Still Sundays

July 31st.

Misunderstood dreams shape-shift return to sleep in cities like Prague. Happy Birthday to my mother. Stillness is some Doppler effect.

It’s July 31^st and it is my mother’s birthday.

I read this year’s July came with an extra offering: one more Sunday. I also learned that this will not happen again for some 800 or so years. I checked the facts on this. Such a combination occurs far more often than every 800 years. The last occurrence was in July 2005. The next one will be in July 2016. It might as well be accurate though. Yesterday feels like years ago.

Who keeps track of Sundays besides those who are harvesters of Stillness? No moment seems to return the same, even a déjà vu moment says, “No. Please consider me a new memory.”

This final Sunday does indeed feel packed with some commanding stillness. Just five? I want thirty Sundays every month. What will you do with all that stillness, self? Tiptoe reach the sky for a kiss all the way from earth.

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Prague is another celestial city to be placed in my dream menagerie, alongside, New York City, Lahore, Durban…  I want to write about Prague now. I want to never write about Prague. Just like I never write about Lahore. I want Prague to be mine only, like some miracle love, like a dream. I don’t know if cities like Prague possess us or we want to possess them? Who is reaching for whom to be understood?

It’s my mother’s birthday and I miss her. I know she too likes Prague. I recall we weren’t even supposed to come here last year. It was just on our way to Vienna. This was never the plan. I remember that night in November last year when we were here together and I awoke to some dangling dream that pierced my chest. Sometimes 3:00 a.m. feels darker than any November sky.  She told me dreams are only to be understood or set free. Poof! I felt more like a child that night than I had in a long time although I am often silly around her. Where do those dreams that we don’t understand go? I think they shape-shift return. They sleep in cities like Prague and Lahore.

I still don’t know why all the lamps of synchronicity lit up to direct my way back to Prague. Is this what Kafka meant by “claws of Prague”: you don’t know why you find yourself in the same dream again and again? This city played a role in the Thirty Years’ War, and in 20th-century history, during both World Wars and the post-war Communist era. Revolt after revolt. The city is embodiment of human karma and all who stay here long enough will eventually hear stories, one’s own and others.

As soon as I landed here four weeks ago I was already asking any and every one: do you too have strange dreams in Prague? Some people just stared at me as if I had asked them for the password to their email accounts and others replied—too quickly—I don’t remember my dreams, and others made up stories.

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Three weeks of my persistent scrounging for scraps as answers and finally others, slowly, opened up (or rather actually started paying attention to themselves). They too have had dreams here like they can’t recall ever having prior to being in Prague. This one young guy dreamt that some militia came after him in the trams. This one woman thought her room had been transported into another house and when she looked out the window she couldn’t leave. Most people in the program shared they are either not sleeping at all or sleeping more than usual. Others just got very drunk and often, and not being conscious enough couldn’t remember anything.

Unlike my beloved Wormy Apple, New York City, Prague is a city that sleeps. Yes, a city that sleeps in dreams.

I know I nap as part of my daily routine unless I absolutely can’t. Even when I had a 9-to-5 job, during lunch I would go find a park outside the courthouse and shut my eyes for the sun. My colleague from those days (now friend) is proof of my “must-have-15-minutes-of-shuteye”. Yes, just like that, in my black suit and heels, just for a little bit…

Prague took this to another level. I was soon notorious for sleeping in parks! I didn’t realize the extent until someone pointed that I have slept in every other park. I know this is false for I can see the green spaces on the map, the parks, I haven’t been…

Some days I would wake up frustrated that I was not writing enough. But my body would win every time. I think I am going to start writing on another speed as soon as I leave Prague. That’s what happened when I returned from Prague back to New York City in November last year.

I have absorbed much too much from this soil, something has to grow.

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When others ask me what I will remember about Prague I don’t know if they can relate…

I was sad to learn last night from two fellow writers that at least three different people in the program were mugged and had money or electronics stolen during their stay here.

I will remember during the very first week in Prague I met a pickpocket, an old man with no teeth, and he showed me how to use a switchblade knife. I tried to tell him he was a magician given he was so swift. I made a horrible drawing of a rabbit and a hat and a man given I didn’t know the word for magician in Czech (or any other word except “thanks”!). He told me to go to this one store where I could buy my own switchblade knife. I did. I am not as good as him. I think mine is poorer quality compared to his. I don’t foresee occasion to use it, here or ever, except for slicing apples.

I speak with the Czech without speaking a word of Czech. I don’t get lost. I nap in parks without fear. I go around ordering double shots of milk in bars in Prague (one day a surprise urge from nowhere found itself in my bones  craving milk! My body is not that welcoming of dairy products, yet here I might as well have been raised on a farm).

