Stitches or Scars!!!

 

This mirage of image from the past triggered by a similar acoustic is putting me down in the neural ravine to drown in to the abyss of memories.  And when I close my eyes with that retrospection, all I hear is the sound of a flute in the deep dark forest.  It is scary.  It is painful. I considered it has the reconciliation of all the sins from this life, past life and the life that I don’t even know if I lived. It was scary.  The acoustic was the same sound of the oozing blood from the torn soul that was thrown in the street to bleed.  I fear that sound. I fear that scent of oozing blood.  I fear that the stitches in my soul could cut open to bleed again.  I though only the scars from the past remined.  Those were only scar of the blade that ran through the soul and healed.  No, those were still only the stiches holding the soul not to bleed.  There was a tiny hole made today or one of the stiches gave up leaking blood.

The nausea the oozing blood creates was from the old life.  I could manage the tears, the cut and even the pain but what was unbearable is the same old acoustic.  It scares me to hell.  It sends shudder to my spine.  My hands shiver, my eyes fill tears, my mouth shutters, throat congests, legs go weak and my soul go haywire.  It feels some time that it is better to be deaf than to hear that same spine-chilling noise that kills the soul. Every human has that one trigger, for me it is that noise, that scream, that acoustic of the devil.  Every human has that fear of their mirage from the past.  Though it does exist no more, the sediment of pain and suffering is still in the conscience burning the soul slow and steady to ashes.  The fire sometimes stays dormant until that trigger kindles it to burn.  It will be ashes all over, it will be scorching all over.  Above the scorches and ashes, it is that fear that was in slumber in brain wakes up and shows its evil face.

It requires consoling. The soul, the body, the mind and the subconsciousness need consoling, like a hug from a mother to the crying child.  The hug from just anybody does not suffice, It should be from a human that really cares, a mother or like a mother.  The hug from caring human sometimes doesn’t suffice.  It should be from a soft and pure soul, may be a baby.  The hug from that pure soul too sometime would not console or put the fume out from the soul that started burning.  The divine intervention, an invisible hand, the hand from up above, the one we have not seen physically because He doesn’t have one, the hand of the one we believe might put the flame off.  The hands of the supreme being that we felt when we were praying during the time the mirage was real, the devil was near, the evil was sitting next to us and frightening.  That same hands we felt, the same blissful hands that I felt and to which I begged to save me, is all we want.  The same hands are all I want now to hug me and take me into His palms and console.  After all we are just humans that knows all are mirage, even the reality is a real mirage but we stick to that image and gets scared.  I am hailing that divine hand again.

 

His Old Typewriter

He enjoys the sound of his old typewriter, the click and tik which makes the letter appear on the paper and a mirror image of the letter sculpted behind the paper.  Every letter he types sounds like the ‘cling’ of the coin when spindled in towards the sky and the minuscule gap where air pass is like the swish of the coin rotation in the air.  Why does it keeps growing, the sentences have to be broken down to lines and full stops and the machine has to be moved to right to roll the paper up ready for the next blank line to type the next line.  Though sometimes it is irritating, the sound of the swoosh of moving the lever to right gives immense pressure like the first few drops of rain that doesn’t pulls you out to get wet but triggers the petrichor.  The deodorant of the earth. He likes not commas, no apostrophes, no exclamation but just pure lines that give joys in typing.  He doesn’t write for typing but types for writing.  It is like the travel the gives pleasure along with the driving pleasure, like a dream inside a dream.  It breaks his heart to break his writing to paragraphs for his words are para-sponsored like sun shine from the sky, though it takes a night break but it is always a pure bless. He forgets his coffee and it becomes cold coffee when he drinks but he continues to ignore his dementia while writing.  It pains sometimes in the wrist and the forearms and hand’s knees then he shifts his speed to a slower one but his mind runs wild to stop him from stopping.  He doesn’t stop. He does not like to take his words back neither cuts the sentences with dashes or a pencil line.  He does not take back his words.  He believes it was supposed to be put on paper for some eyes to catch those words just like a message from up above.  A writer is a God’s own messenger.  The message may be for somebody near of sometimes for the writer itself.  His typewriter continues to run wild until he gets exhausted of typing otherwise the dawn, the forenoon, the mid-day sun, afternoon drowsiness, the twilight, the dusk, the night, the moon and the stars and galaxies will be recorded, portrayed, painted with love and care, sometimes with melancholy, in the paper.  He bleeds words and stiches his wounds with words.  His words are his knives and blades also his shield and scabbard.  His words are the pommel for his swords and also the guard for his knives.  He holds the rope of the guillotine; his words decide whose heads need to be cut off.  He writes his malevolence between the lines and sins in the metaphors.  He camouflages himself to expose his sins but those words sounds like it is all fiction and mirage in the mid-day road in the sun.  He creates no words for all that he writes are all mere repetition of hundreds of years what writes and story tellers have poured inside out. He does not mind when the topic gets diverted from typewriter to somewhere else.  He just types for the sake of typing.   It is like running, the run matters less than the intention behind the run.  It makes him stronger, strengthens his mind for the longer run.   The typewriter is like a drug to him for he does not like to stop earing the sound that every key makes.  He, by now might have understood the different sounds of different keys though it belongs to the same typewriter and the same hands that hits the buttons for hours and weeks together!  At some point in time, he stops and retrospect what he had done with his words.  He goes wild and on and on writing, imprinting the letters on the paper with every stroke of the keyboard. It was like a piano with different sounds in different keys and ends in making a good piece of music on the paper.  The love for the words and writing just not be seen in the sentences he wrote but the meaning which does not appears straight forward but hiding between the lines too revels that love. The love of impetuous words written just for the sake of writing.  He becomes venerable while writing when he talks to the creation to bring those words from the supramental force from the other dimension.  The malevolence becomes benevolence and the sins becomes deeds of reactions.  The ugly truths and thoughts are no more a fact but the imagination of the past, a delusion in which he lived. His writing is fast when his stomach is empty, his brain is empty, his thoughts are slower and when everything is filled then the paper remains empty.  Everybody things it is the thoughts that the writers turn it into writings but the truth is different totally.  As the thoughts are overflowing it blocks the words, it stops the truth.  The writing gets stuck between the walls of mind and brain, crazy manufacture.  When watching a movie, listening to a song, seeing a baby walk, looking at a beautiful woman, crossing a good smelling men, walking past a temple, a bookshop, or a dress shop triggers the idea of writing and even pulls up the words and metaphors to write as the beauty fills in the mind and vocabulary kicks-in in the brain, but when he wants to put that on in to paper those words and vocabularies gets scattered in air and merges with the quantum objects for only the eyes of the brain to sea and not the naked human physical eyes.  He sometimes goes to lucid dreams; half sleep and half awake and keeps typing those words in the paper for after few mins found that those words are beyond his control and those that were falling from the sky as to be dropped on the paper with no interpretation and no interruption.  Trance takes over the writing and sleep sometimes hijacks the writing, never mind, the writing continues until a human stop interrupting the stream of thoughts like a dam stopping the river to be used later but gets evaporated by the sun.  Also, the other problem is they never gets used in real time and stays stagnant as is and becomes unused and one with the sky from where it came from.  

