changing and unchanging things

This evening, between the aleatoric raindrops, we scootered to the Musée Marmottan for a nocturne musicale - a musical evening - to celebrate women painters at the time of Proust. Amid the many Monets downstairs, we listened to the trinity of vocalists singing Fauré against the rain outside.

The museum is near La Muette, a neighborhood so named because of the hunting lodge where King Henry IV would bring his falcons every year to molt, muer, to shed their feathers. Listening to the unintentional duet of music and weather, I wondered what the opposite of molting would be. Doctors tell us that our bodies change every seven years and physicists say that atomic particles are moving at the speed of three billion something per second. But the heart, on the contrary, retains and accumulates everything, layer upon layer growing around everything it remembers - as in the creation of a pearl, when a mollusk grows successive and overlapping layers of nacre around a foreign object which has transformed its soft tissue.

My heart grew an annual ring, another layer of love last night. Post concert and post rain, we picniced at the Pont des Arts, in the same spot where my past successive Parisian years celebrated enormous changes.

Happy Anniversary, GL

itinerant buddhist: part one

lucky lotus, brooklyn
I have been thinking a lot about pilgrimages lately - of leaving home for a place that is sacred. In the ceremonial departure, there is the recognition that the holy is not to be found here - but only in the movement outwards can it be captured. It is through motion, through the effort carved out of distance, that the olive branch from Gethsemane, the water from the Jordan, can be brought back home.

Although I have always firmly maintained that geography is irrelevant, that location has nothing to do with spiritual transformation, I have spent the past few weeks in travel - across to the New World (my old home) and in the Old Country (my new home). These crossings of continents have begun to weave together disparate parts of myself. The travels have been motivated by a desire to spend as much time as possible in Lama Marut's presence, a Sanskrit scholar and Buddhist teacher - in Brooklyn, then Paris and finally in Munich.

In Brooklyn, my initiatory Lama moment - with MH, I had my first flush of feeling that right now is enough - no grasping, but let this moment last forever.

Farewell

a poem Agha Shahid Ali

At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
when you left even the stones were buried:
the defenceless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,
who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
They make a desolation and call it peace.
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.
Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
winter- its crushed fennel.
We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
centuries later in this country
I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms
Children run out with windows in their arms.
You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
have happened in the world?

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world

There is no Frigate like a Book (1286)

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

Emily Dickinson

Emily says that "There is No Frigate Like a Book" but still...

"Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know."
–Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, desert explorer, Morocco expatriate (read while on the Paris métro, not going to the desert)

take nothing but pictures
leave nothing but footprints
kill nothing but time
(sign seen at the Northeast Lighthouse in Trinidad, where the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea meet)

we travel

in order to find the tangible signs of beauty. if they are not reflections of what we thought, we can hopefully learn how to feel.