Familiarity

It wasn’t the sound of a child’s scream that sent me running from my bathroom to the balcony, that’s as common as the Indian mourning retching, it was the yells of a man.  The intensity, the ferociousness and the magnitude of his words were pierced intermittently with the cries of a child, mind you, but his voice overtook the sounds that filled the morning air.  I didn’t hear the morning caws of the crows, I didn’t hear the ocean, all I heard was his yelling.  Looking to my left, I peered over to see my next-door neighbor come out her cottage, a similar place where we had just shared, just moments before, a brief “good morning,” our first ever since she and her boyfriend arrived days ago.  This is the first morning I’ve seen in days as I emerge from a bout of the typical India induced food poisoning.  Now, instead of a friendly gesture we look at each other in disbelief and worry, giving each other the “I don’t know what the fuck is going on” shoulder shrug w/ a furrow between our brows and a mutual silent fear to add any more noise to the ruckus in the place below us.  The door to the room is wide open and I see the lower calves and feet of a man but no more.  I glace to the stairwell approaching the entryways and the guest house cleaning boy is waiting, hidden behind the corner, afraid to continue his morning duties because he has to pass through the air of their commotion.  A few people gather on the balconies of the adjacent building to see what is happening.  A concerned looking aged woman cranes her neck in attempts to steal my perspective and then walks to the opposite end to see if there is anything she can see from the balcony that belongs to the bellows.  She returns, glances at me as if there is nothing to report and I return the same.

Soon after a little girl scuttles out of the room with that familiar little leg shuffle with her mother behind, clasping her had, who is remaining very quiet.  She speaks a few words to the daughter but not many as she rinses out dirty dish containers over the railing into the communal garbage dump.  The mother goes back inside and the little girl, who can’t be more than 6 or 7 years old still cries.  I check on my neighbor and her eyes are fixed on the scene, standing with her hands clasped against the railing like she’s waiting for something, maybe waiting to see the same thing I am, waiting to see what the hell a grown man that yells at such decibels looks like.  The mini crowd of a few still gathers on the neighboring balconies, not with a voyeuristic eye but one of helpless interruption.  What can you do when you don’t understand the language penetrating every bit of air around you but can feel down to your marrow the intention?  A few moments later I see the same masculine feet and legs but only for a moment as the mother emerges from the door with the fixings to go to the beach.  As she gathers her daughter and slips on her shoes I look at my neighbor again, her eyes transfixed, and I look back as the door closes behind the two ladies and hear the “clunk” of the door lock behind them. 

 

My blood courses with a long forgotten sensation as I stare at the closed door and the faceless man behind it.  My neighbor made her way to the corner of the balcony and sits in the lounge chair, eyes fixated at the door, half in focus, half in a daze, her face painted with sorrow, anguish, remembrance and a sense of pained familiarity.  I sit down and wait to see if this man is like my dad, who I haven’t talked to in over 2 years or seen in 14, not due to my lack of trying, to see if he’ll sit and simmer in his own festering darkness or if he’ll emerge and show his face.  Time passes and the door doesn’t open, much like the look on the face of my neighbor doesn’t change.  She and I may be strangers but in this moment, we have a familiarity that goes back deeper than we’d care to remember and all we’ve ever said to each other is, “good morning.”

Moments later, she leaves.  We never even exchanged names.

Childlike

I’m reading Tenzin Palmo’s book Reflections on a Mountain Lake, which I HIGHLY recommend for everyone.  You don’t have to be Buddhist to appreciate this stuff… I certainly enjoy the teachings and I don’t prescribe to any religion.  She spoke in one chapter about having a “childlike mind” and not in the sense of being naïve or weak and fragile but in experiencing the wonder that is life, in each moment, like a small child does and that we seem to do less of as we age.  Someone asked her in the Q&A, “is that why life gets shorter as we get older?”  Her response:

“Yes, because we become more and more robotic.  When we are small children, everything is so fascinating that life seems to go on forever.  Every day is huge, because there are so many fascinating things happening and we are so interested.  So childhood seems like a very long period.  But as we become dulled, as our minds get less and less curious, as we go onto automatic pilot more and more in our relationships, in our social life, in our work, even in our intimate relationships, we become increasingly somnambulant.  Therefore life loses its vivacity and seems shorter… When I became a Buddhist at the age of 18, my life turned around.  My whole way of thinking was being reevaluated.  It was an intense period.  When I look back, it was an enormous period.  I think, oh yes, the time when I was a Theravadin, it lasted years and years and then eventually I came to Mahayana.  In fact, it was just a few months.  But because it was such an intense time and so many things were happening inwardly, the time stretched out.  But when nothing much is happening, it’s the same job, the same relationships, the same this, the same that, we become more and more conditioned in our responses, and time seems to get shorter and shorter.  That is very sad, isn’t it?  Because actually, it is the same time.  It seems to speed up.  This is an indication of how we are becoming more and more robotic in our responses.  In a way it is a warning sign for us to wake up and reestablish that original childlike curiosity and fresh quality of mind.”

There is something really wonderful about Instagram, well many wonderful somethings.  It provides an ability to share your artistic vision with like minded people, it’s a place to build community, it’s a place to find or create inspiration, it’s a place that allows you to see the world through the eyes of others, immediately.  What Instagram has really done for me though is allowed me to see my own world differently, to strip away my habits and reveal my “childlike mind.”  The reason I started using it was so I could have a way to do a quick photo journal, do something immediate, real time, for those of my friends, who cared to see, and for myself.  I wanted to be able to look a back and scroll through a reel that was my own life timeline in a bunch of pictures.  It’s done an incredible job of doing just that.