I stopped here days back and picked a Fante’s book today morning and somehow, he brought me back to writing.  Before I started to key in the letters, I posted this writing into some Artificial Intelligence chat bot to check it I am on the right track of writing that suites the printer to publish.  When I asked for suggestion to improve, it listed out many suggestions to break my confidence but then when I asked for good things about this piece of writing it said the same thing which it suggested to change.   So basically, you will find what you look for in this virtual world of intelligence hacked to death. And another stupid thing I did was to ask that chatbot to compare my style with already famous writers and it compared my style with Viginia Woolfe which I have never read.  I know it is a wrong thing to compare one’s style with other for every letter typed, may be same, comes from a different experience, from different soul and different consciousness.  For me I know only one writer who stands tall amongst the world full of writers and it is Kahlil Gibran, the only one who had the guts to say “you may not understand half of what I say…” as if he writes for others but also cares less if it didn’t reach to their level of understanding.  Gibran, a beautiful, melancholic soul sleeping in beautiful, melancholic Lebanon. The only one who writes his soul out, put his melancholy in words and imbibes the same into the readers soul.  The one who introduced Ishtar to me, the one who made me fall for Selma Karamy, the one who made me cry for with his book “Broken Wings”.  I wish I could raise my standard of writings like my Gibran. 

Drunken Dreams!!!

This drink of sadness, the exhaustion, the solitude, and the feel of unworthy about everything around is dipping him into a deep trance, in the deep intoxication.  The dogmas he carried, the knowledge from the learnings from the texts, the literature, the feel that he is wise and the discipline to be disciplined all seemed delusional.  It was all mirage that the cognisance he gathered had given him.  There is no mirage and there is no reality or delusion, it is all the reflection of the consciousness.  He knows but the drunkenness that the exhaustion gave urged him to cross the border and throw all the illusion of heavy dogmas he carried into the deep sea and fish a whale, kill the fish and eat.

He was that water in the pond that never climbed the lotus petals but now the pond was filled with the wine and the water went high and intoxicated.  The water wants to climb the stem of the sun lit lotus and sneak upon the curve of the lotus to climb the soft petals and explore the bloomed old flower.  The water wants to reach the edge of the curved petals and stand there to see the Sun and laugh at it.  And with no harm, with no hurry, and taking all time in this world to claim down the ups and down of the inside, of the petals, challenging the sun to evaporate the water before it reach the pores.  He then wanted to stay there surfing around inside the core of the flower waiting for the sun to go down and the petals to close, one after the other, slowly as the night darkness the world and it becomes the night inside the flower.   No light, no air, only water underneath and the water itself inside the heart and soul of the flower. He then wishes to get absorbed by the flower itself and become one with it and run inside its every biological nerve and become unplugged from the lotus.  The next day when the sun wakes the flower up, he wishes to smile at the sun to find him and scorch him if he can.

The Sun know that before or after he is never different from the water and the lotus.  He is the lotus, he is the water, he is the wine and also, he is the Sun.  This reality is a delusion of the imagination, nothing is true and everything is true at the same time.  This universe is a dream that dreams about the universe.

He is truly drunk! 

He drank the drunkenness and the trance had engulfed him into the uncertain reality and revealed the reality of the uncertainty!  Does he know that there is no uncertainty and there is only one truth that he is an imagination of the dreaming universe.   

And This universe is a dream that dreams about the universe.

