The world you most want to live in is right here

The fundamental principle of Tai Chi is balance. To never lose your balance when you are attacked. As long as you are standing you have a chance. You fall down and your opponent has the upper hand. At the root of all the slow movements of this incredibly beautiful martial art, the mother of all other forms, is a return to equilibrium.

Patrick used to be my hairdresser for a few years. One of the many Westerners who came to India and never went back. We both used to wait for my monthly haircuts - he, because he could talk in French non-stop, and me because I got to practice my French, AND hear a million stories! About his native Marseilles, his mother who would keep an extra place at the table every Christmas for someone who had no place to go to, and his fisherman grandfather who could predict the heavy winds of the mistral by the colour of the sky. His colleagues at the saloon would smile when I walk in. They knew Patrick would be in a great mood the rest of the day. :) 

He had told me once that he had learned Tai Chi from a Chinese teacher in Marseilles 30+ years ago, and how he still practices it. How it has helped him through so much. And how people ask him to teach it, but he doesn't want to. He was a man of strong opinions. So I didn't ask, though I wanted to continue the Tai Chi I had learned many many years ago.

But suddenly one day in 2016 he asks me - do you want me to teach you Tai Chi? I couldn't believe it. And so started our weekly early morning sessions in Jayamahal park. He would explain so beautifully, in French, how everything about Tai Chi was about balance.  You open, you close. You rise, you descend. You give, you take. And you repeat, again and again and again. You stand with your feet firm on the ground, and move slowly, gracefully, barely displacing the air. 

It was just other-worldly, I could barely breathe. I had goose-bumps every single time. 

Later on, you realize why he did that. He knew he was going to die. He wanted to pass on whatever he could, while there was still time. He was waiting for his biopsy report. He had lung cancer. I was with him and his wife the last few months. The hospital. The treatment at home. And I helped to call his daughter and speak to her in French and ask her to advance her ticket, there would be no time. She made it, 2 days before he passed on. She brought him the smells of his hometown, from the Southern coast of France.  Lavender oil, Marseilles soap made of olives, traditional sweets. 

He left with the smells of his childhood, half-conscious. Maybe that was closure in one way. You go out into the world, you return.

And so I move on, the sum of all the innumerable gifts so many have given me, so generously, so whole-heartedly. I try to give it all away, this embarrassment of riches,  but the universe keeps refilling my bowl, again and again, in the most unexpected of ways. 

On a Day when Hostility rules the News

Rosemerry Trommer

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2017/08/on-day-when-hostility-rules-news.html

Patrick, featured here: https://www.magzter.com/article/Celebrity/HiBLITZ/Je-taime-Bangalore

Arriving Home

The hardest journey is the journey to the ground at our feet. I should have known that, given how much time I spend alone with myself, happily. No, I didn't see it, I was busy watching ants. :)

It is amazing how much distraction we heap upon ourselves to avoid looking at the face in the mirror. Or denial. Work, hobbies, fun, travel, the search for novelty, learning, doing, saving the world - everything protects us from having to look at oneself. And getting down to fixing what needs to be fixed. And yet love the pitiful creature that one is.

Still a long way to go. But the journey has been the most humbling one ever. And it wasn't joyful when it began.

But age, that wondrous thing!

The body starts to fall apart. (Why do I even need so many teeth?:)) But the mind just comes into its own, reaching its joyful youthful exhilarating prime, heaviness giving way to lightness, the chaff falling away by the wayside - along with all the hair. :)

A Spiritual Journey
Wendell Berry

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-ground-at-our-feet.html  

The birds don't alter space, they reveal it

White-cheeked barbet, nesting on my Silk Cotton tree

For Abhisheka, with gratitude

I have never been able to meditate. But I can tune into Barbet Station anytime, anywhere. :)  Above the loud traffic sounds, beyond all that is going on around, I can still identify a white-cheeked barbet. If I suddenly look distracted when you are talking to me, I have picked up a barbet signal. :)  

You can always hear what you want to hear. I hear birds. I hear barbets. This city is still a magical place for me. When things are not good, I go for a walk. And I tune into birds. I move from bird to bird as I walk along. I can more or less identify every single bird call in the neighbourhood by now. Thanks to friends who really know birds - my teachers who changed my life. I can never repay the debt I owe them.  

