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