                                                                                                                                                [SK]

Swamiyee Saranam – 5

I was standing in the queue for a long time in the famous Kamatchi Amman Temple in Kanchipuram. The queue didn’t move as the doors were closed for some special poojas. It was a crowded queue with multiple lines moving towards one door destination and to my left was the open space which is the walking path and the other side of the path was the temple garden with steps like larger seating place for the devotees to sit.  Everyone was busy walking, talking, chatting and few climbed those seating place to sit and talk and few sat down to eat the Prasadham (food offered in temple).  When the entire environment was noisy there was one soul who was sitting in lotus position before a hibiscus plant under the shadow of big willow tree.  She looked serene, undisturbed, effulgent and meditative.   She should be in her early twenties, lean and fair with her hair untied wearing peach color salwar which made her look like a venerated one with her sitting position.  Her phone was on her left lap and she it checked once in a while.  It seemed like she was chanting some mantra looking at her phone.  After a certain time, I guess it should be almost thirty minutes, she went into utter silence, didn’t cared about her phone or the surrounding.  Generally, during penance and wearing thulasi mala, we are told to look at any women as Mother and should call them “Maligaipuram” (the name of the deity in Sabari mala) and treat them with utter respect.  And this young woman looked to me as if the deity of the temple in which I was in, the Kanchi Kamatchi Amman, itself came out and sitting in the garden.  The queue started moving after forty-five minutes and she got up from that place and came down to the pathway. 

Once she was in the pathway, she looked normal as everybody else around, nothing had changed but she suddenly she looked normal to me. And she walked away and vanished in crowd.  ‘The doors are opened and the deity is back to her place’, I thought. 

We had a good dharshan and came out with Vermilion and flowers in hand.  The young woman in her lotus posture was totally out of my mind once I entered into the Garbhagriha, the Womb Chamber of the temple, but once we came out to circumambulate and when I crossed the very place where she was sitting, now there was another person, a man in his mid-thirties, was sitting in lotus posture with is eyes closed and meditative hand mudra.   He looked to be in deep meditation searching something deep inside himself.  And what made me wonder is the place he was sitting.  The same tree’s shadow and the same Hibiscus tree was behind him. It was a garden of around hundred meter and nobody other than this man was meditating or no other place made anybody as serene as this particular spot.

Some places really connect us to the internal God within us.  Those places differs with intensity and radius of the aura.  You end up inside that radius either accidentally or lead by a Guru who had experienced it already.  I think that answers why ‘Sabari Mala’,  why ‘Swami Ayyappan’ and ‘What Thathwamasi is’.

Swamiyee Saranam Ayyappa!!! Guruve Saranam!!! Swamiyee Saranam!!!

    

                                                                                                                                    SK

Swamiyee Saranam – 4

                         I was sitting in the last row of a cramped and crowded room next to a small kid and her father.  It was an Ayyappa Swami Bhajan session and group prayer in the house of a Ayyapa Swami comrade.  I especially went to see him sing and listen to his devotional voice.  The kid next to me was sitting on her father’s lap keenly observing everything happening around her.  I could feel the uncomfortableness her father was feeling sitting there and when asked he said he had an injury in his leg and could not sit comfortably and seating his kid on his lap for a longer time was giving is inducing pain.  I asked the kid to sit on my lap for sometimes so that her father can relax. She refused.  She didn’t move from her father’s lap. As the pain increased it induced anger in him and he showed that on his kid, but she didn’t react to his anger.  The prayer started and the singing was loud.  I asked her again to come to me.  For a second she looked at me and then she looked at the Swami Ayyappan pendent in my thulasi mala.  She held the my swami’s pendent it in her hand as we sit without shirt in the prayers and said ‘Ayyappa’.  ‘Yes’, I replied.  ‘Ayyappa looks beautiful’ she said.  I don’t know what to respond.  I took her from her father’s lap and comforted in my lap.  She turned the pendent and looked in to the image of Swami in both the sides of the pendent and she said the same phrase.  All I could say was ‘Yes’. 

                       The beauty She saw in Him, the peaceful, pure, and childish beauty she saw in Him is only kids could see, I guess.  The bajan was louder with drums, when I though she could fear the sound, she was enjoying the songs and ambience.  The environment was devotional and calm amidst loud singing.   All I saw in her was undisturbed calmness.  When the Guru Swami asked a Kanni swami to lite the lamp set below the feet of Swami Ayyappan, the Jothi, the flame glow bright and iridescent. 

                      Sitting on my right lamp she bent to her left and was observing something while I was busy singing along with fellow comrades.   Slowly she pinged my chin to ask something.   I bent down and her mouth so that I could here her in that loud ambiance.  

‘Why is that shaking’ she said.  I didn’t understand what she was talking about.  I looked at the direction she was showing.  All I could see was Ayyappan in Harivarasana posture and a lamp below His feet. 

                    As if understanding my perplexity, she said ‘why is that flame in that light shaking?’  I looked at the lamp and could see the flame waving right and left and I thought it was wind’s work. I told her the same but she was not convinced.  She said ‘then why all other lamps are not shaking?’ and she was right it was only that lamp below His feet was shaking, very different from other lamps.  I don’t know what to answer again.  Kids could see what the so called well learnt, all known, grown-up, and cognitive adult eyes could not; never. She pulled her father’s neck and asked the same question.  Her father thought for a second and said ‘it is Ayyappa and He is dancing’ that answer satisfied her and she was happy.   She didn’t wait for another second and immediately said ‘I want to touch Ayyappa’.  Now her father too was stunned and didn’t know what to answer her. 

