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.
Kiddie ‘lions’ @ the ‘Valley of Resistance’; Panjshir(five lions) the last bastion against the Taliban has not been accessible to terror/ war these 20 years owing to the valley that secures it. Today though the Lines fall in unpleasant places: reports come in of weakening battle fronts. One can only hope and pray for humane negotiations.Will they hold out? How long? These are not battle – worn hard liners, these are someone’s daughters,and moms, wives. They are angry, fearful and armed with courage, …..but a match for a Force known for brutality?!
What is the global community thinking after 20 years of a different take? I’m swallowing words. Its easy to spew things out in the ongoing aftermath of chaos, but this will impact generations to come like only hell can prescribe. Saigon and Hiroshima now live on within their maps. This here will bleed in every continent like ceaseless echoes in the mountains…
and that’s putting it sweet
and yet, the more we hurt, the more we keel, we look up at the sun, its stars and days of nights breaking into dawn, and don’t you too wonder how ceaseless the path of Light, like Love, true love
not a whim, a selfish need, but a Cross socially distanced from humans, who cannot believe there is One that died to speak Reconciliation, Oh God –
the more we die, the closer the sky falls in with Your Light. When will we all realize, we are fighting the thing we fear most- Your Presence oh God?
In the chaos, may we soften our heart, to hear You my Christ. May Your presence cast out all Fear, that the unseen enemy of the soul be eternally defeated.
I tried to pray today, it was like going to a store and not wanting anything any more except a counter that could take requests for giving. Giving thanks.
RNoel
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In all the recent Mayhem and Jittery June Viral chaos, the centre of me sat down to stare at another month for all of us. Suddenly the things that used to scare me don’t anymore. How come? The people that used to taunt, seem to have lost fang and fuss. Now how?! I don’t know. The rabid need for money seems to have bitten off it’s own head. Sure we all still need the MO but something’s changed and we’re a little less orthodox about our own goodness. We’re all a little more orthodox about our own littleness. We are maybe more crazy and yelly 😅 if that’s a word. We are kinder, if that’s possible. Those who never spoke now speak. The insanely noisy have become quiet. Me, I begin to pray and end up speechless. I remember my Prayer List last year this time. How I’ve changed, haven’t we all?
July, how’re you going to be? Will I be pretty, will I be rich… here’s what he said to me.. que sera sera… if you remember that song.
Meanwhile our 19 year old heals in new ways. The hyperaction you see in below video has decreased way more than we thought possible. He’s still pitch perfect, and a crazy guy for calender memory. And a whole host of things.
Am grateful for the tremendous healing he’s had over the past month. We’re able to play like we used to, chat .. .
He actively hates Covid for the restrictions its imposed on our outdoor lives but home has become a more beautiful place with its quiet surroundings and green. Our lil gardens grow with the rains this monsoon; trees fill with new kinds of birds. Yeah I am speechless this July, with deep need for better days yes, but also gratitude for the million gifts we may not even know we were born with.
This July I’m praying we will know and use our gifts well. What a tragedy to not notice the stash within us.
“What dyou mean?” She asks, her face wide with laughter and tears, a rare combination for Jassi who never cries.
Pic Credit Unsplash ***
Apparently the people who’ve been paying her rent are stopping that now that they must care for themselves. Jassi’s been semi- dependent on her second cousins all these years with eyesight gone and a debilitating disease. A few friends and I collect groceries and essentials, but it isnt helping. The last thing her cousins told her was that she best fend for herself, and said that in tones that hurt. When someone asked her if things were returning to normal Jassi laughed and cried; after a bit she laughed again, like a child. She said this was good. Now she could lean on her Heavenly Father like never before, and why hadnt she done that all her life? Why had she leaned on other things, and people….. she asks.
Here, I find me.. pieces of me, stitched together in the Hem of Your garment.
Old calendar on tiny easel at home. ***
Look Lord, here around Your edge, pieces of prayers, darts sewn with silent fingers.
