(In a convenience store, bumped into Sri Bhaiyaram – complete with Gandhi turban. I once was near where he is from, Rajasthan, N.West India…desert stretches of white hot suns. We chatted about the Gujarat Earthquake and life here in a southern city. His sons run the store, they were amused. Papa was actually posing, as my daughter took this one. We waved ‘bye as we left, India is wide and long and diverse. I’m thinking how multi grained we all are, not just here in my peninsula – how multi tasked and stunning in our Us-ness. Us-ness?)
this is such a random post; I will be on a wee ‘like’ Break. My eyes need some shade from glare, there will be check ups, a procedure.
Morrow ~ MaundyThursday, Good Friday Easter…I absolutely love this time of the year, more than any other fest – yea its personal. The whole Cross story and Us. The whole big picture of Redemption and why I am special (you too) to the Sacred Gardener. Yes. We are gardens. Always suspected that. We are deserts refilled, we are wells dug out and drying for the rain. We are rocks cut out from quarries (Gems) reflectors of Light we do not necessarily see;
we are shy of the heavens, we might tango with hell but we are shy of the sacred. And this time of the year, my insides keel. Am summoned to a place where humanity is loved like impossible to believe. We believe where we’re hurting. We trust our five senses and our frailty. We lean in sands that shift. But here, my eyes fading just a Lil bit, is where the Light shines best for me.
I abs love blogging. It is where I read some fantastic posts ( & Prompts♥️) and learn things they never told us at school. The earth has new words every new season. She brings me culture and vivid images of other territories,
but might need to keep blogging to just posting, that is a quick fifteen minutes. Stay safe blest. Get resurrected. Put on your strength my Bible says. I am praying peace like never before, esp deep inside where now and then we as a race might go crucify Peace. May the power that raised Yeshua from the dead, be yours. Believe, say?
last evening I met a baby man- wide eyed, looking up from a young momma’s arms. (She looks 2 years older than him. I cannot resist the urge to carry him. Who says you must resist a good urge? He is 6 months old. Fatigue outlines the smile his momma gives me. The child has a hurtful unformed leg. His little heart beats hard in my shoulder: I’m holding a humanbeing born for beautiful purpose).
Across the lobby, both my girls stare in horror at me: “…so d’you really need another kid, ma?”
I ask the girls to pray for him: the miracle is they don’t hesitate to. In this hospital lobby, just a few days ago, we’ve seen another miracle. Another ‘going home’ with my husband, another celebration of good health. Shadows will linger, humans are prone to doubts. (We are like that: fragile babies of many worlds we cannot trip yet, on spirit feet yet unformed). When we pray, we trip territories. We touch the Thing that makes us love, fear, doubt… We are inter species – ial: more than flesh and 206 bones. We are not just shadows in the valley of uh-uh. We hurt, we die, we laugh, cry.
The Lil boy understands all this better than we, as we lean hard on the Arm that steadies the leaning. Lil man’s young mother stands up from where she sat with large bag and water bottle. I may never meet that duo again but what a privilege to hear each other’s heart beat in a lobby between here and the eternal.
My pics don’t half capture what we saw two evenings ago at our Kempegowda sky. With zero city silhouettes, no trees, just this blaze of light we’ve all seen before, but this one ruled!
It had been a long day, we were hoping for a spot of coffee & chat. But time runs: you don’t get to ask an airline to wait. ( The last Noel &I did that we kept AirIndia waiting a good five+ minutes; am not telling that story right now😧, they were polite and furious).
But heaven knows.
Heaven knows when a woman is about to have a meltdown. They know. My Noel is Mr. Tenderheart but practical. I’m saying “lookat that sunset“, he’s looking at Time. Where park this. How get to point B.
I’m thinking, does the guy love me? He’s sighing and grabbing steering wheel with eyes like a scared reindeer. Scared I’ll go do my thing. And ‘thing’ is my poetic self wanting to lie in the road and look at the sky. What he’d do is first check if that space is clean/ safe/legally clear…all that. Ofcourse. Is what great husbands do;
im just saying heaven knows how to sort us. They filled the skies with gold painted words I am learning to read.
