ANOTHER REFLECTION ON CHANGING FEELINGS

We are most like clouds, clouds that gather, rain, pass, disperse, and return again. We are vapor in a seemingly solid body. To confirm this look at your photographs from childhood through now, trace the arc, and see how you have changed over the years. We think old people, like my 91 year of mother, have always been old. They are us in our trajectories through spacetime. When I was young I used to have a sensation that I haven’t experienced for years and years, a sense when I closed my eyes that I was billowing out, layer upon curled layer unfolding out into space. I used to feel I was disappearing, that I could unfold out into infinity and nothing of me would remain.

I AM A CREATURE FIRST

When I cannot sleep at night and my dark imagination is doing its work to produce night narratives, horrible scenarios of illness, suffering, death,  I am reminded of how I am a tiny creature first, no more significant than a cockroach to frightened, slipper wielding females. Those that kill will be killed and we are all killers. To eat is to kill; to breathe, to be, is to kill. There are times in your life when you have to get into some self-definition – no, not just times, but self-definition is important to gain clarity about your life. These self definitions can and do change often like all changing things in this changing world. When I cannot sleep I realize and take comfort in the fact that I am a creature first, a frightened (though hardly admitting it to myself and never to others) being, no different from cockroaches and spiders, that suffer, have appetites, and fears their demise. Next, I am a human (huwoman?) that reflects on her creatureliness and needs all sorts of things to feel gratified; third, a writer who reflects on both her creatureliness and her huwomanness; fourth I am a Sikh, since for my peace of mind and need for ecstasy I follow the path prescribed in the Granth Sahib.

There was a time I thought of myself as a writer first, then a God-oriented person, and my creaturely humanness was just a pit I fell into occasionally, by accident. It wasn’t a fundamental truth of my being.

Oddly, the thought of myself as a creature first is very comforting now. It allows me to be everything I am, freely. It helps me function on a level that is less stressful than thinking of myself as, say, an enlightened (which I am not) or evolved being. There is no striving here: nothing to achieve, nothing to struggle for and become, just an experience of existence as it has been given to me to experience. There is something sweet and expansive about it. Yes. When I think of myself as an institutional Sikh (which I am not), or something more, on the other end of the spectrum, I feel I have to be and do all sorts of things to feel good about myself. It puts me in the tourniquet of ‘shoulds,’ trips me up ever so often and makes me quite unhappy. But if I think of myself as a Sikh whose only task is to think of the matrix of existence, wonder at it, praise it, and be as good a person as I can be (in terms of interaction with others, no matter who or of what status in life) considering I also have a bad, shadow side, then being a Sikh gives me a path in the frightening forest of life that I rather enjoy treading. It is a lovely, winding path, perhaps a path like the ones I hike upon near our Kullu home, lined with ancient deodars, their roots jutting out to provide steps on steep inclines, and moss and lichen matted boulders. Much beauty, here.    

TIME LAPSE AND VALIUM NIGHTS

I am a word junkie and must write now, shoot up with words, even though I cannot get on line. There is a time lapse between when I write these entries and post them. This is relevant only because though facts do not change, feelings do. So by the time you read this, the situation may no longer exist, the feelings may have passed, but recur, in another situation and at another time. Take insomnia, for example. It comes and goes, recurs periodically and the syndrome it causes or is caused by taps into and expresses a root that has existed since the time or even perhaps before I was born.   

My syndrome briefly is this: I am too tired to do anything and too awake to sleep, so I am compelled to lie in bed and experience all my neurosis. I call it a neurosis but it may better be called the human condition that we try to alleviate at the best of times with distractions and spirituality.  And the human condition is essentially uncertain. Things can and do change suddenly. All around us people fall sick and die. My current preoccupation with this subject stems from the possibility that my mother’s young maid, Revti, who my mother loves in her own way and relies upon heavily, may have cancer of the uterus. This is an all around concern for, practically, good maids are hard to come by; I am concerned for Revti, my mother, and most of all (as is always the case given our self referential selves), myself. Revki’s loss, even in the best case scenario where she has to have a hysterectomy and will return to work in two months, will cause me a great deal of trouble in my mind. Selfishly, I’m even thinking about having to give up my precious retreat in the mountain to come and tend to her. And my mother is not an easy person to tend to!

Anyhow, let me continue speaking about myself, the subject that preoccupies me the most. Sleepless nights, and the popping of a valium, and waking up with that gluggy, gummy feeling of neurons coated and synapses flooded with chewing gum mucous. Drugs are such a temporary fix and have less than desirable side effects. But they are god-sent on difficult nights. They hit you over your head and put you out, at least for a while.

ANOTHER SHORT GOODBYE

I am writing all these posts because I leave for the city tomorrow for over a week, back to my other life, where there is no email. My mother doesn’t even know what email is. If there is one thing I am really pleased with, it is that I have lived through the technological age of the Worldwide Web, another image from the world of Spiders. We sometimes get caught up in it, but if we know how to use it without letting it use us, we are sitting pretty.

YOUR BODY IS YOUR CHILD

If you are a decent parent, you stop whatever you are doing when your child calls. So, when your body screams, stop. Absolutely nothing is more important than it. Spirit, Soul, God, or at least our consciousness of it, wouldn’t exist without it.  

I had a dream a few nights ago: I am riding a mare, and she is going very slowly, and I wish she had more power and muscle to fly when I spur it, but she takes her time. I realize she is hungry, and stop at a mandi, where farmers sell their vegetables wholesale, where there are heaps of spinach and other wonderful cabbage greens, and I let her feed to her heart’s content. 

Sometimes rest is a way to feed your soul. 

ONE OF MY THREE LIVES

I have said I have a dual life but in actuality, I have three broad lives, geographically speaking. Psychologically speaking, I have more than I can count or categorize, so I won’t even attempt a description of it. I can hardly describe my three lives in detail, but here is an attempt. I will start with the third, the interim life I live between the two long-term lives in the US and in the Kullu Valley: in my hometown, Chandigarh, though I never grew up here. It has always between a stop-gap life between lives, a necessary via. It is where my parents, and now only my mother, and an entire clan of relatives, lives. Wedged between my two solitudes, it is a social life, the place I connect to my roots and all the things that are its manifestations – food, dress, culture, language. I first feel a high upon landing from the US, and getting into the car to make the long night journey to Chandigarh. I feel the high for several days, meeting those I love, a lot of adults, and my joy, the children in the family. Since I have resolved to live each of my lives with engagement and presence, I enjoy all of it. And when weariness sets in, and the interaction becomes too much for the hermit that I am, I head up to my life in the mountains.