Here I am Hannah, a woman ridiculed, hated by her sister, despised for unproductivity. A Hannah ruthlessly in a life not as good as expected. Here my God
How do I feel the contentment of reaching in this moment-
You stopping to hold my holding of You. You not laughing, not You:
here there is zero derision/ judgment. Here, we receive that Touch that alone can reach a wound. Only You, of the Cross where no pride rules, only You could Hem the Streets of my Hannah,
I begin to shed all need of social acceptance. As I breathe, I understand this isn’t as bad a place as we thought it was. Humiliation can wear a crown of thorns. It can disgrace vanity: its stronghold. Rejection bears wounds you cannot receive in courts of honour. Being hated too: ah this one can teach us one or two lessons in freedom. Freedom from that race for supremacy.
There is a State of man, woman, child: a State that is freed from the clutches of skin-deep power. You lose the craving to be loved; you can still love, perhaps more! There is no bitter. There is forgiveness, there is a certain letting-go of all other hems.
You walk valleys and climb mountains barefoot till the mountain becomes you. You cannot be a plateau anymore. Or you sink sink in waters so deep, the river takes you: here, you cannot be anything else anymore. You understand the power of that very tide that towed you off limiting shores.
Or you walked a desert so long now, its acres speak in a voice you couldn’t have heard any place else. You’re grateful for that, for the way it could run without showers or oasis for as long as it took. If you’ve run to the Hem of His garment you meet these wastelands in the Hem. You hear the voice of the Humiliated, the cast down. There is no other place that holds it all, like here. Here there is zero pride of performance, of amassed wisdom, here, you are freed from the whip of laughing scorn, it cannot tug its hook in you anymore, how I don’t know. Ask The Hem.
I woke up this morning with all that. Like I’d met Ruth and Hannah here in the Tattered edge of This. I asked a few things, He will answer in ways we will understand later. He always gives us what we ask for, or something better. (Anonymous quote)
Cover me with Your garment Lord; spread Your shield o’er an earth keeling. There are things we do not know to see. There are Secrets in these Edges , as invisible as a virus, as potent, virulent. Here I kneel my inner being, grateful for the privilege of feeling a certain ‘lowliness’. How beautiful it is, to come apart and rest in the secret place of This Freedom.
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Do check below Poster: is a Live Concert, Vihan D. featuring Originals. You’ll need to be there, 6 pm to 8 pm tonight, April 23rd- Indian time, to know what else goes on. Please do.
ALL PROCEEDS BEING DONATED TO RELIEF WORK AMONG THOSE DISPLACED BY CURRENT SITUATION, INDIA. ***
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This Post is for anyone celebrating their birthday today, (and everyone else) I have this urge to celebrate you, and offer a tiny prayer too from my son who’s incredible gift is prayer. If you’ve been following posts you’ll know he’s not just blind but recovering from a series of disturbing issues, but this isn’t about him;
whichever part of the world you’re in: what a ride this is, and yet we are still the same people we were born as…
Was my birthday couple of days ago: “..no fuss,” I warned them, but there they were @ midnight, cake and candles, hushed whispers: in the morning among mysteriously bought gifts, was a Heart full of blue crystal stars from Kitsy, and Perfume from our eldest, my first name ‘Diella‘ hand- crafted in with scores of words like “Light”. (I got that name in a dream, after a long crazy illness. While I healed, there was a dream: it had my name written on a white stone. Diella means Worshipper);
mid- birthday joy, now there was announcement of national 21 day curfew; our entire street & surrounding areas went quiet, no bustle of traffic or twitter from Myna in trees running between our home and army acres across.
Within our walls, my family had strung out little lights, there was music and the smells of great cooking,
(I have officially surrendered cooking baton to second daughter Kitsy, who is master chef! (On left is how she used to be), now 👇….sigh, they grow so fast.