Body you are some temple, indeed. For the ancient Egyptians, the word pr could refer not only to a house, but also to a sacred structure since it was believed that the gods resided in houses. The Mysterious Energy is a constant visitor if you pay attention to your home.

I will remember this man I met last week in a park who writes poetry. His name is Joseph Muzikar and he is 60 years old. I told him, “I think you are lying to me about your age because you want me to think you are younger.” He replied that I was a funny girl. I told him he was 70 not because he looked old but I  felt he was older than 60 years. I don’t know why I left my nap spot after I woke up to see if he was drawing something nor do I know how he was in my field of vision given the angle I was facing when I sat up. He wasn’t drawing; he was writing. A poem. He told me I could sit next to him. I did. This old man spoke English somehow. He had been to Egypt and that’s where he had learned English, he said. I asked him if he would be here the next day and he said he would. And there he was. The second day he told me the difference between miracles and magic. He said miracles could never be explained whether you believe in a God or not. Magic, good or bad, you always have a choice to believe. “Magic has a process. Miracles don’t.”

I will remember walking on a not so crowded street one day when I passed by a laborer whose skin smelled of a hard week’s sweat. His skin might as well had another layer of skin, that’s how many layers of sweat he had. Another might refer to his saltyearth smell as ‘stench’ I suppose. The cobblestone streets, the noisy cars going through small alleys, surrounded by old eyes that look without seeing because they have just seen enough, I felt I was in Lahore near Qila Gujar Singh when I smelt his sweat.

I have resisted writing much about Prague the entire time I have been here. I have not been able to work as fast on my novel as I had hoped. And after walking through today’s portal of Stillness I feel somehow that is just how it was supposed to be even if I don’t understand it right now. That Prague is somehow connected to everything I have ever written. And I will be back because it is some dream I am in.

I can relate to other people’s experiences but they often can’t relate to mine. I can’t hide or get lost even if tried.

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I wouldn’t be in Prague if it wasn’t for my mother.

Also, if it wasn’t for my mother’s love I would feel insane. What power: a mother’s love! Unfortunately most mothers use that very knowledge to ensure their children can never go too far from them. Literally and figuratively. Not my mother.

I am hesitant to tell people that I talk to my mother every day. Most people who talk to their mother every day do so because they have to or they are really dependent on their mothers or their mothers are really intrusive or their mothers are really dependent on them. And even if they are not, the relationship hinders friendships with others one’s own age or relationships with significant others. Not my mother. I know I am more than lucky. I used to feel bad that everyone didn’t have a mother like mine. Then Marianne Elliot told me once that one shouldn’t feel bad for having a mother like all should have. It’s like having two eyes—we all are supposed to be born with two eyes from which we can see.

Mama says that anyone can be a mother. Even a man. Even without children. Most people are so fixated on what is missing from a particular relationship (with a mother or any other relationship) that they don’t invite the space for another to step in that role.

People often ask me if my mother is an artist. They want to know if she can paint, draw, write, create digital collages and take photographs.

Yes. My mother paints with unconditional love that doesn’t enable our weaknesses but empowers being better people every day. She can draw lines where other women cave in. She writes wisdom into every action. She understands that the digital world is energy too and demands more than clicks to actually create something. She takes the photos of our experiences and is not afraid to process them in the dark room to show us there is no bad experience as long as we are in the now.

So, yes, my mother is a very real artist. Her art is living and inspiring. The only art that really matters in the end, the only art from which comes any other product that lasts in time.

After being surrounded by so many artists and writers these four weeks I can say this because of my mother: I don’t care how the world remembers me as a writer, I know what kind of a human being I want to be known as.

I state the following without any pressure: if I can be half as glorious a woman, half as supportive and understanding a partner to my significant other, half as nurturing to children without wanting to possess them, half as good a human being as my mother, I would have accomplished much in this lifetime.

I am grateful for my mother for having faith in me when I couldn’t even spell faith. When I curse the Universe for being some Trickster she tells me to speak in the only language God/Universe can hear, that of silence where I can hear myself.

I am grateful to my mother for reminding me that yes, it is true that women are each other’s worst enemy for they are damned to seek desperate attention from men who will never value them because they don’t value themselves. “But also never forget that a woman who truly understands what being a woman means will support another woman only like a woman can.”

Happy Birthday, Mama. You are an amazing friend and mother to so many. Thank you for giving birth to so many ideas to so many by just being yourself. That is some art, indeed.

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Walking around Prague, Stillness is some Doppler effect.

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