.


These very popular cat posts have been arranged for your convenience in one place.
Read them (in reverse order for best effect), enjoy, comment and share! Do visit all the links in the posts. 

A Cat Named Ember     - winner Alicia with name "Ember"

No Frocks For Prudes  - winner Ajesh with name "JAFrock"

Piercing The Valley       - winner Jean with name "Percy"

The Pumpkin Quartet - Trick And Treat - A Halloween Nonsense Post - the contest announcement

Have fun!  And enter our next contest when it's announced.

Hurry - FWIW - Before The Cup Dries

... From The Gallery Of Lost Posts       

I am amazed at how current some of the musings in this post are. Some emotions don’t need a locus in time and space. On the other hand there are emotions that I have truly transcended to reach a zone of peace, composure and hope

19^th October 2016

Exactly a month to go for 59. A cup lies beside me unwashed, drying swiftly in the northern autumn breeze. If I don’t interrupt this sadhana and take it away to wash, there are chances the stains won’t come off. The eye drops on order need chasing. They are probably another fiction, and will go the way of all eye drops in recent times*. I get up reluctantly, fighting the tender pain in my knees from yesterday’s fall. My back aches and my legs wobble. I have to chase that blessed cheque book. I will give it another day. Heck it is over two weeks now. I don’t look forward to seeing the monster postman’s face.

So let this be a random stream. That needs to be written rather than read. And there are those custard apples that need to be collected. Dear Lord, I was feeling so apart and dissociated into floating bits last night. And this young pain was spreading its sap between those floating pieces saying “I am the reason and the culmination,” whatever that might mean. I think I peaked in my writing exercise with that piece on the procession and just needed to flop apart.

There has been such a surge of energy in my life. Like when I get messages I suddenly get four at a time. My neighbor is frying in mustard oil (olfactory message). Kim and I are reaching a new place of understanding, and are co-visioning our onward travels together. We are both traveling backwards into the future and forwards into the past. And now the warm bouquet of moong halwa simmering, envelops me. Maybe I will cave in and make some instead of writing. Methinks Pages has(have?) finally come full circle to where it/they started. It is time to fly out at that proverbial tangent.

And I am obsessing over clitoria ternatea. The flowers are always fleshy and half closed when you see them in the market. And on the creeper they are altogether different - ephemeral. We grew the white ones and possibly the blue ones too at home in pots. Mom would take the occasional blooms to adorn the gods with. 

Our gods rarely get flowers anymore. There is something seriously wrong with the flowers you see out there. They all look five days old and preserved. Not preserved alive but preserved after they have died and declared themselves dead. I don’t seem to enjoy bringing them home for adornment anymore. That vital something has gone out of my altar celebrations. That’s a big void. Maybe these no-longer-flowers are telling me I need that garden. Each time I hear that message my eye travels with longing towards the south eastern corner of the estate where my dreams show me a garden and an underground herbarium of sorts. 

A snatch of wild garden

I dare not vision it more clearly out of fear that even the four walls that enclose and protect me now, from whose comfort I dream, end up crumbling around me carrying dreams, reality, memory and the lot with them. Will these gardens come to be? My wind chime is insistently ringing its sweet reassuring tinkle. It speaks every time the wind changes direction a trifle. And it always says “all’s well all’s good all’s right.” I need to believe that wind chime. I need to keep the faith. I need to feel safe setting out on that tangent. 

Right now I am moving along it into a zone in Maine (the setting of The Book) where a lone elm beckons to me across a stretch of grass, from the North West. The grass is not so much a lawn as a meadow. I smell sweet lime(mausumbi) and camphor, rose water and kewra(Pandanus), cashewnuts. I smell a festival of energies culminating in light and goodwill. I need to feel comfortable in that cottage by the bay(the scene of action) where you see both sunrise and sunset over a curving coastline in the autumn and spring. It reminds me of Puri. It also reminds me of mountains. Of the first mountains I ever met. 