Kitsy in our last visit out in a park…. why’d that seem so long ago? …
D’you sometimes feel guilty to feel happy? You know it’s a mess out here with virus and anxiety attacks, but now and then there’s a celebration,
so here’s the thing: we were going thru’ all our pics, and my Jeff he rounded off everyone’s words with, “Ray, you are … you are… unique….” ….words that make me stare at everyone else now…..
that, there is no one like you either!
No matter the news, nothing changes who you are, your essence is unique, novel! Yes they say ‘novel‘ for all kinds of things, but here we are, citizens and strangers and basic people born to mothers and families and lives that can change in the twinkling of an eye. We been warned of all that, but when it arrives it’s a thief in the night, it’s a touch between life and death…
We got two bone chilling letters from people we love, one from our precious nephew in a hospital in Germany, he’s a doctor; and the other from a very dear friend in the U.S. They wrote loving notes, asking family to pay attention to how deadly this Covid thing is, the pace at which it mutates, its silent stealth. These precious ones lives are at risk because of their professions: I can’t tell you enough what it felt like, to be gazing at/ celebrating life in all its hues: to hug across the miles, and cry tears of love and pain;
to know that we 7 billion are strong and yet we are this vulnerable. We are beloved and fragile, our life is like grass, and yet we are one-of-a- kind- each, Designer made, no matter that our breath can be whisked away; we are phenomenal, a Force to reckon with. The day we were born, people paused or clapped, kissed? …. wept.
We can die, and even that occasion is phenomenal. It causes chaos / maddening grief, because humans as a race cannot be ignored. If one of us is attacked in any unusual ordeal it is News. The entire planet of us under siege is another thing altogether, nothing competes with the vastness of that: the fact that we are under this kind of common indefinable, insurmountable distress is totally New.
If we survive this, and many will, there will be the aftermath of it and it may be unlike anything recorded in the history of mankind: I don’t want to go much there: this one is about birthdays and how it feels to celebrate humans, mid- international crisis; it feels strange and provocative -beautiful and Quiet.
This morning I woke up feeling different, younger and older, like I had more in my 206 bones. It’s an awareness… of what? The immortality of life, or its brevity? I’m staring at books we used to read, it’s like from another life: movies, talks. Some Quotes feel more right than before. Oh, bouquets and birds, they don’t change, they are like paintings and classical music; they have Eternity in them. But our conversation…. it is halved in a new way.
Birthday hugs: they are tighter.
Gazes and strummed guitar, candle lights and the clink of glasses… they say new things. I can’t say what, just new. And old. And somethings we never knew before. We thought we knew it all. Our parents and grandparents taught us how to say Grace and say please, thankyou and sorry. As we grew we thought we understood things a little more than yesterday. It felt sweet, sometimes sour.
Now, I don’t know… and that is a New Thing. It reminds me of how little we all truly know about each other as humans. You are a person with feelings and heart and we must care deeply for each others’ well being, must pray for one another’s lives/ souls…
this is more than birthdays: you can see this Post hovers around that word and how I want to wish you a beautiful life without sounding patronizing, even if it’s not birthday zone. Even if life’s not short and we’ll survive this and other wars.
Our daughter Vi does these Videos and I’d love for you to listen to this one. She’s a lot like me and feels deeply about things;
then our son walks in on her recording (he cannot bear closed doors), but the moment turns around, he prays and brings you right into our room facing palm trees on it’s right, with my large painting in the back drop. It is called DaySpring, and I wish you that Inner Spring of Light and Life.
Vi does her own take on Michael W. Smith’s Agnus Dei; we looked up those words and it means “Emblem: a Lamb bearing the Cross of Christ.”
All sounds so serious. D’you get the feeling life is way more than mortal detail? That there’s more besides thinking on Cures and everyday bread/ rice/ health… that oneday we might all be someplace else besides this planet?
And that we matter incredibly more than we suspect…
This is another one I’ve no clue how to wrap. Do have a blessed day.
Innerdialects 
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