A grand symphony of gears, tires, and tar

It's silly fare
I want to share,
The song that's in the air...

Of shiny gears
And metal rears
A symphony debonair...

My ride is bright,
smooth, adroit,
She flows through troughs and crests...

She's cherry red
And velvet felt,
With her, I have no frets...

Her gears are smoothly oiled,
Her clutch is light to heel,
She gallops at the least request,
And moves as in a dream.

The traffic hops and rears about,
There's no reason all around,
But with my car, a manual drive,
Hope for roads abound.

The symphony of tar and tires
The philharmonic joys
Of morning woes and cursing throats,
Abound on every fork.

But the point lies
That when the tide
Rises, falls, or cries...
I listen and learn
And then in turn,
We flow into the miles...

She talks to me,
A whisper, a sigh,
She sings a breathy wheeze...

And with each note
I do respond,
With gentle pressure or release

And she does dance
And so becomes
The mistress of my fate.

Simple Gifts (A Shaker song...)

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'Tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'Tis the gift to be fair
'Tis the gift to wake and breathe the morning air
And each day we walk on the path that we choose
'Tis the gift we pray we never shall lose

I don't think I have taken the time to put the song into written script in my blog before. If there was one song that really influenced me, it is this... 

slave to the body?

I have come to a sorry conclusion about myself... Whereas I used to pride myself on being led by my mind and my thoughts, I now realize that somewhere along the way I fell into a stagnant pool. It looks as though, at this current stage, my body: it's aches, pains and moans, are taking the lead. The conclusion came crashing on me as I sat and bemoaned my tired state, my stomach cramping and curling in on itself, and my feet aching when I stepped away from the bed. And this is nothing new... But, there must be a way to overcome it - to not let my physical self be the commanding officer in the battle to win my soul. I have started a new diet, a new exercise program , but they fell by the wayside the moment my system complained a few days back. But, thinking back on things, I realize that it might have been the better option to push through the tiredness and gently bring my system on track. So, henceforth - that is the plan. Any day which sees me solely horizontal or seated for most of the time will be remade with a walk, a swim, or some continuous movement - no matter the condition of my body... for a slave to the body - I shan't be anymore...

THE Question...

There is a question that has hovered beneath the surface of my brain for the longest time... I cannot recall who or what seeded the question, or when the first drop of its essence seeped into the exposed corners of my mind. All I know is that the question exists within me now, and has become a part of the mould that characterizes the innermost parts of me.

The question is simple, easy to reword, easy to understand, beautifully suited to compose lyrical stanzas from... The answer, however, is frustatingly abstract. In moments of drowning thought, I think that the answer will forever be out of reach... like the most luscious fruit that induces an outpouring of saliva, hanging just out of reach of the highest jump that one can make with the help of the most advanced technology known or unknown to us.

Why do we live? What gives us, puny wasteful humans, the right to existence? Why were we given such a wonderful brain, such amazing self-healing systems? What is the reason we strive to drag in each breath and survive another day? There must be something we are all searching for - some goal, some accomplishment, some knowledge that is beyond us - that pushes us to continue our evolution...

But the question is forgotten... it lies in the shambles of the gutters that we race past each day. It hides in forgotten corners, covered with cobwebs and rust. It is no longer brought out to the light of day, each day, lovingly polished, twisted this way and that, to see the light refract and reflect off it's seemingly impenetrable, mirrored surfaces. It is lost to us...

We run through each day - for what? We wake weary in the morning, robotically fuel ourselves, drive or ride the long long way to work (even if it is one road away), work... or rather... slave away at the same set of rules, create new innovations that do the same thing faster, as though by doing it faster we use the time gained to do something precious, go home, argue with our partners, shout at our kids, laugh a little but oh! forget the laughter in the minute worries that fill our meaningless lives... the small worries, the little doubts, the light stains, and the requisite sorrows, they have grown so large these days! Survival is taken for granted, we have more time on our hands than ever before, health is easy to come by with the swallow of a pill, the sunsets and mountains are plebian and meaningless... we search for monetary growth, career growth, personal growth through social elevation, we want our kids to prosper - how? with enough money so they want for nothing material...

