I felt in need of a great pilgrimage

 

There must be better ways of spending your mornings than sitting under your favourite Hongai tree and listening to the small flowers falling, like the first drops of approaching rain. But thankfully you don't know of any of them. :) 

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

In the evenings, if you sit and wait patiently in your city balcony, you get to see the changing of the guard at sunset. The kites circle lower and lower and then come down to roost on the huge trees in the West. And once the kites have cleared the golden-gray evening sky, the bats come flying in from the darkening East, wave after wave, hundreds of them. Without fail. Day in, day out.

A change of guard that is so easy to miss, because it happens in total silence. When you sit quietly, the world is a different place.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage.

So I sat still for three days

and God came to me.

Kabir, in 'Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices form the East and West'

There are no edges to my loving now

"We are drawn to edges, to our own, parapets, and sea-walls."

'Apart', Robin Robertson

They say everything is Freudian. Everything has a reason which our poor old slow Conscious mind is yet to catch up with. 

I still remember the taking of this photo. The exact spot where I rode up to, with two dear friends. I was riding into the sea, from a steep steep hill top, as a joke. Just stopping at the very edge, and looking back into the camera.

This picture sums up my entire life.

Yet another birthday. And I am still around. Thank you. For making me turn back and look. In your own individual ways. 

There are no edges to my loving the world anymore....

There are no edges to my loving now
The clear bead at the center changes everything.

There are no edges to my loving now.

You've heard it said there's a window

that opens from one mind to another,

but if there's no wall, there's no need
for fitting the window, or the latch.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Translated from the original Persian by Coleman Barks

For what else might happiness be?

Squirrels live on trees doing Squirrel Things, scampering on agile butterfly feet, scratching their ears with baby fingers, cleaning their bushy tails, playing endless games of catch-me-if-you-can, going crazy at the return of the light ("OH MY GOD, it's back!") and standing on their hind feet and stretching their arms  and yawning and warming their fluffy tummies in the first rays of the morning sun when all is well and ummmmmmmm happy in their small squirrel world.

Every morning they come down from the trees, and take what the day offers them. Sometimes there is food, sometimes there isn't. But every morning they come down and notice - "OH MY GOD, it's morning again!" And run around like crazy the rest of the day, chasing each other up and down and around tree trunks, round and round, like they are on wheels. Squirrels never get dizzy. They have a Dizzy Stabilizer in their heads. Am sure they won't faint on a roller coaster like I do.

Understandably I am on a high when I return from my morning walks full of squirrel encounters. Some part of my soul must be with them.

I figured out a long time ago that humans were put on this earth primarily to create electric lines and TV cables so that squirrels can get from tree to tree without having to come down and cross the road. We are just Squirrel Bridge Makers, and we are blessed to be given such purpose. (Come on, can you come up with a better reason? :) )

I watch squirrels all the time, wherever I go. I can hear a squirrel above the sound of the traffic. In the park I sometimes follow Squirrels Going Somewhere jumping from tree to tree and sometimes I discover squirrel nests.

If a squirrel comes near me, you no longer have my attention, sorry. I like you, but the trust of an animal is Another Thing Altogether. That is the kind of thing you have to kneel down to accept, in reverence and wonder. For a tiny little piece of time, the wall between you and a wild creature has come down. And you look into each other's eyes. And wonder - do I know you?

Of all the saints, I relate the most to St Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Animals. And therefore this poem speaks to me.

Happiness
Jane Hirshfield

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2014/05/for-what-else-might-happiness-be.html  

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  

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

To make broken things whole again

The Dalai Lama rocks. Literally, I mean. When he sits and talks, he rocks gently from left to right, right to left. I had read that it is a habit acquired from decades of long hours of meditation, often in the cold. (Though it felt to me like he was listening to some gentle swaying music of the universe, with internal headphones.)

The best-behaved thousands-strong crowd I have ever seen, the Tibetans listened in respectful silence to their leader telling them to aim for a victory for both sides, and to always remain warm-hearted in the face of all injustice. [This was a Tibetan gathering at Bangalore many many years ago]

This man, who every time he leaves a room, tries to switch off the light, hoping to teach by example, continues to tell his homeless wronged people to have compassion above all, to forgive wrongs one cannot bear to even read.     

