Early morning, on the fourth day towards acquiring a new habit of waking up with the yet unrisen sun. A mist hangs like a cloak over the semi dark woods. They are mysterious and simple arrayed like greens in a coloring book, parts of which have been colored too much: those edges tinged with black.

A sound of flowing water, dishes being washed at the tap. If that old Zen story of how enlightenment came and didn’t change drawing water and chopping wood is true, then perhaps there is enlightenment in washing dishes on early mornings. A moth is banging its head against the window. Its legs are longer than its wings. It must be this bright table lamp that it wants to approach. Its restlessness reminds me of my own groping towards light.

Dark shapes, wings, begin to move across the tree tops. Crows I say to myself. And slowly one of the clearings in the woods is turning into jade. These woods aren’t old as old woods go, but they appear timeless, unchanged and unchanging. Yet even as I write, new life is springing from the tree branches and from the earth.

If there is one good thing about this country, it’s the possibility to live close to such wild beauty. And I hope we have enough sense to preserve it. A bird alights on a branch of the tree closest to me. I try to see what it is. In the twin circles of my binoculars it is indistinguishable from the surrounding semi dark. Then it takes off and flies across the lighted patch of sky, a crow. It joins the community of crows hopping on the ground and begins to eat bread crumbs strewn there.

“Give us this day our daily bread”, I can’t but remember this prayerful line anytime I think of or encounter bread. It has the beauty of a simple well crafted thing. And that is what makes it holy, holy sharing the same root as whole. It’s a complete prayer; it says everything in just enough words. “Give us this day our daily bread”, I repeat it often to remind me of now-ness of this life and not to ask for anything more than bread: not a palace, or unlimited wealth or a BMW. These can’t be eaten; these can’t satisfy the hunger of the human soul. Only that portion of God given daily bread can.

More light now, yet not enough to turn off the table lamp. I think this is a sufficient metaphor to think about love, both human and divine. I imagine divine love as this huge dome of endless light at the end of a labyrinth-ous cave that can be and has to be approached prayerfully in this lifetime. Personal love, that we give and get, meanwhile is the lantern illumining the path as we make that journey towards this bright mouth of the cave. I would like to think of all this movement as a swarm of fireflies who are nudging each other along, even as sometimes some go back, sometimes some hit the walls, but yet slowly and surely everyone of them is approaching this great potency, to merge into this great beautiful light.

And when I think of this, I realize even more how prayer and meditation form the necessary compass that points us to the true poles of our lives. So to repeat what Alice Walker wrote, as I was reading a little while earlier, “Thank you Moon, Thank you Sun, Thank you Night, Thank you Day, Thank you Everything!

I am walking down the old corridors again, All around me I hear opening and shutting doors Till I come to B 323 and sit on my old bed. So many dreams I dreamt here, the days past echo With laughter, so much mad laughter. What jokes Did we tell, that we are still crying after all these years?

Below that dorm room, I run across the yard, Mud between my naked toes, it raining and all around me The yells of soccer players I don’t see. In the distance Train whistles, as the clacking wheels bear me away. On the steel road, stations are arriving and departing around each curve, so many that it seems as if I am traveling round and round in a circle, going over the same old ground.

Through the corner of my eye, if I want I can still those names, But it’s easier this way, to keep on going, to keep going away!

I am sitting here on a spring morning, the smell of wet grass still holding somewhere in the memory and listening to what happen to be love songs, this time from Kyrgyzstan. Again another thread that can be pulled out from any other culture or context, perhaps as we were reflecting in the poetry class the other day there are only two great themes in life, love and death. Even though I didn’t think about it before what is important is we didn’t say life and death. I think this comes from recognition that life without love is some kind of death anyway. Yet paradoxically we find ourselves quite far from living in love these days. And I think I want to talk about a few thoughts I have been having on this subject. I am by no means an expert on what I have been thinking about except that I am a human being, for which I claim no credit. Perhaps being an “expert”, with all due respect to the experts, in a sense is dangerous anyway. The parable of the expert who went to the master for wisdom comes to my mind. The master kept pouring tea long after it had filled the cup and began to overflow, metaphor of how a mind full of knowledge can’t arrive at wisdom.

The first point that requires some explanation is the title. I decided to call it that because I seem to notice that most people seem to go around searching for “true” love or wanting “true” love. And usually they like to qualify this with some kind of a turn of phrase, usually, “forever”. And paradoxically go on to act in ways that negates this deeply held wish. Again I am at fault myself, for drawing lines on the sand. It doesn’t require much effort or even much thought to do so, so this means that the first impediment to arrive at that state that we wish for is unwillingness to spend any effort. Just imagine how difficult it must have been to those distant ancestors who painted the caves at Lascuax, France. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing; maybe it was just their way of applying wallpaper to what were obviously bare and un colorful walls. But I would like to think that they wanted to say something about themselves, something lasting, something set on rock. So this means that there is a qualitative difference between the two styles of drawing lines and I think the quality that is the critical difference is a caring attitude. I wanted to say skill but any skill can be learnt to a reasonable level if that care is present.

The words that count are those that have to come from experience. And even then they are the experience per se, that stands separate, different. Words are the efflorescence of experience. I discovered a few such words today in the form of a chapter heading in a book:

Don’t chose your wife at a dance But on the field among the harvesters.

I wish I could have read these words before and perhaps even understood their deep meaning. It would have saved me not some grief. However on the contrary, without this grief I wouldn’t have perhaps understood them as I understand them now. I would like to spend some time talking about these two sentences. First it’s obvious that whomsoever had written those words down, hailed from the country, the village and was thus familiar with the work of harvesting: the acts of preparing the soil, clearing the weeds, watering the soil and sowing the seed. All of this involve much hard work for no immediate result, the result demands terrible patience and are again dependent on chance to arrive to that point, the harvest might never happen, locusts might eat the crop, floods may wash them away. Besides the work in itself tends to be muddy, even tending to the term unrefined.

I imagine an old man or for that matter an old woman sitting on the porch, hands gnarled and brown from decades of dancing with the soil, speaking those words. I imagine they have known their share of dancing too.