Life has lost its meaning - in the search for money and security, the little joys are lost - the small worries are more important. And at the end of the day, what does it mean to have a bigger house, have clean floors and dishes but minute issues blown so big as to smother the joy away... what does it mean to save and save or spend on shoes and clothes and accessorize until the brain becomes a rusty disused organ which creaks so loudly when we are suddenly pulled out of our comfort zone that we fear to think about controversial subjects anymore - that we dismiss the abstract because we are so used to each line and curve being defined by those gone by before us - that we are unwilling to move out of our comfort zone to face new challenges in our thought processes or habitual needs...

Now, when the question surfaces, I am wearied, I fear the time taken away from my normal duties, from my regular activities... as though life can be seen through the microscope of my daily routine. I fear it as it will lead to disruption and arguments. I fear it because I desire it - I desperately seek the answer without conscious thought. I search through pages of fantasy, where the question is portrayed in each character's struggle, in each moment of change, in each turning of the page... I run away into the book and submerge to seek and find... But it's not external to me - this answer.

The answer is my religion. Not my faith, not my hindu upbringing, not my education. The search for the answer sets the path under my feet, makes me believe in karma, and dharma. It challenges the antennae that don't stop quivering in me, no matter the stagnation of my career or the mundane requirements of a new household, no matter the fights or the material gains that accumulate as part of my life's experiences... It fuels the heart beat and polishes the brain... It makes me believe in good and evil, makes me hunger to rewrite my philosophies in new words each time, makes me desperate to debate and reword, and pursue... always pursue...

We all need this. We need to get out of the stagnant corners of our lives and seek. We might be in Kali Yug, when the material things are so much easier to obtain than the philosophical, so much so that even the sages have given us the easiest path to moksha. Just do the Satynarayana Puja, they say... Just listen to the Krishna leela - and you will attain moksha - that divin freedom from the cycle of reincarnation. How is that so? It is not known. It makes me yearn to wait for the cleansing waters to drown us so that we are brought anew into a fresh universe, so that we can see with the eyes of our heart - watch the turtle bring the mighty vedas out of the water, tremble with excitement to see one of the great sages, instead of an actor, breathe in the pattern of the pranayam knowing that each breath is unlocking another mystery of the universe within ourselves without knowing exactly how, treasuring our lives so much that the question is the most precious thing to us...

Divine breakfast

I had the most wondrous experience of receiving a coffee machine and mixie all the way from India just last weekend... And the coffee machine spits out coffee that melts through my taste buds and drives me to heights of ecstasy. All last week, I was eagerly anticipating today... awaiting with beating heart, and eager caffeine-soaked tonsils, a lazy Saturday morning with my love and a spectacular, late breakfast. For a moment there I had forgotten that my love had a weekly appointment with the cricket field and thus would be unavailable to me. A disappointment - but I managed to move past it with the help of my coffee! Awakening to the knowledge of a solitary breakfast, I girded my mental loins, and sloshed elbow-first into the soap suds of my kitchen sink. There was no way that I would allow the grease of yesterday's wash to cloud the perfection of today's freshness! Once that was done, the coffee machine started to purr, and release the heady aroma of Brazilian glory... ah! Gloria-Jean had contributed her share to the perfection that was to be my Saturday morning brew by providing a generous quantity of caramel syrup that added the twist of sweet to heighten the perfection of the bitter concoction so many of us drool over. The decoction was done, and the milk was at the perfect temperature, ready for frothing. The frothing was done to perfection, and my coffee was ready. I slathered some cream cheese on toast, added some chutney, and some raungi with masala as dressing... slid both sides of toast carefully together, zipped it through the toaster oven, and there.... the breakfast experience was amazing to say the least :D

so ma! Thanks a ton for the coffee machine and the mixie - the mixie was what I had made the raungi masala with, so both contributed heavily to the makings of this brekkie :D

And why such a long post about breakfast, you might ask... well, just felt like it :P G'day mates!

Emoting

There is this book I was reading... It starts off saying: "There were some days that deserved to be drowned at birth and everyone sent back to bed with a hot brandy, a box of chocolates, and a warm, energetic companion."

Completely brilliant and makes me smile even though today appears to be exactly one such day for me. There are days when I feel like the sun is shining inside my lungs, I talk non-stop, smile till my cheeks hurt, and add a little skip to each step out of sheer love of life. Today, it feels like there is huge sponge lodged somewhere deep in my chest cavity that is sucking my heart's blood with every arterial-pump of my distraught heart. Melodramatic, ain't I? A concerned reader might choose this moment to drag the reading to a halt, and post a sweet question asking me what exactly is wrong? The irritating, annoying, difficult response that I must give is that I really have no proper answer! I feel rather like a wet rag, with my brain smothered in feathers, and each breath I take just seems to directly open a leak-valve behind my eyeballs and squirt saline fluid to obscure my vision! Yeah, such nonsense ought, if there is any justice in the world, to be forbidden from overtaking anyone's system. Ah well...