As Pico Iyer says: "If the Dalai Lama were a dreamer, it would be easy to write him off. In fact, he's an attentive, grounded, empirical soul whose optimism has only been bolstered by the breakthroughs achieved by his friends Desmond Tutu and Vaclav Havel. Havel indeed, who became the first head of state to recognize the Dalai Lama, within thirteen hours of coming to power, has been a powerful spokesman for his new kind of statesmanship. The politician of conscience, the Czech leader writes, need not have a graduate degree in political science, or years of training in duplicity. Instead, he may rely on "qualities like fellow-feeling, the ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation."

In all those respects, the Czech president may well have been thinking of a canny Tibetan scientist with a surprsing gift for repairing old watches, tending to sick parrots, and,as it happens, making broken things whole once again."*

There was no grandeur, no striking stride, no heroic gestures. But strangely, on the stage, the giant painting of the Potala palace with the huge snowcapped mountains behind did not appear to dwarf this smiling old man sitting in front of it, and talking about kindness being more fundamental than belief....        
                                                                                                                              
*from the essay:"Making Kindness Stand to Reason". 1998.
'Sun after Dark. Flights into the Foreign'
Pico Iyer

14. What we need is here

It's been a while since you've come to the park alone. Everything rushes in to greet you. The rain trees with their canopy shyness, the drying grass, the tabebuia leaves turning yellow, the scraggly park stray dogs who respond to your smiles, the sweeper ladies who stop to chat. Your cloak of solitude still fits you so well, allowing space for the world to pass in and out. You smile as you walk into a grove resonating with barbet calls, content.

The first tabebuia impetiginosa has bloomed already! You wait for this all year. This brief blossoming that bursts into your life every Oct-Nov. You watch the flowers at your feet, flabbergasted that you are allowed yet another chance to see this miracle. What a privilege. You can never quite get over this.

Every time you are shown something new, in this space you have been visiting for years. Today is the day of the parakeets. All over the park you come across the rose-ringed parakeets. Lying down under the silk cotton tree, you look up and see one sitting on a broken branch, peaceful, watching the world below. As you walk  back, you see crowds of them on trees, sunning themselves, linking tree to tree with their constant flights up and down, their sweet shrill cries cutting through the stillness. A family sees you looking up and stops to stare too, "Hey, parrots!" :) 

And you wonder at how  you have taken these beautiful birds for granted, just because they are so common in this city. There are so many all around your house too, you wake up to their calls every morning. Any way you look at it, they are exotic, stunning. You wonder at how much you take for granted, just because you have it so easily, just because it is part of your every day, just because it has been given without being asked for.

You pray that you will always remember that you are rich beyond imagining....

Twice during your walk, park sweepers stop to chat with you, telling you of their woes, the struggles of their hard lives. You stop and listen to them, give them all very liberal Diwali tips, knowing how little difference you make to their suffering, sadly. You are always singled out for such encounters - in a group, you are always the one beggars will come to expecting kindness. Maybe you have "fool" written all over your face? :)

May you always be just as foolish, just as generous. May you go away empty-handed and happy.  May you never forget the unknown dervish.

The platform under the silk cotton tree is now covered with dry leaves. Soon, the bare branches - and then the blossoming in December. The wheel has turned a full circle. Here we are again, ready for renewal, yet another time.

Of late you have been noticing how everything you have read and experienced all your life is now a part of who you are, how so much has seeped into the very fabric of who you have become. You owe a debt you can never repay, to so many all over the world, alive and dead.

You have lit your candles at so many altars, each time the darkness descended. You have been pulled out of whirlpools by the most random glimpses of beauty, by the most ordinary of mornings, resplendent with squirrels and flowers sellers. 

You have been broken, nay re-arranged, until you have seen.

... And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry, 'The Wild Geese'

The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

Parakeet picture from here. 

13. Sarvam Annam

At the end of December, you arrive one morning to find that the silk cotton tree has started blooming. Far up above in the canopy, small orange flowers against the blue sky. Which means it's been a year since you first started visiting this tree. What a year it has been. And what a ritual this has been. The only constant that has grounded you through upheavals, shocks, surges of delight, joy, lightness, heaviness... and as always an endless return to humility.

A thread of visits running through the calendar, linking month to month, preserving what remained constant within you through it all. Or did it? Are you the same person?

The next time you visit the tree, the cement platform is full of dry flowers, beautiful even in their death. The leaves are also drying up and the tree more and more bare. It's January, and time for the annual ritual of the rain trees revealing the water-like flow of their bare branches into the blue blue sky. You wait for it all year and never fail to be moved every single time. You stand looking up and weep for the sheer beauty of it all.    

