Tag: reality

That summer I spent 40 days in the Red sea …

& other Places flowing thick off a beige covered Best seller that wouldn’t let me go. From Eden to hell, from Cain’s mess to Parables snuck like jewels in the dark, this Book held me by my irises.

****

I was 13, I’d read every book there was to read in our school library. I’d re-read some old Readers Digest in the musty bookshelves where Dad worked by the sea; now he grinned as I sat hunched over these Beauties. This Bible was all mine, but:

no one had warned me of its power to grab.

“Read it,” they advised like It were necessary medication for a virus. Yes, they warned, you read it, you sleep well at night. No ghosts and spooks would bother with a Bible Reader. They never really told me of its teeny mustard armies that smashed mountains, Its valleys flooded neck high with Psalms; It’s Blood flowing crimson in my insides, not just for healing and goodies but for Its absolute value as irreplaceable Present Resurrective serial Power …..

****

The Bible dared me to rise above asking It for quick answers to maths problems at school; It looked away when I had to have a toenail removed, as if Pain were a Date I’d understand, oh need to understand for future reference.

“I’m just a child,” I said to my Bible’s somber covers, and now and then I caught It sigh a sigh of relief, like It were asking me to stay that way. That it would hurt if I grew too much into borrowed intelligence. I did my best, but shoe sizes changed. Life was like that, everyone said.

I agreed, but reality was a trick. Is.

****

Reality is wearing some else’s shoes because we often follow others’ short cuts. Reality is a lil pumpkin that cuts out its insides making believe it is not what it is.

The Bible went through many translations in my many shelves but It stalked my desert with me; It ran me into an Oasis here and there, till I went like a Deer panting away from dead seas to Living Waters;

It hurt that I hurt. It was there …. A Still small voice refusing to give in to my worry that It was just another nice Bestseller….aye sold out to every language in earth.

****

The Bible was News. Every morning It was my Dove with tender new Olive leaf, every noon and night and dawn It became my Warrior, fighting for me, against my own mind.

It is more than Page and Info. More than medicine and prophecy of good. It is Breathing Messages from my raw naked God plunging past my external rib into an interior I saw…

because the time had come to look and see and know that I was more than flesh and blood, I had a thing in me that beat to the rhythm of a Life beyond our everyday pursuit of peace and joy.

It rinsed my insides out and tripped me on a Rollercoaster with demons and archangels till I knew that I knew what we know deep within our absolute unlying awareness: the fact that Lies are often the best pointers to the Truth!

Life had better be more than just survival and healings & successes of all our job interviews and processes, and aches. These very aches were my servants, they served well. If I were healed of every ill and lived in a lotus pond with zero needs… would I have bothered about anything besides instantly being made comfortable again? Here my little knots are a mosaic of an Intelligence too much for me to even pretend to know.

The Bible is my irreplaceable Guide, the Fingerprint that writes me into Its tale of love and hate and peace and war but how the greatest of these is Love …. not so I can get better shoes but that I could feel it in my bones to love even a little like Christ would when He sees another with a wounded spirit.

Often healing is not even an option, love an extravagance. Often the best we can do is forgive the unforgivable/ bless when cursed or choose to react with compassion/ acceptance…

nothing in the world teaches me that like the Cross in the Bible. Nothing else teaches me to reach down and wash another’s feet, oh receive a slap with compassion.

To this day, this Mega Page Turner, leaves me asking for more…

here I defeat bears and lions and goliath, here Daniels den is a landmark of praise; oh here a tomb is empty, its mine….here I too rise and walk thru walls of disbelief.

There are days I do not visit It: and those are the times I am deaf and dumb and blind.

………

Why the Bible is the Best Selling and most persecuted Book in the history of human existence.

Positively Shameless

Just got this beauty (Pl check details below) from my very talented friend Shilpa W., also performing;

Theatre Narrative, Social Drama
~childhood sexual abuse & aftermath
March 14th & 15th only.
Venue: SHOONYA,
BANGALORE
Details, below.

if you’re in Bangalore or planning to, do not miss it. (Description*).

My guess is, it’s going to be intense, tight scripted with merciless precision to details that must exclude kiddie viewership, though- it just might involve kiddie victim?

Ofcourse, that is the sickening brute act of abuse: it has zero respect for age, innocence or ‘shame’.