Have you ever felt that your entire psychological self is one big, open, oozing wound where any joke, any laugh, just goes to irritate? to cause your entire self to shrink down for a moment, contract around itself, and rebound with such energy that it spills onto some poor onlooker who only wanted a laugh? How do you explain yourself? How do you say that it's pure dissatisfaction with yourself. You just want to curl up into a corner and forget about the world for a while, but the world keeps knocking at your shutters until you want to scream! You want to float on a stream of fiction while your subconscious sorts itself out, and suddenly you find yourself too waterlogged to float! Life can be perfect, but if you cannot communicate your feelings properly or cannot communicate them in a way that can be understood, then you might as well go stick your head in the ground, dig your fingers through to your ears, stick them in, and go "la la la la" and just let the world go by. If you cannot soothe yourself and find the path to understanding how to fix yourself up to your own satisfaction, it is with complete conviction that I state, you should, in no way, let the emotional overflow scald anyone else.... Of course, I keep telling myself all this, but sometimes, the best thing to do is to write it all out and let it flow away from you until serenity, will-ye, nill-ye, overtakes you... As it has overtaken me... :)

Emotional catharsis over...

C-c-c-collllddd; F-f-f-freeeezing!!!

Well, the title says it all. I had really planned on writing this post yesterday morning when the sharp memory of the acute cold was still as fresh as a bouquet of Himalayan snow in my mind. However, life got ahead of me - or should I say, work got ahead of me? All documentation stuff... productivity info, more productivity info and a very strange satellite phone whose efficacy in non-satellite, sub-stratospheric zones needed to be tested and needed to be tested NOW! So, yes... work got a little bit ahead of me... :) However, the biting cold was not forgotten. Luckily, it was not quite so irritable a chill today morning, but it was cold enough that I was determined to post this little note and get the whines out of my system :)

So, getting back to the topic at hand... Day before yesterday: I had been told by a minimum of 3 sources that the temperature was going to reach a low of 1 degree centigrade that night. If this had been 2 or 3 years ago, in a place where centralized heating was not just a dream but a realized success, this would not have made my bone marrow squirm. But, squirm it did, because I very soon realized that my poor 7 fin oil heater was not robust enough to do anything but wheeze faintly in the chill vapor of my frozen breath if the temperature should reach this close to zero. Upon the heels of this realization, I started to mull over all the items of clothing in my dresser and figure out what would keep me warm through this abysmal night. I reached home, headed straight to my cupboard and pulled out a hoodie, a fluffy pink silky warm bathrobe with a hood, 2 pairs of woolly fluffy socks, a winter cap which would cover my ears, my flannel Aladdin style harem pants (warm!), and a thick soft warm nightshirt and put them on my quilt. Then I got into all of them; the second pair of socks going on my hands right at the end. So, you can imagine me: round and warm with a cap and the hood of my hoodie and then the hot pink hood of my bathrobe on my skull, a hoodie and bathrobe on top of my nightshirt around my torso, a fire-engine red set of harem pants with the pink bathrobe hugging my well-padded behind, purple woolly socks on my feet and purple woolly socks with rubber splats (to keep from sliding in case I suddenly took it in my head to walk on my hands) on my paws. And I took my round self and plopped under the quilt, making sure that all corners and sides of the quilt were tucked right under my cocooned self. Thus, I was quite warm throughout the cold night and laughed myself silly when I woke up and saw the sun grinning at me through my lacy curtains. It's quite beside the point that I ended up with a fever in the middle of the night and decided to sleep in in the morning. So, I woke up warm, lazy, and feeling much better and was actually able to scrunch my nose, squint, and smile when coming up for air from under my covers... Surprising how a warm night can transform a person's mood :P And the morning was filled with that fresh, dew-drop-filled cold that was just waiting to delve into one's lungs and call up pictures of snowy peaks and sun-ridden early mornings :) So all in all, not that much of a whine in this post. More of a laugh and a skip...