Having spent countless hours at the eye doctor's and hospitals since November, you are more grateful than ever for vision. For being allowed to see all this. You were destroyed, beaten down to your knees. And born again, from the sudden overwhelming submerging fear of blindness to everyday gratitude for the light.

Your visits to the silk cotton tree have an urgency that you have never known before. Every moment of beauty is to be taken with devotion, as holy sacrament, on your knees. As for the rest, you just have to get on with it. You work with the clay you are given. You play with the cards you are dealt. You get a grip and move on. You must go with the flow, like the silent trees with their fluid changes, adapting quietly to the unexpected. You repeat this to yourself, again and again. You know you will forget, your fallibility your only certainty.

February and the pink tabebuias burst into bloom, one month early.The kite nests are clearly visible across the bare branches of the silk cotton tree. You can now see them circling above against the sky, minus the thick canopy of leaves. A barbet couple once allows you to lie down and watch them, while they feed their young in a small hole on a branch very close to you. The trust of living creatures.

You have started drawing in a small notebook during your visits. As an act of meditation. Attention is meditation, and also an opening of the eyes. You are amazed at how much more you notice when you try to draw. Every single curve of a leaf, every serrated edge, every turn of colour, every spot, every vein. And for the first time you notice the wrinkles at every single place where the branches join the trunk on the silk cotton tree. Why hadn't you noticed it before, after looking at it for one year?

One more person you know succumbs to cancer. A young life. You remember sitting by the remains of a young cousin brother, the first time unnatural death came to your family.

"...And in Sanskrit there is a phrase,
a phrase to carry with you
wherever you go:

sarvam annam:
everything is food.

Every last thing." *

You do not believe that everything happens for the best. Losing a child cannot be for the best. But yes, everything is food for our transformation. We are never the same again.

All around you nature is changing on a daily basis, this season just takes your breath away. The yellow tabebuias bursting into bloom. The mahogany losing its leaves, its pods bursting open to allow its winged seeds to twirl to the ground. The copper pod laying out its yellow carpets, melting your frowns into smiles. All night the trees are working hard, and are changed by the next morning. Every morning you meet a new tree. Spring, at every corner.

And then the ordinary commonplace Hongai starts its annual transformation into the most breathtaking thing in the city, with its translucent red and pale green leaves, letting the light through, every vein revealed with an aching clarity that wounds you while it fills you with joy.  The sheer vulnerability of it, so like our own. You watch the short-lived magic while it lasts, and while you last.

That you are allowed such beauty. That so much has been taken away from you. And so much given.

Sarvam Annam. Everything is food. Every last thing.

The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

* Teddy Macker, poem here.

Sudama

For some reason the tabebuia roseas make me cry more than the others, I don't know why. Maybe it is their sheer abundance, the lush thickness of their  inflorescence, their reckless overflowing generosity. The photo is from last year, but they are getting ready for a repeat. Stood at the bus stop and cried again this morning.

Or maybe it is because they make me feel like Sudama returning home after visiting his old childhood friend Krishna, and standing dumbfounded at the sight that greets him. His poor hut has been transformed into a palace, and his happy wife and children come running to greet him, filled with wonder, their rags replaced by beautiful robes.

He had asked for nothing, and was given everything.

12. Receiving

Blue skies
And dragonflies,
October.

A haiku you wrote many years ago. This October did not disappoint either. Many mornings lying down in the park, looking up at the sky, watching kites, swallows, dragonflies, all who know lightness. You return from a week in a cold dark gray country and spend a whole day riding around in the light, walking around, soaking in the sun like you'd nearly lost it forever, delirious with gratitude.

You come across this band of musicians who meet to jam under a beautiful gnarled Gulmohar tree every weekend, and you listen to their beautiful singing. They call themselves Folk Tree. Strangers come to listen to them at times. They invite requests. People suggest songs. This is what parks should be for. For the making of music and joy.

You have been noticing how the park floor has been drying up little by little, post the south-west monsoon. The grass has been cut and left to dry, spongy beneath your feet. One morning you follow a squirrel carrying a big piece of dried grass, you know it must be going to its nest. You watch it jump from tree to tree, up there, to finally reach the hollow in which it is building a nest. You realize with a smile that you know the names of the entire squirrel path - the Aakaasha Mallige, the Gulmohar, the Rudrapalaash, the Cassia Javanica. :)  You know everyone's names, you must belong here.