‘Wait for the pooja to finish and you can touch him’ I said and she turned to her father to affirm the same. 

I didn’t see her and her father once the prayer was over also, I didn’t know weather she had touch Him but I, for sure, know that Swami had touched her.

                                                                                                                                                SK

 

Swamiyee Saranam – 3

 

            It has been three weeks of the forty-eight days penance and this year was unlike last two years.  It took 3 whole years to understand this process or maybe it is the starting stage to understand the rest of the understandings to come. For the past three years it was all wonder, I was questioning ‘why this happens, with all hurdles the urge to go back to Him never diminishes’ ‘why people are like this, devoted to the core to Swami Ayyappan’ ‘what does this sacred mala that roles on the heart does to a human being’ and ‘what makes a aged Guru to bend down and touch the feet of a - kanni swami – devotee who takes up the pilgrimage for first year’.   I didn’t know if I could understand all but I could see through the people with the first layer cleared from my eyes.  How many such layers has to be cleared to see the Swami Ayyappan inside the other? Only He know.   Does the eighteen years of pilgrimage, that makes a devotee a Guru Swami, clears all those layers? Or is it the deadline given to clear all the layers of illusion ourselves to see the divine everywhere, inside everybody, especially inside us, and to understand the true meaning of Thathwamasi – You are the real what you are searching for and what you came to Sabari Mala!

        Last night in the group prayer session, which happens every Saturday in the Ayyappan Temple, as soon as I entered the temple, I removed my shirt and got blessing from the Guru Swami and sat down to wait for the session to begin and devotees to gather for the prayer.  A lady called me with utmost humbleness, when I though she wants to me to help her in arrangement for the prayers session, she asked me to step on to a bronze plate and she washed my feet with water and the with milk and again with water, then she applied Sandal and applied vermillion (kum-kum) and gave me hand full of rice mixed with turmeric and flowers.  All this time I could not control my tears, don’t ask me why; I simply do not know! She bent down and touched my feet for my blessings. With a miniscule spiritual knowledge and a heart of a common human being, am I eligible to bless a fellow human being! was the only thought running in my mind along with the tears running down my cheeks. Holding my mala that was rolling and pressing my heart, I prayed to Him, to my Sastha, the real authoritarian to bless her, with all my heart the only thing I could do. I blessed her with the mixture of rice and turmeric and flowers she gave me.  This gave so much heaviness in heart that all along the prayer the tears didn’t stop.

        I saw the usual devotees along with an old woman in her sixties who was singing along with us.  I could see she was wearing the mala for the first year along with her grandchildren.  I found no difference between those kids and her as she was like a kid singing straight from her heart and dancing, shaking left and right with her praying hands; pure and innocent soul.  Looking at her made me to ask myself the only question, ‘Am I eligible even to sit here next to those pure souls?’ And I know the answer immediately as if it came from the up above, from the Ayyappan; I’m here to become one such pure souls to become eligible to bless my fellow human beings.  Thathwamasi!

                                                                                              -SK

Swamiyee Saranam – 2

 

My way of prayer is to write for Him, about Him.  I’m not good with Hymns or Bajans, I’m neither a trained singer to melt in the song and pour on Him the music but I can write.  I can reach out to those who read, walk into their ears and slip into their heart and seed little of my experience about Sri Swami Ayyappan. 

The urge to see Him, to read that one word – Thathwamasi – written at the entrance of the shrine, to breath that fresh air of the century old woods intensifies as the days go on. I want to visit him with the heart of a toddler but I feel the impurity and maleficent cognizance I gathered all through out this life like a pond that consumed a big rock; ripples of past sins and splash of wrong decisions and muddy remembrance of the losses.

This penance of Forty-eight days, I believe, is a wait for those ripples to stop and mud to settle down in the bottom so that the purity of the water is reveled and the shine of the Sun enters the water to make the life inside to bloom. And the learning is that only when a rock is thrown it cleanses the water and makes it pure.

When scrolling the Instagram reels, I saw a video of toddler who is back from his Sabarimala pilgrimage with his father and has to take out the sacred Thulasi Mala off his neck and save it for next year.  The moment his mother touched his mala the toddler started crying hugging his father. I could hear him like many of the devotees who know that feeling or may be the pain to take that sacred mala off the neck.  The toddler begged not to take it off.  After hard efforts his mother took it from him and he broke down and cried.  What made him cry, I didn’t understand that moment that brings tears even though I have undergone similar situation in the past years.  Why does the soul urges for that penance which is not so easy though divine.  It does not end there, from that moment you take that sacred mala off from your neck, the timer inside you starts to count the days for the next Karthigai month to come. 

The purity I wanted is that toddler’s tears, he doesn’t want that sacredness to get off him, he doesn’t want that life close to Swami Ayyappan to end.  That is purity, that is the heart we are all born with but somehow we accumulate impurities from the dark souls and store it in our grey cells.  Like Osho says, enlightenment is not something which you attain, you're born enlightened, it is already inside you like a strained mirror, wipe the dust and you will find yourself, the real divine power, Swami Ayyappan, Sri Dharma Sastha, the Allah, the Jesus and whatever the name you give.  It is all within us, just allow the mud to settle down.  Thathwamasi.