I recall how I painted mountains before meeting them for real and how those paintings changed after I returned from my sojourn. I wish I could find those old, weathered sheets from my school art book somewhere. I am sure I know where they are. In that Bournvita colored trunk. I ran into them some years ago. Was it in my mother’s life time? And then there is the grey-green suitcase that has lain unopened for 31 years. I suddenly realized there could be more in it than picture postcards. I need to get that passport. I don’t know anyone else other than my mum who sat around all her life and then got a passport at 64. Hell today is the 19th – I have a month to go before I start my sixtieth year. The golden years will be behind me. And diamonds after all are cold stone. Hurry Maya!

PS: I realize I have made a lot more out of Morning Pages than Julia Cameron would have expected. I have also actually drawn Pages at a tangent from her intent and purpose. Or maybe gone beyond her intended purpose by taking it into a pattern of ever widening concentric circles even as my thoughts coil closer and closer within me in their quest for the core. I sometimes feel that Pages have started to control me. They have become my opium and my weed and my wine. I feel like I am crossing the danger mark. I need to pull back from that track of feeding myself on Pages and get back to feeding Pages with my ideas. 

Pages, I have to push you hard into the book zone! The book needs me and needs you. Meanwhile can I dare to go public with some of this? My output has been prodigious (remind you of that word from the Rocket Boys in October Sky? Yes I filched it). And my grammar has been outrageous. The editor in me screams at those incomplete sentences, the poet in me embraces them and spews out a few more. Time to carve out a canal and take a part of my raging torrent into it. Welcome to Purpose and Intent - no not another post you cry!

PS2: The picture shows the current state of the “garden” but the golden flowers and the deep blue bumble bees probing for nectar give me hope, that from the shambles ...

Footnote:
Says Kim(my alpha reader for everything I write)  on reading this, referring to the ever-present Eliot some of my readers are familiar with thanks to the cat contest,
'"Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden..." T.S. Eliot Four Quartets, Burnt Norton....
Open the trunk dearest! 
"Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always time present"... 

I feel like the wind of your words is echoing in my mind, disturbing the dust on the bowl of rose leaves... 

"Other echoes inhabit the garden... Shall we follow?" 

Yes!'

 And two years later on re-reading she says,

 '"Tender pain" is such a powerful way to express all that these words, yours and Eliot's, encompass. The rose garden is the place where they rise to the surface. To take the path to the rose garden and open the gate is to be willing to experience both the tenderness and the pain. It's hard to be engulfed by them. It's worse to neglect the chance to do so, and live with the void of the unopened gate.'

Another such cup catching the autumn sunlight - Circa 2018

The cup is lying for real 

*Interesting that two years later I have the same eye drop problems again

A Cat Named Ember

Runner Up

Dual Inspiration

This post has been inspired by the name my good friend Alicia chose for Schrodinger's cat. 
That cat and his/her human companion have both passed into another realm while remaining in this one as a powerful presence. Much as we'd love to know the cat's name for real, s/he (does anybody know the sex?)  will always be tagged with his surname. One name for two beings.

On the other hand we have another cat, also occupying two realms at once, that goes by two names. She is the other inspiration for this post and for much else I am going to talk about.

In her avatar as Ember

This cat named Ember for the purpose of this post, is the mystical, mysterious, almost mythical being at the heart - and on the hearth - of a story being written by me. Ember has these glow-in-the-dark eyes that suddenly look at you from where the fireplace is set, in the northern wall of a seashore abode in a distant land. Her eyes catch the light of the glowing pieces of birch bark as they lull themselves to rest and are indistinguishable from them. Noone knows how long the bark will glow till the hearth lies cold and she stretches herself on the hearthrug. The fire has burned all night and she has been aprowl in the wild garden. They both fall asleep at dawn as the house awakens.

Two Cottages, Two Personas

In her Tully avatar

Ember has crossed the seas from another distant land that has similar dwellings with similar fireplaces. Ember has been a stray cat named Tully living in Tully Cross, Ireland. She "travels" with a friendly American couple who decide to adopt her for their second home, a little distance from the first one, in Maine (their reigning cat will brook no rival). In fact they buy a second home - a tumbledown cottage - and renovate it just to give her a home of her own. While Tully passes on (or does she, ask Schrodinger?) and is buried in Tully Cross, she lives and flourishes across the pond. 