I love the Title, and what this can do to create awareness in a Decade that’s seen #MeToo, and some amount of shame like never before.

Ach. But Shameless makes for gut-wrenching reality that facilitates Change. Change in perspective, awareness, offensive defense….ugh, why does that last one smack of Dark Age suppression?

As I post this, I hear the nag of a chainsaw at another tree outside our home. Hmm.

What does an everyday Citizen do:

kick up fuss & dance, yes, must. Tiring though, and you might either run up against or crash a bull dozer besides! That perhaps is what a 2020 everyday Citizen is counting on.

I’m thinking on parallel lines here, of long-stacked child abuse, and other routes of suppression in homo-sapien existence that might take a whole few bodies of humans to redress.

You got to drag (generational?) skeletons out of closet, ignore stench, rid that closet of access to you forever, reduce it to wood ash: reap from it, having sown seeds of shame-stunning radical change effective from a back date you do not want to remember if you’re a ‘victim’ but,

one could choose to.

(Victim: Sheesh. Another ugh word. Say Survivor, say Winner: a more Advantaged human now, all for the experience that tried to take your teeth).

Shame is probably the most misrepresented word in the history of humanity. Shame is what makes us cover up, hide, fake it, smooth over, wear lipstick over bruise.

Shameless – that is a whole other kind of what we were made to be, in the face of de- humanizing factors, especially that, those.

I’m stoked. It’s time!

Way to go girls. 👇You must be seen.

Positively Shameless,
2 shows
March 14, 2020, 7 p.m.
March 15, 2020, 4 p.m.
Rs.250/-
BOOK YOUR TICKETS HERE

***Venue:** Shoonya – Centre for Art and Somatic

Open to adults and adolescents with parental supervision.
Now in its fourth iteration, Positively Shameless is a devised ensemble theatre performance based on aspects of childhood sexual abuse that endure into childhood. It interweaves personal narrative with social commentary to create a playful, dramatic act of resistance and revelation that challenges the shame and silence that often surrounds survivors. By foregrounding physical expression, the play acknowledges the site of violence, resistance and reclamation, to be the body. Positively Shameless was originally created in 2016 by seven women in Bangalore who continue to form the core group of this project. This theatre piece has since been performed across different parts of India and the United States. Positively Shameless has captured the attention of diverse audiences for its refreshing tone (critical yet hopeful), artistry and emotional complexity.
It will be performed in Shoonya Centre for Art and Somatic Practices, Bangalore on 14th and 15th February 2020, following which, it travels to Rotterdam to perform in the ICAF (International Community Arts Festival) and then NYU (New York University).

SHAME: Synonym: embarrassment, humiliation.

Paperboats

Provoked by a heartbreaking post I read today in another blog.

When Healing comes

No alarm bell, no burst of glory. It tiptoed in ‘neath my gate. It wouldn’t hold my hand, It couldn’t. I was cold cold cold, every leaf in my garden shrivelled, ashed; Ivy & dust layered the ground and walls of my address.

When Healing came It bled into me. It Crossed boundaries I had built. It broke Itself like Bread over my hunger and poured Itself out like Water over my drought. New metaphors crowd my space. This had been desert with no oasis. Now, this Healing-

growing me into things I do not want to recognize:

a Garden of Shadows where a Lone One prays. Prays as if for me. What’s this. He breaks on two planks where He hangs, I hate this like a personal wound. I’m screaming words with no decibel: He’s saying it for me. Two words, three- I will never forget. “IT IS FINISHED.” He said, smiling stars in His eyes as if we were in Paradise being made over again.

Wait,

wait. He takes my buried memoirs of habits of pain.

No, wait!

But I can’t have them back, He says. Healing takes it all away. I’m blinded by an emotion with no name, Its a Light falling careful in my blind eyes. It grabs my poison ivy with new strong Vine: It inhales me, slamming my dying dead inside, don’t ask how. I have no Theory, no Words wise or pretty. All I know, when Healing came to me I was dead blind, now I see:

I see Scars, Its Body broken. Healing has scars, you get this? I don’t and maybe never will, not till we go Face to Face past that proverbial Glass darkly in the way. Now I peer through Reason, Logic, Theories, Rule. Oneday when we have crossed our rules, we will see the host of things that see us now. Oneday we will break through gravity bound toes: on that day we will see what we question these days. Oh when Healing came It broke Its news gentle to me. It knew I’d be suspicious,afraid,disbelieving…

