Just Another Crow Story

The crow is cawing
on the neighbour's terrace,
trying to wake up the Sun-
And light up her dark world,
Of Disgust. 
She has been cleaning.
Cleaning and cleaning and cleaning...
Underneath pure carpets
Behind pure masks.

She can still smell the stench
Of carefully cooked food
Grinded and devoured through,
In the halls of Purity,
Until the arrival of burps. 

She can feel her skin burning,
From the sacred fire,
Carefully stoked and tended to,
By its pure caretakers-
To transform to the grey dust
that she remembers
from the crematorium. 

The beautiful chants,
that are not meant for 
dirty ears and impure minds
still reverberate in hers. 

She sees these portals of Purity 
Her mind's eyes turning Red,
As she contemplates her anger and disgust. 

With a sigh of quiet resolve,
She turns to the day ahead,
And her work of scavenging
Her eyes turning yellow and blue. 

As the sun comes up
I see the crow take wing,
And explode
Into a flurry of colours - 
Mynah,
Drongo,
King Fisher,
Bee-eater,
Roller,
Seven sisters,
Sun-bird,
Treepie...

About Giving, Taking and Transactions

For about a year and half since we moved to Tiruvannamalai, I experimented with offering my service (yoga therapy sessions primarily) on a gift economy model, wherein what we offer and receive are gifts and hence without any sort of a predetermination or limitation of how much is offered and received.  This experiment had been a revelation for me in terms of my relationship with money / earning, and my expectations from whom I seek to serve.  I had also felt that this model hinges on a relationship of trust.

I came to a conclusion that every engagement in the world is a transaction, and I don’t mean that in a cynical or negative way. I believed that even a mother wants something from her child; it may not necessarily be in a cut-and-dried way of “I give you this, in return you give me that” however there is an expectation of something.  I may have glimpses of unconditional giving in myself and others now and then, but I question that it is an uninterrupted flow. The ‘I’ does interrupt.  I felt that I could keep this (unconditional giving) as a signpost of growth, act such that at the very least my transactions are not exploitative, practice in this direction.           

   

A recent conversation with a friend lighted up and brought in deeper meaning into this matter of transaction for me.  She was speaking about how difficult it is for her to ‘take’ from others, and some of the ways in which this plays out in her life. I realised that I was looking into a mirror!  While it has manifested differently in my life, I could have said those very same words and it would have been true for me.  As I listened to her and said some things in response to her questions, I felt I was saying those things to myself as well. 

Swami Vivekananda is a personal Hero, and I have known the following aspect of his personality and what he has said about this, for quite long.  However it took this conversation with my friend to truly personalise what he had said. Paraphrasing what he had said in different contexts to different people: that he doesn’t see himself as a ‘giver’, there is a problem in seeing oneself as a giver or receiver. I have no problems receiving gifts from all you people who come to me. In giving, I may receive and in taking, I may give.”  

As I said to her that somehow this is what I am reminded of, it occurred to me that I have always identified myself with ‘giver’ and ‘giving’, with the primary cultural conditioning and assumption being, ‘giving is good’ and a consequent injunction, ‘I should give’ and somehow the automatic negation of ‘taking’.  All that I have perceived as ‘taking’ from others, I have been carrying on me a like a heavy sack of rocks. And every time I ‘take’ without ‘giving’ something, I have put a stamp of ‘exploiter’ on myself.  And if I ‘give’ without taking anything, then I am some great saint or some such!! What a drama.

As I continued walking around the mountain with her and left my drama behind, I remembered the often-discussed idea that every engagement is an exchange of prAna, and in that current exchange of prAna that was happening between my friend and me (as much in silence as during the conversations), I did not (and I feel neither did she) perceive either of us as giver or taker. We were with each other for that period of time for a purpose, which held our complete attention, as much as each other, and the path and what it brought to us. From a point of examination, it could be said that in a gross way, we gave each other many things, and even looking at it more subtly we each took from the other a whole lot. And yet there were no expectations and agendas. There was no give and take.  There actually was no transaction. There are I believe, no residues. Perhaps.  It was a spontaneous, innocent connection / exchange. 

While returning, a few non-transactional processes and exchanges that I have experienced came to mind.  Examining them I find that a non-transactional exchange takes place as a consequence of some spontaneous, empathetic connection. I want to call it love. A deeper sense of losing / reaching across one’s usual boundaries of ‘I’? Maybe.  A space where and when, notions of giver and receiver lose their meaning?  

Yet, one category of people I see who are involved in this kind of a prAna exchange have their role boundaries very clear – my elders. And it struck me that this is something special about how some of my elders love, and seek to serve the people they love.  They are able to hold the transactional and non-transactional together seamlessly without any apparent conflict between the two.  This is what gives me the sense of wonder and joy when I watch them doing what they do. 

My domestic helper transacts with me every day and yet there is an underlying sense of non-transaction about it all.  She and I are much more than each of those transactions that we engage in, and yet it is not just this. There is something else, something more, that is feeding the human process here?  

My great grandfather at 104 does not expect much from the world around him except the vadas that he relishes, to watch his beloved tennis, and someone to bless with a good and prosperous life through a 10 or 50 rupee note, each day. He gives and takes with childlike abandon and yet there is nothing transactional about it. Oh, he was a banker.  

My mother-in-law’s purpose of living seems to be to support everyone in her immediate and extended family.  She also gently and consistently demands role appropriate values and behaviours from her family.  Her every exchange seems to be a transaction and yet absolutely non-transactional at the same time.  Just how is this happening?

I now feel that it is a secondary matter whether I am working with a gift economy model or not.  This would depend on the context and what is necessary.  I stay with my questions, what makes me (us) give and what makes me (us) take, when do I (we) not feel any difference between the two, and so, to look at those times when transactions are taking place and yet the meta process is non-transactional. 

  

x

Living the Question

It lay dormant for many years, ages. in the dark, comfortable, cosy. No water could reach it, and not the sunlight. the passage of time, the revolution of the planet, ushered in some moonlight, Some movement, in the worlds above.

They say faith moves mountains. Have you seen mountains move? now, a teacher’s faith! She brought in fresh air; The ground started breathing, and having conversations.

The sun reached in, and touched the shadows and questions. “Is the individual for society, or society for the individual?”

Water rushed in, ever-loyal to gravity and conversation flowed – “Does name matter? Work is work; water is the form of its container.”

One uncomfortable morning, the ground broke. And the young one peeped out, eyes covered. To discover the forest. Conversations abound nourishing, strengthening, questioning, the sweat and blood of growing up.

Yet another morning, not so uncomfortable, the not-so-young-one found purpose. More conversation, “Can there be an individual purpose? What is a wall? Robert Frost knew the secret.

‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’ roots uproot, here in the forest. creepers grow thick as thieves, and create gaps, walls crumble. Even the Berlin one did. and the great China one, is on its way there. Do the tourist, you will see.”

On this morning, fresh after the rains, the smell of beauty rising from the ground;

Fluttering its leaves, dancing with the breeze standing, with friends and family, and community, Here is the neem, There is the tamarind, and the peepal, the banyan, the young ones, the herbs and the flowering, the thorny and the leafy....

the direction seems clear, and yet not so much.

“My shade is for the asking, the fruits will come in season, twigs for firewood grass underneath for cows and goats. And yet, What is it that I am doing? What is just me? Kabir says to his Lord: You, are the bigness in the elephant, and the smallness in the ant,”

Asks the not-young-one,

“What makes the I-ness in the I? Fruits arrive naturally.”

- Priya

A Loneliness

A loneliness.
It manifests differently,
With different people.
A loneliness.
It has different flavours,
In different contexts.
A loneliness.
It smells and feels uniquely,
Rendering the environment.
A loneliness, nevertheless.

Sometimes when it is there,
I can want it to be.
I am settled in it.
I am watching this –
The settling.
The loneliness allows it.

Sometimes it’s there;
And I don’t want it.
I am feeling heavy, intense.

Sometimes,
It just creeps up on me,
And then, there is so much space.

This loneliness,
It’s like a separate entity –
Standing apart,
Yet within me.

Sometimes,
I love and welcome it,
this aloneness inside.
It frees me somehow
And melts the chains
holding my heart tight.
I breathe,
And fly.

Sometimes,
it makes me want to cry.
there’s a hollowness
in my gut.
But my chest and throat,
they are clogged up,
with Emotion?

But,
I am not inside the emotion.
It is in me.
The aloneness allows this.

There are all these other times
When I just don’t know,
don’t feel, this aloneness.
I would be all alone,
at home or in the park
But I simply cant find it –
this aloneness.
Just a gazillion forms
shifting, writhing and twisting in me;
and I am drifting this way and that.

And then there can be a time,
in the middle of a crowded room,
much like this one –
the loneliness in another,
the aloneness she is inhabiting
is clear, evident;
and all at once,
I am right in there,
in that lonely, alone space
in my heart.

I am in it,
and it is in me.