The silk cotton tree has started yellowing in patches - you are surprised, you didn't know it has an autumn, this tropical tree. The leaves are more sparse, the ground below drying up. One day you come across a rat snake along the edge of the cement platform. You notice that you haven't heard the barbets in a month now. You wonder where they have gone.

You come in early one morning, before daybreak, to see how the park feels in the dark. The moon, seen between the rain tree canopies, beautiful. A few people already walking, jogging. You catch the first rays of light on the upper branches of the silk cotton tree. You stand still and watch a squirrel move slowly, sucking on Aakaasha Mallige flowers. It has just come down from the trees, and is feeding, not yet sprightly, not yet doing the crazy squirrel stuff they always seem to do, chasing each other up and down trees. You have been standing still and it comes close to you, not minding.

You wonder at its simple life, coming down from the tree every morning, taking what nature offers that day.

You have been also waiting for the blooming of the tabebuia impetignosas every week, the pink fist-bunches of lightness. They are blooming, in small patches, but the leaves are yet to fall fully, it is slow this year. Last year was so stunning, so breathtaking, you cannot possibly ask for more. You will wait, and take what is offered too. You will not complain.

More dry leaves under the silk cotton tree. More browns everywhere. The leaves fall down on you in the wind occasionally as you lie down and watch the kites. You notice how smoothly the dark rainy wet months have transitioned into this light dryness. How so much has changed. You notice that you have been learning to live in the present, in the Now, more than ever before. More than ever you know that your imagination is limited, you have no way to predict what will come your way, good or bad.

Maybe this ritual has played a part in preparing you for that? This regular seeing, this receiving, this documenting of the Now. Your moments of happiness are less clouded by the future, the whatifs, your usual paranoia of loss, your perennial preparation for the worst, the conditioning of the past. Perhaps this ritual has synced you with the rhythm of the universe, the many comings and goings of things, all beyond your control. The only surety, what you have now, in this moment.

You receive each drop of Joy like holy water, your head bent.

As the sun moves towards Uttaraayan, as yet another year catapults towards its end, you walk under falling leaves, grateful.  

The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

11. The Light of September

Today you decide to spend some time in the less crowded, less "pretty" part of the park. Where things grow wild and the bats hang from the giant trees like dark fruits, their screeches cutting through the early morning stillness. There are a few runners you see along the edges, but otherwise you have the space to yourself. You slip on solitude with ease, your well-worn cloak.

And you notice that the light has returned. The light of September that you wait for all year. The crystal-clearness of it, after months of monsoon darkness. Under the giant canopies up there, you are in a house of dappled speckled light coming in from the East, slanted liquid rays.

September arrives in orange. In the bright lush burning orange of the Rudrapalaash that lines the streets of your beloved city. Spathodea Campanulata. Family Bignoniaceae. Poetry rolling off your tongue. You know these names by-heart. You know every one of these trees in the park, and some have names on them.

When you walk back into the sunlight from under the tree cover, you see  them - the dragonflies you have been waiting for all year! The dragonflies always follow the Rudrapalaash - as you learned from observing their connection for years. They will be here for three months and then disappear. They bring you unending joy. Their lightness, their translucence, their dance of delight against the blue.

As your start the long walk to your silk cotton tree, the day brightens. The patterns of shadow and light under the trees turn even more magical. Under your favourite gulmohar-tamarind grove, the light is to die for. You feel your quota of happiness is over. Can so much be given to a mere mortal?

At the silk cotton tree, it is pure heaven. The wind. The wind in the leaves, the sound of water. You are hungry, but you cannot leave for breakfast. The perfect light, the perfect coolness in the air. You want to stay here forever. You watch people stopping to admire your tree. You notice yet another old gentleman folding his hands in prayer, approaching the tree. You know that feeling.

And then a young girl and her mother come to the cement platform where you sit. Your overhear the girl excitedly telling her mother that this is her favourite tree, her best friend. And you smile, and start a conversation. A delightful time, listening to their stories, their love for history, for the city, for the trees. Such beautiful people.

The previous Sunday another stranger had come up to speak to you, another lover of trees, a foreigner. Who taught you how the age of trees can be measured, by arms spread across the girth, and how this one must be at least 150 years old.

