POSTCARD #256: New Delhi: No memory now of the journey, the three-legged hop from Chiang Mai, Bangkok to Delhi. Nor the specific sense of that wormhole spiraling through space-time, large enough but no bigger than my body size, songs of the mind, and belongings – things we cling to/ clings we thing to. The urgency of speed, an immense engine sound deafened, hidden, obscured and bubble-like enclosure built over it, designed with the dynamics of flight … the same plane flying to and from the same route all of its working life, and the ‘to’ becomes the ‘from’… no end, no beginning. Maintenance crews service the parts whenever it lands – both ends of the journey. From the engines’ point of view, everything is stationary. It’s the world that moves.
Arriving at the Delhi house then, with ears sucked out and everything familiar yet creepy, the coldness of known objects that’ve been unheld for all this time. And dropping stuff here and there, releasing context plug-ins from the journey. Freed from having to have everything to show officials, and always in the background searching: where’s my passport ‘now’? Biro pen to fill in Landing Form, boarding pass with some words written on the back. Crumpled up tissues, a wrapper, and bits and pieces from the journey. Checked-in bag dropped, remains where it is, wide open like the mouth of an opera singer reaching the high note: laaaaa. Contents of pockets’ fly out, liberated, what it’s got in its pocketses, wallet opens, low value currency bills and little old folded notes from a former life, which always seem to be there.
Body expanding, filling out to normal size, and so I go up the three flights, to the top where the steps become narrow and steep, and the stiff old door is reached. Teetering on the topmost step, just enough space to negotiate this particular door lock from some time in history, which opens by means of a remembered turn-key and shoulder-shove. Thus propelled on to the roof, I jailbreak the house and everything out here is pink. Birds quietly watching the sun go down.
I remember now, it’s the crows that perch on the highest branches, and as far as the eye can see all around this massive landmass, broad enough for every imaginable thing, encompasses all kinds of ways of being. I’m expanding and stretching out from the cramped confines of small states of mind, in countries like Thailand, Japan, UK, Switzerland where they believe things come to an end. Pink sky at the end of daylight… unfathomable and vast.
“Beyond the mind there is no such thing as experience. Experience is a dual state. You cannot talk of reality as an experience. Once this is understood, you will no longer look for being and becoming as separate and opposite. In reality they are one and inseparable like roots and branches of the same tree. Both can exist only in the light of consciousness, which again, arises in the wake of the sense ‘I am’. This is the primary fact. If you miss it, you miss all.” [Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj]
dhamma footsteps 
Back with the birds … breathe 🙏
Thanks Val, yep it’s about being grounded. Feeling more like that now, with that deep in breath and long slow out breath…
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
Thanks for the reblog
“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, let him put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever…”
Hi Stuart, what meaning do we draw from this Genesis 3:22 quote… hmm?
Hi tiramit, a little brain tickler for you… a clue, the quotation is not entirely accurate…
Naw, don’t get it, tell me…
‘let him’ is substituted for ‘lest he’ which shifts the sense of inner and outer and hence the whole idea of the expulsion… i.e. change two words and ‘the end’ is no longer an end…
So, did you or somebody else do the substitution, or is it an error in the translation?
Mea culpa. Although it wasn’t deliberate, I originally read it wrong and then thought that can’t be right, and then thought but what if… It does raise questions of translation, at the very least…
See what you mean but I’m not the one really to have this kind of exchange with. Most Western Buddhists I know of 20 years + study, still have unreasonable panic attacks of guilt about anything Biblical.
Apologies… I can go with unreasonable…
I know of two instances (read about or heard) of highly respected Thai Buddhist teachers going to the US for the first time to do retreats and having to have the word ‘guilt’ explained to them, over and over until they understood. And then they seemed to be disbelieving or profoundly perplexed.
No, guilt is not good, especially in the context of life… ‘profoundly perplexed’ though, could sum it up…
Well… Thais in general don’t stay perplexed for very long, highly revered masters may make a joke about it and move on, they have this ability to just let it go.
Apologies for not wishing to get into the discussion…
A useful technique to acquire…
No worries…
Okay, we can look at that later, when the time is right…
TIMEPIECE
I watch time tick by
Watching the watch watching
I pass the time
The watching eye sees
In being seen the scene seen
Meets the watching eye
Running parallel with the movement, then becoming the movement and I discover it’s multi-directional, of course…
Thanking you for the inspiration here. 🙂
_/\_
Reblogged this on Stuart France.
Thanks Stuart
I love your words, so vividly descriptive and what they describe is illuminating! I take heed of your message about pinging back and forth between places. Until last June we pinged back and forth each week, 3 days here, 4 days there, between the US locales of New York City and rural northeastern Pennsylvania. Having sold the New York apartment we left that familiar place and made PA our full time home. Then in November we pinged to Southwest Florida. Now, having gotten good and used to this new tropical clime, in a few short weeks we ping back to Pennsylvania for 6 months or so. We are grateful to be able to do it, but it does take some doing to get the mind around being where we are while imagining where we are going.
Thanks Sunny, ‘vivid and descriptive’, well things are pretty vivid over here anyway, as you can imagine, and there is this urge to tell others what it’s like without it becoming boring to read – thus the necessity of finding new words and ways of putting it. Then the pace and hectic way of figuring out how to pack your bag at a moment’s notice, from clothes in the closet at both ends of the journey, forgetting where you are for a moment and your actual point of origin – does it matter? As long as you have everything duplicated, and if something is forgotten, you just have to buy another one to replace it.
You’ll recognise this of course, pinging back and forth between places as you do. Getting so used to living out of a suitcase and the skills of travel, it’s hard to stop doing it… being in the same place all the time doesn’t feel right! I have to remind myself it’s the reason things are never quite resolved (regarding my meds and allowing time to see what feels right), I’m never in one place longer than 6 weeks. Also the fact that there’s no winter, no seasons, no sense of seeing your surroundings change through the year and that sense of being grounded, touching the earth.
Forgetting things is a problem too as you will have noticed in the bounce-back between Pennsylvania and South West Florida, or learning how to get by without that thing whatever it is that you left on the shelf – but it’s not on this shelf, it’s on the one that’s about two thousand miles away from here…
My goodness, your prose is poetic! So beautiful,,,!
Thank you Judie for these kind words…
… quite a coincidence to have found similar titles in each other blogs. and a question coming up about Nissargadatta, phenomena and experiences … that tree falling in the taiga without observer … my mind doesn’t get it, cannot get it … still all the pieces appear to be in the right place …
Hi Bert, yes a coincidence, we are both pondering the imponderable, so it’s not surprising. As you say, there’s this “non-find-ability” and everything related to the unfathomable viewpoint becomes so vast mind doesn’t, cannot get it. If the tree falls in a desert it makes no sound because there’s absolutely no one there to hear it – as simple as that, no sensory mechanisms function so it doesn’t exist. Some camels arrive the next day and figure out hey that tree must have fallen…