I sit here forcing air through my nose into my lungs. Air in the middle of September is anticipatory. It is nethier the warm humid air of the summer, air that hugs you like a second skin, a thin sheen of sweat. It's nethier the ice cold air of the winter, air that tingles the bones before the extermities detach from the body and float off into space, just as if the gravity switch has been turned off. Ofcourse they really don't, it just feels that way. Numb. But now this is the air of in betweens. The air of passing, of waiting. Waiting for what? I don't know. Just breathing this makes me restless. Or is it the other way around?

Thoughts rise to the surface like a shoal of flying fish. Thousands and thousands of thoughts. The air about the sea is filled with fish, sun glinting on their fins. They are performing a ballet, Tchaikovsky's Nut Cracker Redux. Everything stills to watch this fantastic sight: college students, bums, dogs, birds roosting in the trees. I wave my arms in the air, I try to mimic their sorrow, I cry and I write. I am strange sight sitting here and writing, in this place that has already sunk into semi darkness. Places, where I think I have already been put in your neat ordered world, are already dark. Open the trash can, stuff me in, close the lid. End of story.

I lift my eyes to the sky, everything seems blurry. Is it because of these glasses that require replacing or is it because of the thick track of tears that have coated the glassy surface. Why can't my memories be indistinct like those distant twinkiling neon signs? Their sharpness is a weapon that hurts me repeatedly.

I sit at this cubist waterfall. Clean angular lines delinate the shape of the falling water. There is an order to my sorrow too. I read that it has to with body rythms. Depression is easier to contract when the body is in a low. I stare at the thin sheet of water and the foam at the bottom. I pass my hands over the thin sheets of water, again and again. It undulates like another skin under mine. Is water male or female? Chinese say it is female and all Indian rivers except one, are women. Goddesses.

People are now coming out of the library. Everything has a closing time. Library, cinemas, bars, love and even wounds. I wait for the closing time of these gashes that mark me. It's closing time and the sky is full of city glare. I ache for the endlessness of the darkness, darkness of a forested sky and the immensity of stars, too many to count. I ache for you in as many ways. But I remind myself of the wooden fires. Dust to dust ashes to ashes. Once strangers going back into places of not knowing anymore.

Mountains raise in my thoughts. Hiamalya, the abode of snows, that white translucent crystal that shape Kailas. The home of the Lord Shiva after whom I have been named. Maybe there is a logic in that naming,given the way life self destructs around me. Shiva is the destoryer in the trinity of gods.I suddenly ache to see the Himalaya if only on paper. I run up the stairs, get hold of a book and pull open a plate. I see Kanchenjunga, Five Mangnificent Snow Treasures. This photo had been shot from Darjeeling, the Land of the Tunderbolt. I had been there a few years ago. I have been in and out of many places since then. Five women are standing in a circle in the squre below, I think they are dancing. Those five peak on the other hand were still. The first morning I was there clouds were crashing against the moutain in useless futility, crying big fat drops of rain. They didn't know the nature of cold rock. No it was me who didn't, I must stop attributing my ignorance to fluffly clouds.

We had a talk. I don't remember what we said to one another. I must have said, " I love you". I was laughed at, at my stupidity, at my smallness, at things I lack. I remember those mocking white teeth. Too many lovers have been in and out of that place I was standing at. A few jumped from the cliffs and died, falling thousands of feet. This is what Tom Petty sings in Free Falling. Blood vessels burst in my eyes, the higher one climbs the one unbalanced on becomes, air thins and pain becomes a constant companion. All this striving, all this madness for a single moment of clarity.

I fell off the You mountain before I got there. I lay prostate on broken bones, eyes wide open to the sky in old recognition. Water splashes on my face. It's late and I must go now.

Rainy day outside, a good day to sit around and talk or read a book or listen to music. I think all days can be good only if we can discover the rythms that play out with changing weather. Nature follows that pattern, I am reminded of this fact I see chipmunks gathering nuts for the winter and spend that hibernating.

We have grown so distant and seperated from these that we have lost our sense of balance. We do everything in excess: over work, over consume and over dose. And with such growing distance from what is truely good and truely enduring, I think we even forget what is good. This seperation from nature I think has something to do with seperation from our own stillness.

Once not too long ago, I was on a high moutain lake, with a woman. The stillness of the blue water, with tree tops reflected in it and the sun striking the lake angularly, everything seemed to have stopped, a frozen crystal of time. Even though all the roads between us are now boarded up, such memories offer me a measure of peace, instead of the usual unease or pain. It's as if the whole universe once in a while conspires to give us certain moments that approach infinities, only few but neverthless precious.

And when I pass my fingers gently over all such old memories that seem to be frozen within me, I see that in each of those moments I was alinged with the breathing of nature. I only wish for a few more of such visions, such fantastic dreamscapes in all the days: rainy, sunny and snowy that I still have to walk in and out of.

Walking home to lunch I become aware that the breeze that is blowing still has the morning's chill. Down south Fall creeps upon us, we usually don't see the fiery displays of reds, yellows and golds that foilage puts on show in the northern states. So to sense the season's chage one has to be more aware, one has to read the signs. Here leaves are dropping in ones and twos, ivy is becoming brown at the edges, the last blooms of the season are on the rose bushes that form the fence of a certain house on the street I walk up and down twice a day.

I took a moment to watch fish, red in color, swimming in circles around the pool in the front yard of the same house. Elsewhere a terracota Buddha, baked clay that is now almost the color of wood, sits under a magnolia tree, in a meditative posture,a smile of bliss on his face. My feet impercetiably stop for a moment to gaze at him. The ground beneath my feet is covered with pine needles and pine cones. A small bird flits from tree to tree. Up ahead beyond the chain link fences of an abandoned gas station hundreds of minatures suns, yellow wild flowers, dance a tango with the big sun sailing by in the blue noon day sky.

And I move away in ever widening circles of stillness, travelling from the inner shell to the outer bodies of a Russian doll set, self similar dolls contained within each bigger body.