Since I started using it I’ve felt more compelled to make sure I take at least a few interesting pictures a day so I have something to post and in March/April when Instagram launched for Android, I was already 3 months deep into my time in Arambol.  I thought I had seen everything I wanted to see, done everything I wanted to do, talked to everyone I wanted to talk to but now, I had this new toy to play with and I wanted to use it but what the fuck was I going to do, take pictures of the things I’ve already taken pictures of just so I could post them?  I could’ve done that, but I didn’t.  What it jump started was a desire to walk the streets, back dirt roads and sketchy looking paths with fresh eyes, like I had never seen them.  I kept my ears open for all the sounds I heard, my eyes for all the sights, my nose for all the smells, sometimes comparing them to my past experiences but really trying to just be with whatever was there right then.  I wanted to find beauty where I had already found beauty but also where I hadn’t.  Instead of zooming down the street to get to the Rice Bowl for dinner, I walked slowly, stopped to look up, to the left, to the right, over ridges.  I smiled as I saw a rooster hoppin around checking out a garbage fire and then darting off between scooters and taxis, something I may have typically missed because I “just wanted to GET THERE!”

I have found that I’m completely fascinated with faces, daily life and the landscapes of India and while I was in Australia and Amsterdam, I loved the architecture (more so Amsterdam), the cars, the smaller details like door handles, entry doors (well actually, that’s my fascination EVERYWHERE except the US… hey carbon copy home depot mass produced BLAH!), train tracks, places I was standing, mail boxes and bicycles.  

The easiest place it’s been for me to take pictures like a crazy beast was in Kashmir because I was there for such a short time and EVERYTHING was new!  I was like a little kid who had just stepped in sand and rubbed the sun out of my eyes to see this vast ocean for the first time.  It was incredible!  I loved it!  Everytime I turned my head I just whispered quietly to myself “wooaaaah” and my senses seemed overwhelmed and I couldn’t ingest enough of my surroundings.   It was the same type of experience I had hiking to Triund for the first time.  Mark, my next door buddy, said, “oooh, that’s only like a 2-3hour hike, you’ll be back by early afternoon.”  Bullshit!! My mouth was on the ground the entire time looking around in awe, wondering when the fairies were going to fly from the trees and float around with me up the mountain… it was THAT beautiful!  I stopped for chai and talked to the owner of the shop for about half an hour.  I stopped to sit on big flat rocks on the cliff to nibble on the PBJ’s Lama had made for me before I left and I watched the fog roll in and out of the steep, massive boulder, tree filled mountain side.  I stopped when I saw a new kind of vegetation, just to observe it.  It took me 4 ½ hours to get to the top and I sat on a rock at the top for an hour and a half watching the fog roll around some more, trying to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond it.  I was all *SNAP SNAP SNAP* the entire time!  When I was done for the day, I practically ran down the hill, I couldn’t get home fast enough.  I didn’t see anything, I didn’t stop, I just WANTED TO GET THERE, I had seen all this just hours before.

I’ve taken a portion of that path a few times since and it’s always taken me half the time to get up, because “oh I’ve seen this… I just wanna GET THERE!”  It’s the same thing that happened with the walking path from Dharamkot to McLeod… instead of enjoying the walk I found myself timing how fast I could reach the bottom.  Why?  For what?  Is something no longer beautiful and worth slowing down to take in once we’ve already seen it?  It’s the “same ole same ole” so why enjoy it as much all subsequent times as I did the first? 

Once I get into a habit of doing something, or being somewhere, once I think all has been absorbed, I just go through the routine, the motions and the process is no longer as enjoyable, the destination is all that matters.  It’s not like that all the time but sometimes, to often times, it is.  Having this camera with me all the time, and the intention to capture what my life looks like, has forced me to slow down, stop and look around and I’m absolutely amazed at all the things I see, either for the first time or I see differently than I have in the past.  It used to take me only 11 minutes to get from my door to McLeod Ganj… now, I have no idea how long it takes but I usually have to send Mark a message that says, “got distracted, going to be a few minutes late.”  You know what, I’m not 30 minutes late, I’m maybe 5 or 10 minutes late but the joy I had walking down the hill, on the same path I’ve walked countless times, was really enjoyable.  I could actually feel the mist of the thick fog on my face, smell the fresh water coming from one of the leaking water pipes (not a poo pipe, THANK GOD), glimpse a monkey quietly chillin on a branch, munching on a banana and I don’t slip on any of the slippery parts!  I’m totally aware of everything going on around me, I’m immersed in it, not trying to shoot my body through it as quickly as possible.  It wasn’t just something I HAD to do to get to where I was going, it’s something I wanted to do and enjoyed it while I was doing it.  Using my camera as a catalyst for walking everywhere, doing everything, almost like I’ve never done it before, has been such a beautiful experience. 

Life isn’t about always picking a new destination, often times, we can’t, nor is it about always picking a different path, because those can be limited, it’s about experiencing the same path, the same destination, as if you’ve never experienced it before.  I want to go up to Triund again, when the rains have simmered a bit, and I don’t want to improve my time getting to the top, I want to take my sweet ass time and enjoy every step on that path I take!   Is all this easier said than done?  Probably, well, actually, yes… but that doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying…

Stop to smell the roses... again… ;)

Xxxox

Dirty

p.s. Instagram and a camera did it for me but I’m sure there are countless way anyone can think of help look at, what they think is their mundane life, with a new surge of curiosity… but if you want, you can steal my method J