With my inner sleep clock actually growing more and more distorted, I was with bright eye at 2:00 am. Of course I was counting sacred cows by the time 6:30 pm came around last night, but nevertheless, I was up again to master my creative sanctity. I concluded my normal morning writing, meditation, study and yoga by 9 and showered and went up for breakfast and internet time. I caught my talk with love over Skype and felt even more empowered to go out and sink in line with other beings. In such a meager passing of weeks, I encountered another who walks to my rhythm while I hum her tune. The quandary came when I was struck with such a relentlessly open heart and was able to shed past romantic doctrine without even pushing a button. Accordingly, this fresh budding romance is a source of inspiration and a platform for motivation. It is funny the way we continuously go through life wondering what is around the bend and trying to set things up and knock things down in order to cause a future outcome. We even try precariously peeking in to the future to see what it is that we have in store. Especially we westerners, who tend to always feel a need for outward and upward success. We never notice the times that when we are just simply being at our own personal best, we are succeeding in the only suitable way. We are carrying our own hue of light in to the sentient world. I, for some time now have been strongly focused and chasing after the answer to what it is that I am supposed to bring to the world, how I can be the most authentic tool possible? I have been searching in what I thought were all the right places, inside and out. However searching seems to connote the idea of looking elsewhere. Elsewhere, if you haven’t noticed yet, is an illusion. The only place I had not truly looked was where I was in the moment. I was too busy trying to be. In the west, we especially localize our achievement status around this. Well, in my case, I suppose I had stood in the same place as my dog Gaea does for so long circling round and round herself, looking for the right place to sit until she notices that she has been there the whole time and so she sits down in contentment.
I decided to take her advise and go out today on an exhale, blowing the way in which I am born to blow. I took to dallying in the shops of gipsy attire. All the European and American hippies flock to these Mecca’s. And yes I was another one taking gander at the eclectic jumble of $2-3 threads, the plushy pashminas, the shiny bangles and dangly earrings, until I was stopped in a moment of possible non-consumerist -consumerism.
A gentle hand and a soft Namaste came from behind. I turned to see a delicate woman wrapped in a worn silken sari of now muted colors with a petite baby upon her hip. She kept saying, “Miss, miss, for baby…sick, medicine”. She would say “see” and lift the child’s limp arm and let it drop back down on to her own arm. The scene didn’t even seem real. What do we do? Always being told by books and even by locals I was told of the ‘racket’ these beggars had, paying off the police so that they may beg freely. I go back to a wide eyed moment of my past when I was a little girl in London. My family and I had passed a heard of homeless punk rock kids on the streets with signs. I remember lagging behind as they asked us for money but my family kept going as most do. I remember one man’s face standing out in the crowd. He was lost and I knew it or I knew something. It wasn’t money I desired giving him, just a moment of kindness I wished to give away. I ran up to my dad. He was a sucker for my innocent notions and so he gave me a bill of some sort and I hurriedly ran back to deposit it in his hand with a meek, “sir, here you go”. Damn if my big doe eyes didn’t touch him. The point was that he touched me. There was a moment when our energy shook each other with the purity of intent. But later on in life I became more unsure about giving money to homeless, after all, many of them are plenty capable of going out there and finding their way just as I have, unless of course if they’re not . After all that is simply enabling them…uh, maybe. Or is it about them at all? Now this isn’t some rant on the right or wrong of charity because that is not my question or moral dilemma. The world of good/bad, right/wrong only keeps you trapped in the game of dualism. But what I am suggesting is that maybe there is a point of liberation within ourselves and a point of surrender when we are able to just release judgments on the way things are and just let the hum of sweetness buzz around the city. Perhaps if we gave of ourselves, maybe less people would be lost. At that moment, it was easier to give to a face that was yet another aspect of my own humanity, that little woman begging for kindness. So I stuck to me release and padded behind her to a market and bought the canister of vegetarian formula she desired. I asked for one thing in return… a snuggle. One little hug from the doll like child that instantly wanted her own mother back, the hip she knew, the incarnation that she was born to somehow do.