At home last night we talked of how the skies are our keepers, how they shock us into their Point of View. At our Contrasts.
Have you had a very hot day, and got in the rain? And how that fell in your face like kisses from heaven; haven’t you too been hugged by an old person; they looked like your parent did, and you felt a piece of the Eternal holding you? Haven’t you too at least once, been smiled at by a total stranger at a bus stop, and felt the urge to smile back and it was indescribable friendship, random yea, but an ode to the Visible Unseen?
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
— Albert Einstein
So I experienced renewed friendship with the sun : twas a glorious Stranger smiling at us, at a rushed Port, where there’s that thin fine line between here & eternity, between Time zones, latitudes, clouds, beneath / above. There are safety checks, safety measures. Waiting lounge. Departure, Arrival. Life in Transit. It is all of us, seen as with Bird’s eye. Everything suddenly miniscule. A paradigm shift of reference. One gets to congregate with all that blue. All that expanse. Acres of the heavens. Turbo speed is the closest we come to that kind of mileage. But deep within, we soar higher than we admit.
The nations are as a drop in the bucket, my Scriptures read. What is man …?the first Astronaut on moon quoted from the Psalms. I was a child, now am grown and the more I stare at life, the more am startled by beauty, by pain, by comfort and chaos, and by the rain that falls equally on us all, like the untouchable Light, the way It pulses at emotions, reaching in the iris of human fatigue, esp at dusk.
"Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren't you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind - to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity."
A.Einstein
Light. Shining. Via our son’s blindness? This is not what we yelled for at altars. This is not what we asked …
the Almighty, and when He never answered we sulked hard at the unanswered prayer.
This dawn am staring at how I’ve misunderstood the Act of not getting what I asked, and how it morphs me into a person one would never prescribe for their self… cuz the basic human request (esp this parent’s) is pretty self focused.
Watching him in the Light of a growing sun or dusk, is staring at his Joy not dependant on external conditions, as I am. He doesn’t know how blindness separates the seen from the Unseen.
What’s it like for him to never see my face, but touch me and experience my love for him? To never see the sun but feel its warmth in his skin. Am humbled this morning at the hugeness of Light,and how it can spill out of even my own response…re-writing my own thoughts that spiral down, and oh into the Unseen Dayspring in the cellars of inner blindness;
often I Choose to pursue sadness. But on days as these, the Light hits the shutters of my mind, leaving me no Choice but to dance with the fabulous All Mighty Light.
Suicide is a deadly option, but those who’ve been to its edge, say that it just simple plain & total, takes over. This smiling happy face, Twitch has been our family favorite. Anyone who can move like that, in pure honest-to- goodness joy, is a masterpiece. This Story will go on a bit before Media turns its glare on other news.
Last night while we were searching the skies for stray comets that might slip over to our side of the city, the sky an indigo purple at mudnight –
I got thinking how tiny we must look from space. A glowing jewel, really. All our generations of man, woman, child, flora, fauna, war, bruise, buried place…our judgments, abuse, rejection, courtesy, indifferences, war, treaties, indifference, cultural/ spiritual kind unkindness; …
all that, is a dot in space, but close up we are breathtaking beautiful. C’mon. We have our shares of pain, our investments in disgrace, but creativity is stunning. We’ve too been called Creators of projects. We hate, but we love. I believe it is love that causes the insecure to turn bitter. Somewhere a need was not met. Somewhere a disbelief began. Somewhere we were hushed into a depth no one else could know. We own cellars. We bully our self into a submission that believes the worst Faith: we are dispensible. We are rich with a poverty that can seep like a deadly tide and we won’t know when it will wreak its lethal harvest.
The city where I live in, Bangalore, is known as our Suicide Capital. When I was in my early 20s, we did a Documentary on Suicide prevention. I helped out a lot; thought I knew how this went.
Nada! The next month there was this acquaintance who hung herself. To this day I remember the last time we met, her eyes sparkling with a new love. They were getting married that year she said, she was wearing a green Tee and long blue skirt. Kay didn’t make it. I had seen nothing in her that betrayed underlying conditions.