When Healing walked into me, It spoke things I believed I couldn’t know…..

that gain came in via loss, true I knew, but what else could a human fight for? We needed this. This War for Survival was our one socially acceptable behaviour; it united man and woman and child and nations and bazaars and gangsters and priests, it fed global talks and need. If I didn’t do Survival what tell aunty Maya I was doing ? Or Pastor Sahil. Or neighbour Bishhy. Or Karu Harben my brilliant corporate cousin. What tell Didi Grey my mentor..or art collaborators… that I didn’t care anymore how I’m being received;

who could I be, what of my ‘me‘?

When Healing came It talked into me – sacred syllables of the Father Son and Holy spirit, groans not uttered by the carnal 5 senses: we are heart and mind and spirit soul, beyond flesh and sensor. I had territory within that must heal first*, my Healer said, it began in the acres acres acres (deep in my core where we live or die, there we heal, there we host our virus, our sickle cells, our warrants of life, our predictions of peace. If we die there, how could we survive in the peripheries?) ..

Healing took me to an impossibly narrow dizzy path. When I began to heal- one tiny step at a time, It unleashed me to run my feet like a deer’s in cliff edge sheer mountain. Fear rose bitter gall in my throat and I killed it like a beast is killed with bare hands: something I’d tried an entire lifetime, now it happened with one rapid wish;

here was this desire to thank every mean thing that had ever come my way, hey yes those nasties I’d crumpled over? Them. They were my helpmate, they now proved my brick and mortar needed to build foundation of this impossible route. “Forgive. Go on higher,” The Healer pled with eyes of deathless Love, and the Light of that gaze scorched my last defense, over and over like with birth pangs. How could I have known this detail if I hadn’t needed healing ?

Why haven’t You been here earlier- how much went in wasteland of my nothing. My Healer replied as if I had spoken, He said,”You are more than all this. In these deserts more Gardens could grow, if you go. “

Say what, why? There’s more folk like me, why would I care, but now I did.

When Healing came to me It rained and Its Tear whetted my thirst for Its fact. I used to think with Healing I would be strong again to return to old strengths, I’d be a pillar of fortune, a wheel of Change. Oh look- see how nice healing is, but that is not Its way. It told me things I couldn’t know.

When Healing began I leaned my core on Its Strength. No more great burden of goodness to bear! I was still a torn leaf garden but with new shoot- as if I had wing, the Healer said,”Never mind your Self. Rise..”

When Healing came It did not give me wings, that’d have scared us all.

It is much more than we show and tell, it’s in the way grass grows o’er and o’er and wise men die and babies born will oneday grow to know more than you or I confess. When Healing can, It will come to you and the Light you see will be outside of our incapacities, then perhaps you too will say to another, “…how else could I have known…?*”

Inspired by our son(& little brother Joh) as he heals.

…

@innerdialects.

In my heart there are walls and rooms and doors

There’s keys and stairways, vents and switches- in this heart. Like it or not, there’s a cooking pot and stove, a freezer and corners. There’s levels,floors,ceiling,tile and wash. There are left overs and water; bathwater, sprinklers, showers,bucket,toothbrush,needles, spoons &knife and fork. And cushions and covers. Mats, floor mats, table mats, dinner ware for guests/everyday. There’s a welcome mat and a throwaway. There’s towels and sheets, carpet and garbage. Oh veg peels, bouquets, flower vase. Garden balcony,books,papers,papers,papers,wires,cables, photographs, memoirs,chairs,canvas,easel,cases,boxes, music,chatter,silences,markerpens, erasers,coughs,sighs,laughter,prayer,steps, dreams, vision,hope,faith,dusk,twilight,dawn grey blush bright, noon orange yellow gold sun, rays sifting,shifting in, rising waning moonlit dust/steam, answers,questions,healing,tears,fears, rejection,hearth,peace,

My heart has walls,entry,exit, skylight,dewfell roof,rainharvest water,pulse,rhythm,arteries of Breath:

She goes around the sun, she goes upside down, revolutions rotatary- she can take this, she was made to run with me, no roots,

I’ve not understood how deep the wealth of the human heart, how inscrutable a store

Whats its measure, its define,

what an insanely blessed owner am I.