I am pausing from wrestling with mathematical expressions – the sum of the job I have to do to keep my work afloat. However I am also listening to John McLaughlin jam his mofo electric guitar with Zakir Hussian’s tabla, The sound rises as a pot rises out of red clay. See the hands pull on the frets, see the hand pull and tease that pot’s neck. It is becoming longer and longer, you hold you breath knowing that it might just break and collapse on itself, but no it doesn’t. It goes on, it is stretched, stretching your skin too in the process. What a miracle is this! You become hollow, a drum, a dhol, a marimba. The thwack of your palm trying to keep the beat on the wood of the table. Tahk tahk din din, your blood beats as it runs up and down the body. It screams, it is orgasmic, it is annihilation, it is OM, it is the fucking Big Bang. It is only a simpleton full of hunger and desire but it is surely better that your brain that thinks and thinks, and that consequently is trapped in itself.

You know some tricks to escape it and one is this what you are now doing, beating the keys as you see the letters run off at the other end, sewage, pure nonsense, kindling for fires. Still this is the vitamin C you need, you don’t care if for someone else finds what is produced, to be caviar or clay. Yet sometimes you shouldn’t try to explain yourself, even to yourself. Look at this flower, this Japanese magnolia, when you plucked it last evening, it was a closed fist, as soft and secretive as a breast And in a night it has begun unfurling into a vertical galaxy of beauty, a ear holding an echo of some sound that is so pure that it requires one to invent an language to write about it. But will the flower care to explain itself? No, never! All it knows is to open itself to the sun, to the air and then rot. How different are you? Not very different, the same five elements compose you, yet how little like this flower you unravel!

Why this difference? The lack of steadiness of purpose, on not allowing the inner drum beat rise to the surface in all these mad races you run to and fro? All this ugliness to make some one like you because you don’t want to hear what you should hear the most clearly? Just stop. Become a violin, become the wood of the violin, be the sea, be a rock, be the seasons, be the cardinals that greet you every morning, be this joy, be these tears that are falling in this moment, be the very breath whose vibration is what all music is, just be.