learning to fly (lesson five)

"As I lay on the Tarmac, my leg twisted at a horribly inappropriate angle, I looked up at the sky and waited for the ambulance to collect me. Above was a thick, overcast Stratus just like the one today: low, grey, oppressive...

Not long after, my friend's father, Neville Hodgkinson, told me something that seemed pertinent. He practises the eastern religion of Raja Yoga, as taught by the Brahama Kumaris, an organisation established in Hyderabad in 1937. Neville told me that clouds have a symbolic role for some yogis: they stand for the times when the yogis lose track of their spiritual journey. They symbolise the distractions that come between the yogis and the 'Supreme Light' of God.

He didn't say what these distractions were, but given that the Brahama Kumari yogis are teetotal vegetarians who avoid garlic (which they consider inflames the carnal passions) and practise a strict vow of celibacy, a few possibilities came to mind. Anyway, these distractions occasionally become so profound and sustained that the yogis lose track of their spiritual path altogether. They call it a 'storm of Maya'. It is one in which illusory ways of thinking and feeling block out the Supreme Light altogether. At times like these, he said, the yogis remind themselves that, beyond the clouds, the Sun never stops shining.

This brought to mind the revelation I had in an aeroplane as a child: that for the pilot it was, without exception, always a sunny day at work. Not only that, but the view from his office window was one of constantly varied and beautiful cloudscapes. So what about the rest of us, stuck down here, terrestial in our jobs and distracted in our spiritual paths? On a bleak, grey February morning, it can sometimes be hard not to yearn for the limpidity of direct sunlight."


- Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter's Guide

partay

well, it's my birthday. so many nice things to think about. just because i decided to think about them today. only happy thoughts.

if i can manage this today, then so i should every single other day out there. and maybe i will.


you're never too old to learn something. as long as i'm me, i'll be me. no matter what the age.



(ps: old pic, found it on my laptop)

nice words # 14

meadow

there's more

it's strange how much, lately, i've been living merely through the words of others here, in this self-created virtual wordworld. i did it because--because i don't know. because this is how things go. as much as i still dislike the word 'blog' simply for its sound and the way it looks in writing, all clumsy and unwieldily rounded, a stately, plump word that in no way appears to assume the shape of its possible contents. but i divert. i started out writing, some four years ago, all that was me (or perhaps still is me), placing a spot in the world that is suspended between two places, between the flatness of my laptop screen and the depth of the multiverse depicted on it; suspended between the insides of my head and the outsides of this non-existent place embodied by ones and zeros. once i wrote differently than i do now; once, i guess, i thought differently than i do now. even though i am still the same person.

i have not been away. nor has the urge to pour myself out into these white letters on a (probably bothersome) black background diminished in any way. i pretend to think that i was preoccupied, that other things got in the way, but ask me to name some of those and i will not get very far. in fact, i was struck by a thought yesterday, while reading an essay by Jonathan Franzen; struck in a way made me almost literally sit up and see my face in the mirror of a page. the text does not even address this (or at least not directly), but one train of thought lead to another in my tired, late-night mind and i suddenly realized how goddamn valuable time really is, and how many ways i often find to waste it, waste it in the way that too many of us waste water, or trees, or oil, thinking that as long as there's more coming in the next moment, there will be no end to the stream and the present will be true for all subsequent moments too. it was then i saw myself in my last moments in life, thinking how much i would give for just one more day, one more hour, one more minute. a second. to do something meaningful with. and i am tired of waiting for that moment to realize how precious a single minute really is; i am tired of waiting an awful lot of minutes. this is not to say that procrastination is all i ever indulge in - far from it - but i allow myself too many moments of lethargy, of meaningless time--not even meaningful in the sense of deliberately doing nothing. and i want that to stop.

i made a promise to myself. that i would make better use of my time. and today, i tried to do so. like everything, it is hard to succeed from the first time. but i know i gained a very large bag of minutes today, a bag i would have missed out on on many other days. i also know that this will not always be so easy -- after all, how cripple is the mind when the body is defunct. but not trying would be worse, and i am happy even with the attempt alone, and the actuality of mindset it brings with it.

all this to say that, however useless this post might be to you, whoever might be reading this, it is meaningful to me. because i took my minutes, looked them over, and turned them into moments--real moments. because i meant them. that my intent translated itself into a blog post is just one way of manifesting things, and i am happy to have done so. in the same sense that i am happy just to have this public refuge, have it even when i just write quote after quote from the various things i read and which strike me as having value; i am happy to come here every now and then - truly come here - and wallow for just another moment in the warmth of the dirty water.





P.S.

"Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society--to help solve our contemporary problems--seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?"

- Jonathan Franzen, "Why Bother", in How to Be Alone

life underground and within; autumn.

"The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents' garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvellously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. ' 'Ook, 'ook!' he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood's fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turn-up, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and - I knew this because I had dressed him - his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spiderman shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light."

- Joseph O'Neill, Netherland

pound for pound

"Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It throbbed forcefully on-screen. The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in formation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geological time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars. How dwarfed he felt by his own heart. There it was and it awed him, to see his life beneath his breastbone in image-forming units, hammering on outside him."

- Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

nice cd cover # 17

The National - Boxer

happiness # 60

the feeling of uncooked linguine in my hands, soft and elegant

listen

VIRGIL: I can't pray. It must be Tuesday, one of my godless days.

BEATRICE: Then let's talk about God again on Friday. Until then, think of this: perhaps God is silent so that He might hear us better.

(Silence.)


- Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

the veracity of what ends

"The road crossed a dried slough where pipes of ice stood out of the frozen mud like formations in a cave. The remains of an old fire by the side of the road. Beyond that a long concrete causeway. A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hagmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence."


- Cormac McCarthy, The Road