                                                                                                                                 SK

Swamiyee Saranam -1

            It was almost a week passed since I have started my penance for this year’s Sabari Mala pilgrimage.  The state of being in penance is not easy nor the pilgrimage but one thing that stays wonder to me is that the state of mind that was waiting for this period of the year though it was a lot to stretch for the body; may be the soul wants to go back to the dense forest where it lived in free will or the power source sitting over the top of Sabarimala – Sri Dharma Sastha – is the real soul of the cosmos and we are just its representative caught in the illusion of normal life. I’m no venerated soul to come to a conclusion but the connection is so strong that it pulls us to its place – His Place - though it is not a cake walk.

Unlike last year it was not easy days before and after wearing the sacred Thulasi Mala.  Days had showed me Pain in the mind and body, insults, angers, perplexity, intimidation and what not!  The golden rule is to control your anger which was tested and I think I breached the rule. The next is love for all, the empathy and compassion towards every soul around but I failed even in that.  Ayyappan had put me in situation wherein I lost my compassion and empathy. 

I was worried about the environment and people; I was complaining about the situations in which I was put on.  Maybe I was expecting supreme respect from the people around just because I was wearing the sacred Mala and I was in penance.   My Ayyappan had decided to teach me humility, compassion and love so He wanted to test me by putting in situations wherein I had choices to stay patient or go wild.  I know I didn’t get through in His test but I stayed in between that state of being serene and becoming an animal.  I hope that I get a just pass mark from my Ayyappan.

I realaxed once after I came out of those situations and I saw His light in my daily prayers. It was dust over the mirror that shows you as a venerated person or an enlightened soul and only when the divine intervenes and pour water over that mirror you will see your real face! This journey is not searching something outside us, not something exist there calling you to reveal itself.  This is a journey that take you internally, realize the something that you were searching is not outside but deep inside you. This pilgrimage ends in a place where Sri Dharma Sastha, my Ayyappan sits on top of Sabari Mala to enlighten that what you have came looking for – Sri Ayyappan – is you, inside you.  The divine light, Makara Jothi is not on top of that mountain but inside you – Thathwamasi!

Naked Man

 …it was a fine, cool, rainy and mesmerizing evening.  The clouds had stopped their love making but still stuck together leaving no space for the light to pass through.  The Sun behind those clouds should have lost patience and gone home to rest by then.  She stood still before her canvas with palette of all colors.  She was drawing the outline of the picture she wants to draw and the clouds and breeze were giving colors to that painting in her mind.  She knows that art is not a brain work but mind’s voice, souls rejoice, or souls cry.  She knows that art is the words that she couldn’t speak or may she do not want to speak.

Those that speaks a lot inside their mind but not outside becomes writers and those that don’t talk even within them but has a lot to say becomes artist using colors.  She had a lot to say but, at the same time, she knows least of the least people understands and others underestimates her.

She started with black, in fact slightly grey.  It was portrait of a man in his early forties with broader shoulders and heavy chest with dark black nipples.  His torso is not athletic but strong. Unusually, she was drawing the man with a small belly slightly protruding from his body which is unlike of artist holding brushes in general.  Most of them want to draw a strongly build man with flat stomach and curved torso and sculpted biceps and calf muscles.  No, that is not the picture that got manifested in her mind. It was a middle-aged man who was once strong and athletic but life had made him tired and naked; yes, it was naked middle-aged man that was in her mind.

She tried hard to bring it in to colors in the canvas. The harder she tried the slippery the image of the man. So, as her usual ritual, she started painting as slower as possible and then she lost herself in the man. The man became real in her mind and slowly he walked towards and she asked him to stand still in a posture she wants to paint.  The image shaped well slowly. His hands, his belly, his hips, his genitals, his groins, his thighs, his calf muscles, his foot and fingers. He completed himself when she was him. She merged herself in him, the Sakthi to Shiva, the momentum to the electrons in an atom, the energy that comes in the fusion and fission.

She felt completed but not satisfied for the story could have been told better, as all the artist’s unsatisfaction.  The stood tall, slightly bent with tired eyes and melancholic reaction in face but healthy hands and legs and genitals. 

What do you mean by the story could have been told better or what do you mean by story here for this is just a vulgar picture of a man?  - somebody passing by asked her. When an outrage or a harangue was expected, she laughed louder for few minutes irritating the questioner. 

She said, “The moment you said it is vulgar you already had a story with this naked man as protagonist in it but that is your story and that is the first success of this man.  And again, that is not what it is, not my story.  Look closer, he is not a common man who wants to dress up and show up in suite or tuxedo and wear shoes and ties.  He is uncommon who wants to be naked. This nakedness is not vulgar but nirvana or the body that disowns everything, the body that doesn’t carries the life of his past or future but the nature of his being alone.  Look deep into his eyes, little pain and sadness of the experience which he gained all these years that which is loaded into his head making his head slouch.  Look at the small scratch over his shoulders, those are love bytes, the identification marks of the intense love making in spite of all his pain.  Look at his uncombed hair, the carefree sense of self beautification for he knows that beauty we see in others is something that is inside us, as Rumi said, so the ugliness. 

Look at his hands ready to work, ready to carry weights but tired of the baggage he carried all through his life but won’t hesitate to carry again.  Look at his protruding belly, he realized he is not this body, not this mind and brain.  He started to relax too much and enjoy the tastes for he knows he can be back into his shape anytime he wants as this is all an illusion that mind plays in the virtual screen.  He understood the illusion, the greater maya. Look at his calf muscles, his legs and toes, ready to run and stomp on any thorns and bushes but he hesitates for he realized the run is not going to taking him to no place.”