Tully aka Ember has the pleasure of playing host to a group of undergraduate students from Maine who find themselves attending an all-night gathering of energies hosted by a group of traveling professors and students from India. 

Schrodinger and his beloved cat whom he addressed no less than nineteen times by the name that no-one knows, can be thanked for opening us to the possibility of being in more than one place at a time and thereby in a sense being more than one person. Ember by her presence draws Ireland into the gathering or transports her guests to that locale. Long before that crazy thought experiment started holding our minds (and sometimes our sanity) captive, books have served the purpose. We enjoyed the afternoon sunshine on our garden swings living simultaneously, the lives of each of the characters a book brought alive. Sometimes we were one of them, sometimes we were all of them, sometimes we were our own self, playing a character of our own creation in the story we read. That was the realm of fiction merging with the realm of our own reality. 

Today internet ensures that we can be in the same room together. While that room is an alternate reality, it coexists with this room, rather these rooms - the ones we physically inhabit. Down in time we could be teleporting ourselves, but would another self stay put at the source while one is at the destination? Is there indeed a separate source and  destination?

Unraveling Mysteries
As the gathering by the fireplace discuss such philosophical and metaphysical matters against a background of  Indian thought and culture that the hosts provide,  Ember slips in and out between their sprawled legs and books and papers. She is weaving the web that connects the realms as the narrative of the story unfolds through the threads of the conversation. Soon the crowd loses awareness of time or locale. This bridging of realms is what A Night's Tale will be about. And a million thanks to Alicia for adding a new dimension in the shape of "Ember the cat," that further energizes the story as it comes to life over the  weeks ahead.

Footnote: Read the posts for the other winners here
No Frocks For Prudes - 3
Piercing The Valley      - 1

No Frocks For Prudes

Runner Up

Cat name according to Schrodinger:

Not by T.S. Eliot

By Not.T.S.Eliot
By T.S. Not.Eliot
By and Not By T.S. Eliot

Cat Name according to Eliot:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name

Cat Name According to Ajesh:

JAFrock

No Prudes Permitted

Ajesh you happily knocked all prudery out of the cat jointly owned by Eliot and Schrodinger.

On first seeing the word "JAFrock" I mistook it for some new enigmatic breed of rock music involving meows and purrs. Then it flashed! Well going with rock and going with the Frock that you robbed from the prude, we are left with a rockstar in a frock. J Alfred PruFrock aka J Alfred Frock Aka Fred Frock and we have cat loving Freddie Mercury in a frock. You leave me with no choice now but to write about the influence of cats on musicians and how musicians who love cats have a preference for drag or for fancy dress at any rate.

                                            Freddie Mercury in a frock and Freddie Mercury with cat

But having said it, I think I'll bypass that road to perdition and focus on the inscrutable mind of Mr Eliot. I turn to these lines from my Pumpkin Quartet post.

"This silliness around a quartet of pumpkins - or Four Quartets of Pumpkins - emerged from a really serious conversation around the Trick Or Treat theme taken in the profound context (Eliot was involved)  of Life-and-death/Life-or-death. Believe me, the conversation gave me goosebumps of a totally different kind from the spooky shivers and shudders associated with a macabre Halloween costume or two. That conversation will be posted another day, also entitled "Trick And Treat" because that dratted cat got us good and educated us on the new reality where they coexist peacefully and don't fight over scraps like old-fashioned Tom Cats did." 

Is this the time to wake up the above somnolent post-in-the-making? Perhaps not. 

Perhaps I will take a whiff of Schrodinger(and also Eliot) style enigma, a touch of rock music, and round up those pesky cats that Ajesh loves to hate. A veritable tribe of cats called the Jellicles! Oh and we must perforce abandon JAFrock/JAPrufrock. The only prudes in frocks I've seen around cats (our core theme is cats isn't it?) are the proverbial Old Spinsters and I'm not about to give them writebytes here anytime soon.