There is a time to save the world. Fight the good fight. Stand at street corners with placards and raise slogans. Like Rambert the journalist in Camus' 'The Plague', I would "feel ashamed to seek a merely personal happiness."

And there is a time to stop. And tune into bird stations. The barbets. The bulbuls. The cuckoos. The magpies. The kites. The mynahs. And the shikaras, if you are really lucky. And remember that you are one thing among so many others in this universe, your power equally matched by your powerlessness. 

Barbets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IpU_dLropY

The birds don't alter space, they reveal it

Li-Young Lee

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-birds-dont-alter-space-they-reveal.html 

Someone should say what everyone knew

A dear friend is now working for an organization that is hoping to make mental health a topic that people are comfortable talking about in India. Acknowledging mental illness as a reality, and a possibility in every person's life. 

For once we are on a level playing field, ironically. The line between the "Okay" and the "Not Okay" people is blurring. And some have not realized that they have crossed the line, moved to the territory that so many find themselves in most of their lives. 

At the start of it all is paying attention. Keeping an eye on oneself. On others. And actually having the courage to ask, "Are you okay?". The greatest sadness is sometimes no one asking that question. Maybe this lockdown situation will make us no longer avoid what is staring us in the face, "while there is still time". This beautiful poem says it so well. 

On the Death of a Colleague
Stephen Dunn

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2013/06/avoidance.html 

Faith

St Mary's Church, Cambridge, UK

I am not a Christian, but I spent 15 years of my early education in a school and college run by the nuns of the Apostolic Carmel order. The shy stammering child bullied by the smarter more confident children, I used to find refuge in the school chapel where no one could harass me or tease me until I cried. The chapel was usually empty during the day. When I was very small I did not know who this man was, why he was nailed to a cross, why he had a crown of thorns on his head. But I felt he surely must be suffering, and more than me?

And that's how he became a brother.

The nuns once took us to watch a movie about Jesus. When the time came for him to be lifted up onto the cross, I was crying so uncontrollably they had to take me out of the huge hall. Decades later I went to watch the 'The Passion'. When the scene of the crucifixion came, I knew nothing had changed. This was still my brother, my flesh and blood they were torturing. I fainted and slid down unconscious from my seat, much to the horror of my husband and my friend. :)

To this day I walk into churches wherever I go, anywhere in the world, I am deeply drawn to them. The routine is still the same. I smile and say Hello. I kneel down. And then I usually end up crying. Though now it is more out of gratitude and astonishment.

The realization that I have been saved, again and again and again, in ways too miraculous to be real - though I have never had any faith whatsoever..

Storm on Galilee
Teddy Macker

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2016/09/faith.html

Until only the mountain remains...

Stillness...

Dedicated to Shreya, my patient wise young teacher

Fully living and experiencing this well-known poem of Li Po has always remained an aspiration. Though I am very comfortable with silence, love walking alone for hours, and can relate to this poem very deeply - I knew that the quality of  absolute stillness and weightlessness - as if I don't exist at all - I had not really achieved.

And now I am learning Praanayaama (Yogic breathing) from a young friend, an excellent teacher who is correcting all the mistakes I had made earlier when I had attempted to learn. Which led to this mind-blowing experience, literally. 

At the end of each round of Kapaalbaadhi (one deep inhalation followed by multiple rapid exhalations - I can do up to 60 now, and increasing) there is that magical thing that happens. 

For a few seconds you are not breathing. At all. You would think that after not having inhaled for a full one minute, your body would be rushing to inhale, deeply. But no, it doesn't. It pauses. And for a few seconds you are absolutely still. You are not inhaling. You have no thoughts. Yes, that practically impossible thing - to not have thoughts at all - I am experiencing it for the first time in my life. 

I am finally beginning to know what this is really supposed to be - prana (prāṇa), breath, + āyāma (stopping, controlling, restraining) - literally the suspension of breath. 

And then you slowly start breathing again, like the body is just easing back into it, like it just remembered it has to do it, but there is no hurry. And then your breathing throughout the day becomes slower and deeper. Which evidently makes you calmer.  A few weeks of practice, my no-breathing pause has grown significantly. I don't know by how much. I am not counting - because I am not thinking. :)  

It is absolutely exhilarating, wondrous, magical, life-changing. I have hope now that maybe one day I can sit with a mountain like Li Po, until only the mountain remains....

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2007/09/until-only-mountain-remains.html