Two new people in your email contacts. Funny. You have always been known to be a connector. And now the silk cotton tree is connecting you to people. :)

With great reluctance, you finally decide to leave. It is 11, and though you had missed dinner the previous night, and breakfast, you don't feel very hungry anymore. You feel satiated, in this ocean of light you are walking through. Your contentment is complete.

As you get on to your bike at the closed gate, you cannot help looking back into the park, into your favourite rain tree boulevard. You get off and go back to the gate, and look in to the dappled luminous corridor, just one more time. You cannot tear yourself away.

Home. This is home. This house of light.

Album: https://goo.gl/photos/P2j28cczGSvgkQaY8

The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

10. Wonder

In the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis' autobiography, 'Report to Greco', there is this beautiful scene that you often remember. During the course of his wanderings across the islands, the author, along with a friend who is a priest, stops at a little monastery occupied by Sufi dervishes who dance every Friday. They have a conversation with a friendly dervish who comes out to welcome them.

"Father, what name do you give God?", asked the abbé.

"God does not have a name", the dervish replied. "He is too big to fit inside names. A name is a prison, God is free."

"But in case you should want to call Him," the abbé persisted, "when there is need, what name will you use?'

The dervish bowed his head and thought. Finally he parted his lips: "Ah! - that is what I shall call Him. Not Allah, but Ah!"

        *             *             *             *             *             *             *             *

As you walk into the gray monsoon-dark park that day, you are unprepared for the discoveries you would make. More than six months ago you had searched for the tree of the beautiful red seeds, with a friend's young son. The seeds were everywhere, but you could not locate the tree. And you tried again afterwards, months later. But you never found it.

Today when you start your usual walk, cutting across your favourite stretch, you walk a little more to the left than usual. And you notice that the ground beneath your feet is full of red seeds! You look up. You are under the Red Sandal tree. At last. It was there always. So close to where you usually have your park picnics. And you'd never noticed!

And then a little further down, you discover the huge round cup-like seed pod a friend had found during a picnic. And whose source you could never find. And today you walk into a space covered with them! And you look up at these three beautiful giant trees with thick canopies. You are filled with wonder. This was a stone's throw away from where you normally sit. A horticulture-lover friend identifies it for you. The Sterculia Alata, the Buddha Coconut tree.

You feel like a child all over again. You want to hug strangers and tell them - hey, look what I found!

And then when you reach your silk cotton tree and discover a new nest in a branch you always look up at, you smile.

Lying down under the tree, you think of how over the years you have become more fascinated by people than places.  How every person is a country that reveals new territories that you never knew existed. And how that happens  only when you reach out, are curious, when you create this safe place where the other can open up without fear. When you learn to project kindness, like a horse whisperer who wins the trust of even the most wounded animal. 

You are filled with wonder as you traverse layer after layer into the core of another.

We are plural. We are changing. And the familiar is forever new.

16 Aug 2015

The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

9. Balance

 



After many Sundays of dark cloudy mornings, today when you approach the city, the light breaks through the clouds, like the blessing it always is. You know the park will be beautiful today, and can't wait to reach. It is. The light from the East, slanting in through the trees, creating patches of shadow and brightness. The parakeets and barbets, loudly announcing the start of the day. Your favourite rain tree at the park gate; its canopy shyness, as always, pure poetry.

You remember how the darkness of the last Sunday depressed you. And how you didn't quite face it with equanimity, such a minor thing. :)  You have been thinking a lot of balance, of late. Of what it takes to react to the unexpected, without losing one's cool. Of being prepared for the worst, but without dread. You remember your one year of Tai Chi lessons, the perfect exercise of balance, of never falling.

You keep returning to this beautiful blog post that says it perfectly, a lesson learned from Judo - Kuzushi. You are grateful for this reminder that tranquility is possible, though there is little we can predict. We can only choose the way we react to the unexpected.

Today you have to collect seeds for a friend, who wants to plant trees in the forest next to his house. You pull your eyes away from the light which is now playing hide and seek, and look down. And then you can't lift your eyes up! There is a whole world out there, on the damp park floor! So many species,within a few metres, their leaves and seeds intermingling with the lush undergrowth of so many kinds of grass and weeds. And insects, and their babies. And ants, busy as ever. And fungi.

Within minutes you have collected a whole bunch. Jacaranda, copper pod, hongai, tamarind, casuarina, pappillonacea something. Such riches! You have forgotten to bring a bag, your purse is full of seed-mud.