Welcome to Cats, The Musical - By and Not By T.S. Eliot.

First Eliot's poem - "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" 

Eliot was sure fond of small, pesky mammals. "As Peter Ackroyd wryly says in his biography of Eliot, he loved small animals, whether of the four- or two-legged variety."
This poem turned out to be the inspiration for the musical "Cats"  

"Cats is a sung-through musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make what is known as "the Jellicle choice" and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life." Additional lyrics are by Trevor Nunn. Old Possum is a nickname given to Eliot by his friend Ezra Pound.

Which brings us to the most important part of this post - inscrutable, small, furry mammals. 
Old Possum (only one of its kind), Opossum, and simply Possum, and as a poet might say to keep the rhyme and rhythm in place, Possum-Oh-Possum! Is he addressing a possum or two animals, a possum and an opossum aka possumopossum? Does that sound like Eliot's cat names I gave at the top of this post?

In case you think T S Eliot wrote unmitigated nonsense, his status as the leading modernist poet (in English) of the 20th century – and the greatness of his poem The Waste Land – was never challenged. But, ironically, the work of Eliot’s which sold best was a collection of ‘cat poems’ for children. I would have loved for him to have written about cats for adults. 

There is clearly something about cats that musicians and poets find captivating.  I've been spending a happy Sunday searching for the cat passions of people in the performing arts. Indeed there was one such who prefixed Cat to his name. Go figure. Even a cat basking joyfully in the sunshine seems to be dwelling in some private zone that none can enter. A few claim to have penetrated its aura but it's more like the cat read their minds while giving away precious little about its own. I have to ask what drew Schrodinger to a creature that "is while it isn't" to put it quite simply? Did his pet cat whom we are all busy naming, inspire his thought experiment? By the way it is not the cat but the possum that plays dead - it is both dead and alive!

Meanwhile I will leave you to your own thought experiments and name calling. Bet you learnt a whole lot more than you bargained for about Eliot and small furry animals. What did I get us all into with that Pumpkin quartet? It's your fault Kim for sending me those four  pumpkins in the first place, right when I was researching the Four Quartets.

Footnote: Want to see Schrodinger and Heaviside in the same place?

For entertainment and in further support of my theory about crazily clad musicians and their cats I post below:

Ian Anderson in his famous cod piece and Ian Anderson years later with cat - he works for wild feline welfare

You'll find plenty more if you search. 

And here is a song that sums up cat-enigma better than I can - Rupi's Dance. You can read the lyrics and also listen to a few bars on that link.

"She dances through the flower-filled room –

Sea-green eyes a-sparking

Or are they blue?" 

Methinks green.and.blue!

PS - The Original Profound Trick.And.Treat post will reach you readers yet! 

Footnote:
Read the posts for the other winners here:
1. Piercing The Valley
3.  A Cat Named Ember

Piercing The Valley

Winning A Contest

Picture taken at Birdsong & Beyond

Valleys are where thoughts form and mountains are where they find expression.
The day Jean gave me the name Percy for Schrodinger's cat, my mind instantly shot off inquiring arrows in several directions. And one of these arrows pierced a valley.
As always, the obvious eluded me and the obscure lured me away.

Yesterday Jean won the contest. There were only seven contestants and I picked three winners as I had promised. No that wasn't what I had actually promised. Initially finding only 3 participants - cats tend to freak out even cat lovers (or maybe cat lovers even more than others) when I mention them - I had decided to use all three names in a post.  Maybe name calling is kind of disrespectful for that mysterious and aloof creature and people were wary of participation?

Jean having won the contest - I selected two more names anyway from the witch's basket* - I was stuck with "Percy" and I went for it every which way I could.

Welcome to Purrcy-Bysshe-Shelley. He wrote cat poems!! Did you know?

Written by 10 year old Shelley

Shelley was among my mother's favorites but I don't recall her mentioning cats. In fact when trying to recall her favorite poems, my mind draws a blank. Methinks the sounds of purring are obstructing the flow of thoughts.

She Leadeth Me

A poet named after a cosmic vibration next only to "Om" can't not write a cat poem or two. But the purr connection goes to the afterlife.  By sheer chance my quest led me to pierce the valley of the shadow of death - that place deep down in the earth where the poet was laid to rest, via an article "At Shelley’s Grave: The Ineffable Calico Cat at il Cimitero Straniero". 

To quote from the article (please read it from start to finish, I learnt much from it)
"' 'I’ll send for you.'
So I said, most impractically, to the obliging calico cat with yellow eyes, as we turned to depart the old Protestant Cemetery, that walled oasis of green quietude in the midst of hurried, cacophonous Rome. She had materialized, Ariel-like, just as we were running short of time to find Shelley’s grave, having somehow gotten lost amidst the crowded maze of old gravestones near the ancient pyramid of Cestius. Presto, the calico, presented herself as our spontaneous mascot and guide."

I repeat, do read the article from start to finish, even if you don't finish reading this post. It resonated deeply with me and were it not for a cat named Percy I wouldn't have found my way to it. And that article is the source of inspiration for upcoming posts! 

I quote some more:
"Not everyone, Shelley included, who came to rest in this quaint urban oasis fits the category of “Protestant.” The term can scarcely be stretched to describe Shelley’s unorthodox spiritual bent, though certainly he did protest passionately against the many injustices he saw in the world."

Indeed a cat named Percy has led me to return to the strange, mystical and unorthodox path I had withdrawn from, in favor of the tried and tested. And strengthened my convictions that my destiny lies along it.
The author continues,"And so we set out to find Shelley’s grave, but soon found we were lost. That’s when the calico cat appeared, just as we had begun to despair of ever finding Shelley’s grave in the time we had left. When I said, “take us to Shelley’s grave,” she made a few leaps and bounds and landed on a stone that read:

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
COR CORDIUM"

And I'm convinced that when I flounder for directions, a cat will appear and I will address her and she will lead me (the quiet waters by)

She writes,

"Having led us to the spot, the calico cat seemed to keep watch over Shelley’s gravestone–so much so that to photograph the inscription, we had to lift her from it."

This cat reminds me of Lord Ganesha who creates/removes obtacles! Lest you worry that I will switch loyalties from cat to elephant, fear not. 

And the author concludes,

"Of course, I never did send for that calico with yellow eyes. How could I possibly send across the Atlantic for a cat without any name that we knew of, among the countless felines dwelling there? That is not to say she didn’t have a name. As a fan of Keats and cats, T.S. Eliot, alias Old Possum, once said, a cat properly has three names, at least one of which is beyond human ken–

His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name."

Yes you're right. Eliot does sound like Schrodinger!

Neighborhood calico cat photographed by me

I leave you, dear readers with a new challenge - "Name The Calico Cat With Yellow Eyes".
And if  you see the name Eliot up there, it's not by accident. Nothing happens by accident. I did not write this post or start this contest by accident. There is a cat muse out there and she is calling to me.

Footnote: Eliot and his cats will be back in a subsequent post. But perhaps for now we'll send Schrodinger on vacation!

*The Witch's Basket: the winning name were drawn out of it in a lucky dip*

PS: Trivia - Calico cats are almost always female

Footnote: The links are treasure troves. There are as usual, far too many (?) in this post but I implore you to open them. While many of you would be familiar with the contents, I certainly learnt a lot that was new to me. 

Read the posts for the other winners here:
No Frocks For Prudes - 2
A Cat Named Ember    - 3

Can I, Can’t I?

I can’t, I can!

At the very outset I have to say I am staring at this beautiful masthead uploaded here. This has been my beacon and my instrument of faith, hope and love, for believing in myself as a writer and believing I will come to author a book I can be proud of. I filched it for the post as an acknowledgment of someone who stands for a whole lot of things I am trying so hard to be.

A seminal moment confronted me today as I walked home in a sweat, back and legs aching, from the pesky chore of chasing the bank. Somewhat akin to chasing crooks really! There was certainly something different about writing a book that people would read. My mind returned to the Collection of 33 Essays. Each essay would have been trimmed, some merged, and a plethora of hyperlinks, quotes and references tucked into suitable places so the book made sense as seen in print on paper. It would of course have found a perch on shelves of college libraries. People could have picked up an essay at random ... and another. And then they’d have got bored in a bit, because people like the presence of people around them.

Is that one possible reason why Book Readings succeed? Some have read the book already, others decide to arm themselves with a copy and yet others find their curiosity kindled enough to buy one. And then some who really aren't into books but find themselves there through some social compulsion, feel silly or left out so they pick up their copies and religiously get them signed – or slip away when no one is looking. But then a book reading with the coffee et al and the overheads, could cost a tidy something! Unless I haul the little monsters (bless their hearts) up my heritage stairs and seat them all on the floor in my drawing room! Well does anyone have a reading for a collection of essays to promote it? I wonder.

Heck where is my mind wandering? It’s the thought of people that led me there. No I wasn’t planning any sort of book reading for a book that isn’t yet written, but a whole lot of writing has been flowing out of me. And there seems to be some connective magic that is linking all those pages together smoothly. Maybe that’s how authors wrote a column? Week after week? And the readers started getting hooked. And then they became regular. And then they started remembering what you wrote last week. And so on... 

But I was not at all meaning to talk about capturing an audience and holding them captive over time. I am talking about capturing these discrete ideas and making them link arms and dance together effortlessly. And I am guessing there’s more than one way to make it happen. For instance the book of essays that might-have-been, was content driven. There was a loose connection between the essays as they were all generated to answer questions emerging as responses to a classroom session and a presentation video that 33 people happened to experience - 33 of a peer group, similar in age and studying similar subjects. Young and fortunately, curious – yes some asked three questions in place of one. A few forewords and afterwords, and a few smaller essays by way of explanatory notes, would have sorted out the sense of isolation the pieces might have felt from one another. But also perhaps “dried” out the whole work considerably, tilting it in the direction of a possible boredom-inducer.

And that’s where the people suddenly spoke up in my head. People would be present to string those essays together. The very people who asked the questions and received these essays as answers. Or people very much like them. That was when it became a whole other book in my mind. And no, these were not repetitive Q&A sessions over the internet. These were real people gathering face to face. And what really keeps a reader excited about a book is a sense of place and time. It seemed so easy. What isn’t so easy however is that the story, the situations, the here and now interactions are guiding my hand. They want to flow out of it with a mind of their own. Try as I might, I am unable to bend them to the needs and demands of those 33 essays, many of which have been masterfully crafted. So in what ways do these essays pop up as the narrative demands, and fit themselves into place like actors on cue? This interface, this stimulus and response, this conversation not only between the characters, but between the essays and the intent and purpose of the story, all need to evolve.

If you ask me, my purpose is finding itself. Gracefully and willfully at the same time. The book and I are conversing and trying to find balance in our turns at steering the boat. The essays like the people, need to become characters in the play/interplay. So we talk not only over them, we need to talk to them. That is, as the author - Master of The Ship - I need to talk to them and ask them what role they want to play and what they would like to contribute. Now that I’ve given voice to the muddled up thoughts in my head, I feel suddenly like not just the author but the director of the play. We are now gearing up to bring each other to life as creator and creation. Out of that, the purpose will find itself. On with the writing!

PS It just struck me while reading this back to myself that the book and I were equal partners as writers. The word “author” however popped out at me. It was quite unconsciously that I equated her to the Captain of the ship. Yes author - derived from authority. My roles were both as writer and as author. Just realizing that right now has put things in even better perspective.

Footnote: This was first written in 2016. It reads back like I just wrote it though. Did time stand still or did I take a detour into some other realm I wonder?
"The intent and purpose of the story, all need to evolve." At the time of making this post public, they are evolving with a magical energy, thanks to the responses I've received to my October Post Marathon.  Now I need my readers cheering me on every step of the way!