“Look at his genitals…” she started and went silent for a long time. 

-why are you staring at that!!! They asked irritatingly. 

She laughed again, “you think that person I drew, those hands and legs and organs as somebody else, but those are part of me, from my mind and soul.  He is me in man form, my child who grew up only in hours.”

-insanity, they said and walked away from her.

“Look at his genitals, he cares least about this world, least worried about the culture and dogmas of this world.  He found the nirvana; everything is his and he is everything around him.  To hide his sexuality, to cover his body, to obey the dogmas of this world is a sin, he learnt.”  She said, from the heart of an artist.  There exists nobody to heed.

                                                                                                                                                     [SK]

 

A stupid story;

 

A stupid story; Once upon a time lived a man called Huuman.  He is strongly built; his hands are stronger enough break a coconut in one strike and his legs are so strong that he can run double digit miles without perspiration.  He ate at least five meals a day and slept 9 hours daily and worked hard for 8 hours in his paddy field.  Daily, on his way back from his field to home he saw a butterfly at the same spot.  First few days he saw and observed its colorful wings and left. He didn’t think about at after that very moment he crossed the butterfly.  Once a thorn prickled in the spot where he used to see the butterfly and he stopped and bent down to pluck the thorn and the butterfly flew to him and sat on his shoulders. From then on, as and when he stops there, the butterfly flew to his shoulders.  He didn’t touch it or offered his hand to ask the butterfly to sit on his hands.  He just left it as it is to sit where it likes to sit.  He felt happy to see the trust the butterfly had on him and he got obsessed with that feel of love and started to stop even in the morning to see the butterfly.

The Butterfly too reciprocated his love for him and flew to him in the mornings too.  Slowly, he started thinking about the butterfly in the mid of his work and he ran to the very spot but the butterfly was not there since it is its time to work or may be rest after work so he returned to work.  After his lunch he suddenly remembered the butterfly again and he ran to the same spot and it was not there and when he was about to return the butterfly came flying to his shoulder from his behind.  Overwhelming in happiness to feel the love he felt in his heart he stood there for a long time.  Then the frequency became three as he started running to the spot after his lunch too, also the duration increased and affected his productivity.

He didn’t care about the decrease in productivity as the feel he thought as love for him from the butterfly, flying around him and sitting on his shoulder preceded.  As he got used to it daily, he started talking to the butterfly about his pain, his work and his family.  The butterfly sat still flipping its colorful wings slowly as if listening quietly which gave Huuman a feel of satisfaction and insane happiness.

The day of harvest came and his work in his field stopped temporarily.  But he decided to go to the butterfly spot just to meet his colorful love.  This time he went little late in the morning to see the butterfly was sitting in the shoulder of another man, the owner of his neighboring farm. He was shocked and furious but then he thought as he reaches near the butterfly will switch shoulders to him; but the butterfly ditched him.  He went to his field and sat under a nearby tree as the harvest season was over and work will begin only months later.  He was sad and furious at the same time.  He didn’t go during the lunch time and he didn’t eat.  In the evening at his usual time, he walked crossing the butterfly spot and the butterfly came flying and sat on his shoulders.  He felt happy and forgot everything but told the butterfly how much he felt sad to see it sit on other man’s shoulder.  The butterfly listened patiently on his shoulders flipping its wings slower than ever before.  He took a longer time than his usual time, and while he was talking the butterfly suddenly left his shoulder and flew to same man who he saw in the morning. 

Huuman got furious and shouted at the butterfly about its loyalty and his love. Within seconds he approached the butterfly it flew away and disappeared in the fields.  He was sad and furious again and left home.  Once after reaching home, he didn’t take bath or eat or sleep.  He sat silently in a corner of his hut.  His mother called him many times to eat but he didn’t respond, so she finally decided to have a conversation with him on what is going inside his head.

He explained the whole scenario and his love for the butterfly.  The Mother listened carefully and once he finished his story she said “Son, how soft are you to fall in love with a tiny butterfly!  How sweet of you to feel sad for the imaginary love that you have built for a butterfly”. 

“No, Mother it is not imaginary.  It is real.  The butterfly trusted me but I don’t know what made it to ditch me and leave me for another man” Huuman said.

“Son, first of all it is a Butterfly.  The meaning of Love of that species is different not the one our species have in our brain.  Its love language is different.  It doesn’t even know what you are, it may be thinking you as a moving tree with different spores you carry over your body especially on your shoulder which has fallen on your shoulders while you walk crossing different plants and trees on your way. Stop looking at it has your love and start loving it as butterfly and love the butterfly for its own nature.”

Huuman sat in the same place for an extended amount of time and got up to take bath.  He ate and slept.  Next day he woke up very late and after his bath and breakfast he walked to his field.  When he reached the butterfly spot the tiny creature came flying to his shoulder. He smiled at it and dusted his shoulder.  The butterfly came close to his shoulder and flew down to the grasses where he stood.  He smiled and walked away.  From then on, he stops and dusts his shoulder just to see the butterfly coming and flying around.  He never stopped loving it but he loved it as it is and not as what he wanted the butterfly to be!

An Astral Spirit That I Met!

I didn’t seek her permission to write this as I’m unsure how to get it or where to find her, but taking it for granted, with an assumption she doesn’t mind writing an episode of my experience.  It was quarter past four in the morning and I was standing in the backyard of four stories building.  On the top floor the lights were on, bright and luminescent.  I could see the blur images of people rushing here and there.  And suddenly the movements stopped and everything become slow but the luminescent become high for a second and returned to normal.