And you discover some new trees because you see a seed you don't recognize and you look up - hey, what's this? And you thought you knew ever square inch of this part of the park.

Each one so different, each one containing life, waiting patiently to be born, or wither and go back into the circle of life. So much going on, silently, all around us.

You can hear the military band playing as you walk towards the silk cotton tree. And when you reach your favourite Gulmohar tree, the one of the beautiful skirts, the light comes in suddenly, and leaves a fleeting patch of brightness amidst the dark monsoon green of the park.

At the silk cotton tree, there are two girls sitting on the raised platform, talking. As always, when you overhear conversations in the park, you notice how some people are so absorbed with their lives, their tribulations, even during a morning walk. How not everyone is looking at the trees or exclaiming at the light. The park, a setting for so many dramas being recounted at length. To each his own. : )

The tree has a few more patches of yellow leaves in between, you wonder why. Surely this is not shedding season? Or maybe it is a tree that observes Autumn? :)  A lone squirrel careering down the trunk. You can hear so many small birds, but you can't see them. You wonder what they are.

And as always, just when you think - "Hey, the kites are missing!" - you hear a shrill cry from up above. The first one to spot you telling the others - "Hey, the mad tree-kissing woman is here!" :) :)

You notice how because of the attention you pay to the silk cotton tree, you have also started observing other trees with more care. Your love for one tree overflows on to all others. Just as your love for one person should make you love the whole world more, an abundance that should spill on to everybody.

"False love, i.e shared mutual selfishness, makes people more selfish (and this is the case often enough). Genuine love increases the capacity to love and to give to others. The true lover loves the whole world in his or her love for a specific person." Erich Fromm, 'To Have or To Be?'

A fine balance.


The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual

8. And the light comes and goes...

After weeks of increasing summer sunlight and dryness and silver silk cotton floating in the wind all around you, today there is a stillness, and a coming and going of the light. The monsoon will soon be upon us. There is something in the air that spells change, or rather a readiness for it. 

The babies seem to have all left their nests. The barbets are rarely seen or heard. There is less activity on the trees around, except for the kites that seem to dominate the silk cotton tree. They are the guardians of this huge fortress. And oh, do they look it, these majestic creatures.

There are huge bee hives everywhere, especially on the silk cotton trees in the park. Is there a season for bees too? On one Sunday you see a bit of a hive lying on the cement platform. Its intricate perfection holds you spell-bound. To think that without these small beautiful creatures, plants will not be pollinated, and we would have no food to eat.

Last Sunday, a mother and child stop to observe a man who's going around the small banni tree to worship it. The child is curious. The man tells her it is a sacred tree and he is praying to it. She walks around it too, following him, hands folded. As they leave, the mother asks, don't you know the story of this tree? And she says No. "I'll tell you on the way back", she says and they walk away slowly, hand in hand, an intimacy you are privileged to trespass upon.

Today you see an old man holding the banni tree close and pressing his cheek against it. Which is exactly what you do with the silk cotton tree, every time. Two trees, one sacred for everyone else, the other for you.

And as the light comes in in waves and disappears, as you lie down under the tree and watch it, you remember the 35-year-old Siddhartha meditating under the Bodhi tree for 49 days, to discover the source of all pain. 

"According to Buddhist texts the Buddha, after his Enlightenment, spent a whole week in front of the tree, standing with unblinking eyes, gazing at it with gratitude."

You can imagine why.

And you remember Pico Iyer:

"...The Gospels, revealingly, tell us little of Jesus' spiritual formation and concentrate mostly on his words and actions. The Buddha story, by comparison, places most of its emphasis on how Siddhartha came to enlightenment - the process (which anyone can follow, even today, in principle) - while the particular details of his subsequent teachings and wanderings are often barely mentioned.

Even non-Christians may know some of Jesus' words, while typical Buddhists may know hardly any of Buddha's specific discourses. Buddha is a precedent more than a prophet; and where Jesus came to earth as the way, the truth, and the life, the Buddha came to suggest that the way is up to us, the 'truth' is often impermanent, and the light comes and goes, comes and goes, until we have found something changeless within."

Pico Iyer, 'The Open Road - The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama'

And then you see this little squirrel picking up the laddu pieces one of the banni tree devotees have left at its base, and eating it from its small hands. Its prayer, its very life. 

The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual