or: No Tomorrow
Two years ago I parted from the River up north, upon which I lived, the River at whom I had mushrooms for the first time, the River at which I found and lost love, the River by whom I started and stopped studying at the intellectual-centered academy. So I parted away and set off to learn from a male-teacher.
I found a female one instead.
I followed her around the world.
I found that my greatest teacher is my body, and my greatest teacher is my uterus and my gut. Because everything comes down to the gut and everything there it will stop. All the feelings that I could not express at that time, all the pain and all the joy stopped there, there it stood at a halt. I found that finding a way to this joy is to let all that has accumulated there for years, to finally go out. It’s to stretch my tensed body, it’s to stretch my recoiled tendons, it’s to stretch the muscles that have forgotten, forgotten how to stand upright against gravity. They might of forgotten, but the stomach remembers, she remembers all that has been forgotten, everything that has been repressed, all that has been put there to find its way out in the future.
So this future has come and now it’s the present, my present to myself(ves), and two years after this River it is time to meet that old love that had blossomed upon it, again in the north, but of another country. The same love, but I am already different.
Two years had passed and I saw other streams, I sat in the shade of other trees, I danced impossible dances and wrote many words, but something about that magical river was unique. I finish a two-week project, a painting in colors on a pair of glass doors, 12 paintings. I find that almost every
painting represents a piece of my life. The dragonflies of the Banias-river hovers in the yellow painting on the left door, red and green and sparkling in the eternal sunlight (of the spotfull mind). Since then, I had known the coconuts and the pineapples and the scorching sun of Goa, I had known the sufis in the cosmic rhythms star dance, I learnt that a beloved teacher who had found herself confined to her bed, in her words: this, too, is divine. Indeed it’s divine, divine and transcendent,transcendent beyond my comprehension, and transcendent beyond my ability to emotionally digest, observe, or perceive, a beloved friend and a human teacher, being shaken into the hardships of life. She said today that when her carer saw her crying she told her “you are a strong woman, don’t cry“. She replied “I am a strong woman, and that’s why I can cry“.
I had set off from the River to meet a teacher, and found within me a devotion that I did not knew could exist inside me. Devotion to the path and to the internal quest, that sometimes claims for deliberate suffering. Deliberate not in the purpose of suffering deliberately, rather deliberate from the akgnolegment that to become something new- means that old parts of me must die- and death of bits inside me hurts. They do not wish to die, Just as I do not wish to die before I really live.
And what is it really to live, what is it to live in truth, and who is this truth?
I found that everything that was automatic in me, all that was done without attention, from internal script and habit, is far from being true. Even responding “I love you too” automatically, to her “I love you” – even this love at that moment, there is no truth in it. Because it is not love, it is a habit, an automatic output. And then I find, that I don’t always feel like responding that “I love too”. Only when the urge to say “I love you” comes naturally from my gut. So what, if it does not want to come out, does it mean I do not love her?
Once, at “the beginning” of when the last partner and me were “together,” it used to hurt me that he never replied my “I love you”s. I thought it meant he doesn’t love me yet. Today I understand differently. Love is not always in words. Sometimes love can emanate deeds without a single word. A Touch, a hug, a soft look. Choosing to paint a white cat, because she longs for one, or to give my very best painting the glass doors that she wanted me to draw on. To do it as if there will be no tomorrow and as if after I’ll leave I would never see her again. Because being here in Goa now feels just like that. Maybe there will be no tomorrow. Maybe the coconuts that crash here from the trees and the waves of the sea are not going to exist any more. The same way that I will not have the same Banias-river anymore. This river, it will flow for other people, different waters, other days, another stream. The same spot but its waters have changed, I have changed, it has changed, and the path- I am already on a completely different part of it.
Once I sat upon a River. Time passed and the past also went away. The blink of an eyelid, the flutter of a wing, and the shimmering dragonflies had already gone. (on and on).