 

Before I continue, how did I come there when I am supposed to sleep tight in my bed? I’m sorry, I have no idea. What is that place actually? I have a vague idea about it; I looked like a hospital of a medium cost one. I was there from nowhere, maybe I could identify that backyard if I see that again but route to reach there is the missing part.  And when I was standing there, the purpose of my visit was unclear for I have no intention to go out early in the morning.

 

When I was standing there without moving for I do not know where to go, somebody jumped out of the window from the fourth floor and stood about hundred yards from me.  It was a girl of about twenty-five to twenty-seven.   She jumped without any efforts and she looked glowing with the minimal light from that window.  She walked slowly towards me but I could feel the agitation in her to move faster somewhere.  I didn’t remember if I waved at but I remember that I was not able to move towards here.  No, it is not that my legs are stuck in the ground but my conscience didn’t allow me to move.   She said something walking towards me which I could not understand or couldn’t hear.  She talked animatedly and I could fee that urgency to go somewhere in her action.  She showed that window up above her in the four-floor.

 

I told her that I couldn’t hear her and raised by head towards the window in the four-floor she pointed.  The moment I saw the window the fear sent lighting in to my spine; the window was not opened at all; then how could she jump!!!

 

Slowly the realization hit me that neither she nor me had body that sent me into perplexity of who is dead here? Me or her? Or both?   Anyways we both are of the same state of matter or we both share the same energy and that realization relived me from fear.  I called her near and when she neared, she didn’t stand next or near to me but within me.  I was all like energy collating.   And she started to talk in her urgency to move away to some distant place.

 

“I was suffering all along and I in the bed also surfing many places.  I was suffering for quiet some days and now I’m free.”  She said before I asked her anything.  The communication was energy exchange and explaining how I understood her was beyond my skill to write that energy communication but she spoke in the language, which felt, only we two understood at that moment.  She continued “my family was planning for my funeral and they have not planned it yet, maybe they still believe I am going to return to that body.  They didn’t plan it yet” I have no questions or answers for her.  “I have a thousand place to go” she said and separated herself from me and slowly walked away from me with face turned towards me.  I realized that that was the image of the body she lived in so far.  And as she walked away farther and farther, she only became an airy light and finally melting in the air.

 

The next second I could feel the hard bed on which I was sleeping.  I was wide awake without opening my eyes.  There was no fear, no perspiration, no sweeting but perplexity.  I couldn’t believe what I saw or what I had experienced. 

 

“Hey Girl, show me a sign that you were real, my experience was real.  Show me a sign that I was really out of my body in astral plane” The bell rang, that was my alarm at 4.59am.

Trance

 

I’m in trance now after drinking from the cup of tiredness and gulping the wine of drowsiness.  The poetry doesn’t come, the story doesn’t get better, my heroine is not smiling, my protagonist is not crying – nor doing anything but the words come.  The words come one after the other like a drop following the drops from the clouds when it rains.  No, it is not drizzling but it is a down pour, cats and dogs. Oh, what should I do with those mosquitoes that sucks my blood and the lashes that wants to cover my eyes but the fingers that wants to keep typing words after words.  I have nil patience to read what I have written neither anybody but I write for I will die if I keep those content in my mind and my brain will burst and head will blow into two thousand pieces; the two hemisphere thousand each.  My stomach is bloated with the food I ate for dinner which just added more wine to the body in trance.  How could one explain the state of semi-state of sleepiness.  How many know that this is the state of ecstasy, you control your sleep and sit alone when the entire body wants to fall down anywhere and in any corner of the house and sleep, just sleep and do nothing. It is the state of ecstasy the god like state where you realize nothing is so romantic than sleeping undisturbed. O! Everything and anything you write in ecstasy make more sense for it is the true you that writes from within, it knows no lies, no dogmas, no moral, no ethics but the state of just being. The metal that rotates over my head, the blades that spines the air to keep me away from sweeting is one other tranquilizer that sings lullaby with the acoustic of the electromagnetic force.  I have no idea of writing more than five hundred words so I look at the bottom of my computer screen which gets increased slowly when I was normal but now, I see it is running wild.  I know I have to stop at some point of time and go to sleep for I cannot stay drunk with this drowsiness for a longer time.  It feels blessed when this word software underlines the words and sentences that needs correction with a comma or space to give or a space to delete, but now it is annoying.  There were lines and lines and lines in blue and red to correct, who cares.  It is not me who is writing; those are not my hands that is writing, it is that Indian or Greek or Egyptian God for writing who is putting words in to my mind and driving me crazy to type and type and type.  I am typing with my eyes closed for I care my least what I type as the divine that is responsible for writing is sitting on my lap and writing.  Okay Sir Mr. Lord of the Words I want to sleep please get up and get lost until next time for it has already crossed five hundred!!!

                                                                                                                                    [SK]

What - Words - mean to me!

 

What does “Words”, all those I write, planned to write, wanted to write, imagined to write or missed to write, mean to me!  I was wondering on my way to a Gnana Sakthi’s shrine. All the words that bloom in my brain were like the panorama that I see through the vehicles window, it changes, come back, alters with the angel sometimes blurs and darkness.  That is all it is! Nothing more! I was pondering until I reached the womb of the shrine where the Gnana Sakthi stood effulgently in the twinkling oil lamp.  There were two kids not more than 5 and 10 whom I didn’t see until they started singing, I realized more than humans the Sakthi, the unbridled, uncomprehend energy, was listening to their song, the voice, the music and the words.  Music is a confabulation between the human heart and the energy that was wide spread in cosmos like the Om sound of the universe but words make it more meaningful; is it not!