Unsure where am going with this Post. Just stay safe y’all. Life is short, but here we learn how to die please. Life is precious. We are precious. None dispensible. Its a Planet that needs us to do only what we can do. Like it or not, thats the truth of Mortal existence. We are a necessary link in someones life. Like it or not, we each own finger prints none has. We are Creators ourselves. There’s much to do. We were Created. For purpose.
Beyond this there is a Space yet to be made friends with. Beyond what we know, think,imagine, we are immortal.
“…I mean, really, one of the main reasons I avoid such poetry is because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. What would be the point of responding to a true believer’s sincere God-loving poem with my skepticism? What would my cynical response accomplish? And- believe me, I have almost nothing left in me today but cynicism…” David Bogomolny, Skeptic’s Kaddish – ben Alexander David.
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I’m a ‘Faith Poet’? Now I know, thank you David. Love the description.
‘He didn’t want to hurt me’ … ben A.D. Ah’m. You don’t see my cactus heart – I’d have been the original doubting Thomas’ daughter had it not been for What we been staring thru’ the dark at !
David writes with skilled ease and forms I never knew existed. Like it or not, this impatience at “faith”, coupled with careful toeing of thin line between here and the Shekinah, is fascinating; his Kaddish of grief, at loss of his father, the renowned Israeli American Mathematician +, Alexander Bogomolny is a Prayer Wall all by Itself. These are lyrics of beauty in ashes. It stirred me to look closer at scepticism. After months I was blogging again and two passages from his Skeptic’s Kaddish ran at me; both are necessary to Everything.
“Papa…in describing you …I have sometimes invoked an image of you as the “genius version of Forrest Gump” because you lived through so much momentous history but remained unruffled by it. You innocently savored life’s little details and exhibited a childlike fascination for moments that went unnoticed by most. It seems to me that your life experiences were filtered through your soul before ever reaching your mind.“
His other line : “… it feels to me as though nobody has any interest in listening to those with whom they disagree politically …..”
Two random readings from a professing skeptic, and neither felt hostile to a Bible hugging momma (me);
so. We did a couple of back and forth Poetry shares. One cannot presume to know another’s journey;
as for me, it wasn’t my Ma’s insistence nor Dad’s that provoked me to stare in the Unseen. Left to myself I’d’ve been the Skeptic of skeptics, you’ve no idea. I didn’t find heaven in the pews and baptism pool till a certain clearing of my mind began. The Unseen was right there beneath my own skin and the veins of leaves, of Life;
I find God staring at my own narrow ways through other humans who can forgive one another too. Love like that hurts like little else can. And it wrecks me to pieces, in a Peace that defies defect. Nothing missing, nothing broken – Shalom. Peace.
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Our local Sati, Dowry deaths to mention a few, had begun to build me into a museum of crime records. It is not impossible to go there. I could not forgive that everyday there’s a grisly rape, an honour killing, there’s war & sins of the powerful / ‘righteous’. One summer holiday between Anne Frank and Jungle Book, I came across Corrie Ten Boom’s Hiding Place:
the power of Forgiveness mingled with Love that asks nothing in return but a certain giving: this is an act of Soul. Without which we are….what? And if we do have Soul, we are miles more than meets the eye. Sigh. Yes!
Then we could not limit our self anymore nor stay indifferent to evidences of Life beneath surfaces. Maybe we would begin to listen to each other, know why we are what we are. We are more than a few dimensions. We are minefields and diamonds that surface from generations of bruises we carry like tattoos in our skin, and stars we seek.
Sheer relief : I didn’t have to play God anymore. I gave up my panel of Controls. One could swing a hammock in a desert if you could find two good trees! There would be dust storms, there would be songs. And there could be nothing missing, nothing broken inside-out if you dared. It would be tiring. Uneasy. No blame games. Only Grace.
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I am grateful for people who believe what they believe with an honesty that is unafraid to look at the Unseen. People like David who is a true ….Tolerant?
I just saw this piece by Malala. If you haven’t heard about her, read on.
The chaos being experienced right now is not a distant event: it is the scream of humans that will follow us in ways we can’t know yet. What can we do? I’m praying. There’s people praying that those who can make a difference will do so.
Innerdialects 
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