I returned to the mud path, a little lighter than before. I went back to some non-consumerist-consumerism and in following this easy way I came upon another simple exchange to play. I edged my way in to a shop and was engaged by an older gentleman playing king on his humble throne. He asked me to sit and have some chai with him even though I had no intention to buy. I sat on a pile of circus-like pillow covers and he told me of his nephew who had gone to the afterlife at 18. He tried to explain heaven with his hands, a charades devoted to the gods. I understood. He then explained of his new two year old child that was born 12 years after his others. I couldn’t grasp fully the connection at first that he was trying so hard to make. “Just one year”, he said, “after my nephew had gone”. At that point I understood the point he was making; his nephew had come back. That life had returned from death. That creatix had destroyed to create again; that flesh had decomposed in retreat before returning as the flower in his wrinkled water worn photograph between his thumb and fingertip. I nodded and gleamed at the shimmering truth in his mind. He later wished me on my way and I knew the next stop was back to the orphanage.
I was compelled.I found myself a tuk-tuk and skated on over to the same high colored walls with the statue of the Virgin Mary and a trickling fountain. A man let me in through a gate and showed me to the foyer and had me sit. Behind me there was a quote by Mother Theresa herself saying, “How can we show Him love when we don’t show the very people that we see love”. She was manifesting god with her hands. I watched another man to my left; half of his face fallen, cut material and pull it through a sewing machine. He would occasionally look at me and meet my smile with a stare. To my right, sisters, many of which were Indian at that, dipped their fingertips in holy water, bowed and stepped in to a room of prayer where they chanted prayers together. I fell in to their syllables and into a haunting peace, when an older western nun with a kind demeanor called me to follow her to the children’s ward. She talked to me sweetly and questioned my intentions in India. She looked me over in interest and complemented some of my bobbles. I suppose I almost had the preconceived notion that she was going to actually scoff at my look. I was dressed modestly but I knew that I was not dressed conservatively. But instead she just was intrigued. It is funny how much we assume about others and how much is lost with initial interpretations because of the very judgments we have of others possibly judging us. It is a subtle place in the back of probably even some of the most enlightened person’s minds but it is there. I relaxed and trailed behind the nun as she took me through my first view of the corridor of the forgotten. The little wooden constraining chairs lined up side by side with child after child, each with some varying disorder. From drooling head bobbing to those that you could have sworn were dead already. There was not a one of them that did not look desperate for love. I had not expected the disabled ward. I just thought I was going to see children. But there I was confronted with the faces of so many avoided and pushed out of our sheltered sight. I began reaching my hands out to each one. Tingles were shaking my nerves alive each time I touched one of them. Sometimes their grip was violent and relentless. Other times you had to hold theme up to receive the passing energy. One woman was low on the ground with her legs locked outstretched and her rear flat as a board on to a round wooden rolling contraption. She had short black hair. She looked up at me with the brightest most knowing eyes and the most cheerful and pure welcoming smile. She was all there. She knew her situation and she still lived. All it took was that moment to see. I could not take my eyes from her most astounding presence. When she looked at you, the world stopped and spun you so fast you were in a daze. There was one kid that latched on to my hands once he found them. He was blind. He shimmied his way up my shins and turned flips in the air again and again. Another blind and wailing boy latched on to me immediately and fell soft as I stroked his face and hummed to him quietly. I took him for a walk up and down the hall. He wanted to fall back down in defeat but I wouldn’t let him. Then I picked him up and sat him on the windowsill to feel the air outside and the sunshine on his skin. Yet another was lying in his crib, his head so flat from his eternal resting place. He smiled with giddy as I picked him up and bounced him gently on his pointed toes. The music lifted up through the hallways and I watched two or three of the children pound so quickly to the beat, in perfect rhythm. Their intuitional musician was all there. One older boy sat in a corner rocking with his hands over his ears. When I touched him he pulled my hand to cover his ears and he began to sing gorgeous operatic melodies. The list goes on and on in merely the two hours of my stay. Through which I laughed dangerously hard, smiled till my cheeks turned numb and felt knots turn round and round my heart chakra as my stomach clenched. Just being with them and watching them gush over the attention was more than enough energy to fuel a whole house. There is that Maslow system of hierarchical needs that is seemingly true. But in John Lennon’s words… okay I won’t do it, I won’t totally cheese out, but you know it’s true.
I sat listless and cheery the whole way back home. I treated myself to a delicious Indian dinner and went home to have one more chat with my love. I was all a buzz just like a child on chocolate, so much intensity that it burned me out sweetly in to a slumber. I suppose it takes really rather little when it comes down to it. Today I found it only took touch to send others and myself in to exhaltation.
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