 

What does “Words” mean to me?

Words are my confabulation divine, negotiation with the evil, my perplexion about world, stick in the hands of Jesus, flute in the hands of Krishna, a sojourn in a tiresome journey.  I was still standing before that Sakthi.  The song and the lamp arati brought tears in my eyes for reason unknown, unexplained, and inexplicable.  I understood that that is what “Words” mean to me, an inexplicable reason that brings tears in eyes, melting of the soul, that drop of tear, the devotion, the fear of superior energy, the love on ubiquitous omnipresence.

I walked out of the womb of the temple to sit and continue to contemplate.  I saw a couple circumambulating the temple, she took the vermilion powder and applied in his temple (Temple! You see!) a nonverbal communication that you are my love and he bent down to understand it, a surrender.  That is what “Words” mean to me, a surrender, an understanding between hearts, an untamed love, unconditional compassion, the love!

My stomach growled in hunger so I walked into the place were Anadhanam was offered.  When I was waiting, I saw an old man shouting for stopping him in line as the room was filled with the first batch and he looked at me and consoled me saying that the food will be there for us, don’t you worry, they wont talk home the left out (sarcasm).  That is what “Words” mean to me – anger, anxiety, sarcasm, unventured horizon of the future, and that hunger, and finally that consolation.

I remembered Mahakavi Bharathy’s poetry to destroy this entire universe if a single person is not offered with food.  That is “Words” for me; the compassion towards empty stomachs, communism, rebellious thoughts, the sword in hand, the war, the fight, the wounds, the desperation, a cry, a longing!

I ate – stomach was full and got back into the vehicle and a trance swept me like a breeze to take a nap.  That too is “Words” for me… forget everything and take a nap, fall into dream of something sweet, the cushion comfortable seat of the vehicle, the acceleration that give thrill and the wobbling that sings lullaby are all words for me.

                                                                                                                                SK

Techno-Romance

 

…I start with dots because I do not know where to start and you see only one dot is a stop, add two more to it and it becomes continuation. It is the continuation from somewhere I left or continuation from what my mind is chewing at the moment.  With every day I grow old I feel like I’m an alien in this faster world.  My childhood and adolescent were termed as fast world when the technology started sneaking in every middle-class houses.  The satellite television channels which peeped in for limited hours and later become all time and the thirty minutes news in those channels then become a separate news channel and then now a nightmare with 24x7 flash news, landline phones which got converted to wireless landline phones and later to mobile gigantic phones and then into smaller handsets and now again become gigantic mini television in hands, and the music that were more softer which was a continuation or with the trace of the earlier generation with respect to the language, words and meanings which now become only noise with all dramatic technological tools (musical instruments), of course the movies which were full of songs in the golden days then become partially songs with less violence and more story which become only acoustics of whatever it is.

The televisions, the white lights, the mobile phones all emit the same level of Hz, the frequency, that damages the human body which sometimes makes me think that everything is designed, in the name of technology or luxury, to cause damage to the human existence!!!

Given the life to the tools and technologies what I miss the most is the different types of romance that blooms at different stages of life.  Times when letters were exchanged which then become emails. The telephone booths then become mobile phones then into texting and now into WhatsApp.  So easy to talk and chat nowadays but imagine the days of letters and strict parenting the meeting will be coincident and chatting will be only between the eyes which then become little easier with the landline phones in my adolescence though the strict parenting and location to meet with those eagle eyes that was ready to spoil the names, especially the girls made life tougher.  Said all those stuffs the time taken to talk one word to each other took years and with the urge to be together for years built a bond that continued life-long if it was a successful love story, even if it is not the story stays in the heart.  The train love stories, bus love stories, street love stories, and letter love stories were longer and sweeter stories than the WhatsApp and Facebook stories.  Isn’t it!!!

What is missing these days is that urge that brings hearts together as everything is faster and communication is fastest.  And of course, the western culture that made Indians believe that meeting and chanting and dating at ease is part of our culture too when westerners are taking their direction to East for peace and salvation from what their culture had given them!  When you walk the hard path towards your destination, the journey becomes as precious as the destination.  That experience is spoiled when everything is made easier.

                                                                                                        [SK]

if you’re reading

 

…if you’re reading, my love

I want you to let you know that you’re reading my mind.

…if you’re still reading; 

You’re my words that I write and

The meaning between the lines that I hide.

You’re the warmth in the crowd in my winter below the sky,

Don’t stop here for  neither I  nor my words could fly.

Sometimes you’re that favorite song on the pathway that I long forgot,

And many a time, you were that last drop left in the water bottle

That wets my throat when the environment scorches.

Read on… 

When it rains heavily and the road was not clear,

Your memories were the wipers of my car’s windshield!

Many broken promises that I made let to not one good day, so

I forgive all who break the promises in attempt to break me.

Few more lines please…

I could write the memoires of your fragrance, your image,

the caress, touch, hand-in-hand walk in the rain under the umbrella, but

that drop of tear at the edge of my eyes in the night can do it better !!!

                                                                                                                       [SK]