On The Threshold Of A Dream

Time Travel Alert
This post/Page happily switches between 2016 and 2018 as well as merges them

Pages #42 6-11-16

I decided that Pages had already sown the seeds for a book in its own right and witnessed the emergence of healthy saplings. What happens though, is that these saplings even in their infancy, tend to put out adventitious roots. Unlike the root bridges of Meghalaya, these are hasty little bridges a little too eager to get across, a little too tiny to make meaningful use of areca stems for support. 

13-11-18

If I have thanked Charlie the Sun Man for being the hero of my book set in Maine – hell, I need to get back there – then I have to thank dear Joe for leading me to the roots themselves and the stories they tell. I realize nothing I wrote in answer to anyone’s questions over the past 10 years, has been in vain. Charlie, an undergrad student in Maine, was one of the 33 mariners-in-the-making who had to ask me a question each on India with a specific focus on Hinduism, as part of their humanities project. In reality, I was inundated by "compound" questions from most of these kids and the answers took the shape of 33 veritable essays that came to seed A Night's Tale. The conversations on the sun - specifically the sun on the threshold of rise and set and the green flash - created the core of the book as it morphed into the tale of a charmed night between the thresholds around a hearthfire. Joe came into my life the following year with his questions on living root bridges, giving structure and form to the story that was asking to be told.

I tuck back a tiny errant root and continue #42. 

The cyclone fled to Bangladesh. Yesterday was my day of anxiety that melted in a moment, into peace. Physical comfort has been a long time coming though. As a precursor to the melting, the elusive eye drops (yes, there was a supply crisis) arrived. Quite the surprise of the day! Followed immediately by the sighting amid the grey and damp, of a special golden bird - a harbinger of recovery and renewal dating back to 1963 when mom was in her lowest possible spirits due a health threat.

Synchronicity 

Today (6/11/16 and 13/11/18) is the glorious worship of Surya and Chhathi Maiya. While we think of her as the sun’s consort she goes ahead of him at dawn and behind him at dusk in a reversal of East-West protocols (I leave you to unravel that loaded sentence). Yes the Usha-Pratyusha twins! In a flash of insight that reminds me of Charlie’s green flash and our conversation around it - the deciding factor for the choice of book to write - it struck me that a rainbow was that creation of the union between tattvas – Surya and Varuna aka the sun and rain god. Likewise Usha the dawn goddess stood poised to emerge at the threshold of night and day. As also at the threshold of earth and sky. 

                                Usha                                                          Pratyusha

And heaven sent me all the signs last evening at sundown that I had rightly understood the spirit of Chhath Puja. I was actually standing in the water – yes the leak had spewed water all over the floor and the moisture was clinging to the breeze almost like a spray – and gazing at a dawning light in the western horizon. A violet flash if not a green one. A hello at the moment of goodbye and a lingering farewell that held all the joy of a welcome. And this little drama was staged for me and by me, a whole 24 hours before vast numbers of people enact it in numerous water-bodies this evening and tomorrow at dawn all over again.

I have no idea on which dream’s threshold I stood as I started this post yesterday. It is indeed a stream of dreams as part of a larger network of dreams and. The bigger dream is the same each time. The bigger dream is always at the intersection of past, present and future, even as the dreams within are never still and flow continuously into other dreams. It’s complicated – far more than anything Facebook ever meant to convey with that blanket term – but it is so utterly simple when you know the biggest of the dreams is unchanging. It is your still point, your unchanging threshold that stays like the center of the sphere or the ever constant Pole star. 

Usha the dawn and Pratyusha her other face the dusk, are twins. Are they forerunners that open the portals or are they the rush of energy that follow the sun wherever he goes? I have always noticed a special radiance both before and after a rise or set of the sun. Usha somewhere is Pratyusha elsewhere. As I write one book, another is being formed somewhere in my mind or in someone’s mind. We are all in a state of readiness and a state of transition, at all times.

Footnote

There are references galore. Do check out the links to fully enjoy the post

PS all water references are to 2016. Come the sunset I will either stroll down to a water body or have a bowl of water handy for the tattvas to conjoin.