New Delhi: Sitting in the garden these cool days, and the world, as it’s seen, suddenly falls into an enhanced version of what it is. Alice in Wonderland says things are not what they appear to be. The presence of my cup and book, my phone and a pen, just lying there on the garden table, extensions and extrapolations of the environment I’m in – the ‘self’ that I am, at this time. Everything I see becomes unfamiliar, yet known – uncanny recognition of every-day things, strangely out of context here, but also fits quite well in these surroundings of birds, sunlight shining through the trees and a pattern of moving shadows through layers of leaves.

A momentary easing… the ‘beholder’ sees beauty through the glass of eyes to the world out there and the self, as ‘me’ in here, disappears completely – a flow of words just tumbling out and I’ve got to get it all written down… if not, it will vanish. It’s the writing of it that gives it life (of course), the quickening. Words snatch at a direction, fractals of the original instance. Too huge, I cannot see the whole pattern, only what is here and now.

Then, it all falls into a vortex of shattered ends and beginnings as the focus shifts to headache mode – It’s part of me these days… take meds, wait for it to pass, allow healing, nurturing.

And now it is later. Fragments of imagery of the story appear in the mind so fast I can’t keep up with it. Scribbling it down on scraps of paper, and rewritten on the back of till receipts found in wallet, pockets. The back of my boarding pass… reduce the size of handwriting to get it all in the space, then take a photo of it and zoom in to see. A flow of utterance, stumbling incoherent urgency, activates extensions, developments, and completions… and I arrive at an ending. It changes the beginning (I thought it might), and there, it’s done. Refined, defined, in the form it takes, chunks of language jigsaw together, trim the edges and placed.

Extreme minimalism… the story contained is edited out. The Absolute is in all things, omnipresent and there’s nothing that it’s not a part of. I have to ponder this for a moment; where is it not? There’s no ‘nothing’ and no ‘thing’. Gone is… even the word ‘gone’ is gone. [First posted June 16, 2017 titled “More than words”]

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. [Meister Eckhart 1260 – 1328]