Still Sundays

September 4th.

Spirituality is a nose everyone has. Thich Nhat Hanh on art. Words are a bow and an arrow. Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

From what I can recall: earlier this week…

Thursday: surrender should not come at the expense of exploding…what good is any practice if you are trying to hold it together as if life is some performance…emotions should be like pop-tarts: cold, warm, hot, toasted, and done. Would anyone reading this in Prague or Lahore know about pop-tarts? Of course they will! There is google! Why am I not thankful then?

Wednesday: Maybe this is why we have weeks made up of days, call them by whatever name, so as to track the shift of energy that happens…I mean seasons exist regardless if we call them Spring or Fall…Why can’t I write as if it is Sunday every day? Where is this discipline even if I am not doing anything else during the week? Who invented the clock because we all know time is something we made up. What has the clock offered us to measure?  Just like paper money although value was there before and actually meant something… I demand a still Wednesday!

Monday: Where’s fiction? I haven’t written any like I did the entire year last year, every Tuesday.

Tuesday: You are living, which means you are collecting fiction.

Friday: I used to write to understand and be understood. This has been my “author’s statement” since 2009.  Now I understand and no longer desire to be understood. I need a new statement.

Saturday: Anything I could have possibly wanted to expand upon from the entire week through the grindstone of Stillness found on a Sunday morning has been scraped, grated, pressed, and churned out thanks to the intense, insight-bearing exchanges with Jamie.

For example, we discussed how spirituality is a nose. Yes, really.

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We agreed that unless there is some deformity everyone is born with a nose! Sure one may not know that it is called a nose until you are told it is a nose but everyone knows a nose by the time he or she is done with 1^st grade in whatever part of the world even without former schooling. But somehow as people become adults they forget that the function of the nose is to smell and other purposes which include serving as an interface between the body and the rest of the world to circulate and condition the air breathed in. So when people start ‘searching for spirituality’ they are really looking for their own nose, which they already have!

But because sometimes we all forget that we haven’t really lost our reading glasses but only misplaced them over our own head, it is quite natural to go looking for something you have never lost. The problems begin when we buy books upon books and seek out teachers upon teachers about where to find our nose, what our nose looks like or should look like, what our nose does compared to other mammals, that we forget to feel out what we have read, learned, and experienced. Very much like looking for one’s glasses everywhere but on top of one’s head. And often those who are helping us look for our nose just want us to stick around for company and attention that they too forget we are looking for something that is already there!

But the most disheartening is when we finally do realize that the nose is right there on our face! What happens is the following: we want to make a statute of it, find adornments for it, tell people how to find their nose instead of just telling them ‘keep touching your face, you will find it. Really!’ and don’t realize all a nose is primarily there for is to smell.

Spirituality is a nose that knows the smell of just ‘being’. This doesn’t mean it does not get colds, infections, needs to blow out dusty experiences and mucus from crying, but it doesn’t need something else to do all that because it is a nose! Sure it may need a tissue paper friend every now and then but for the most part the human body is made to take care of itself. If you do research on the ailments associated with the nose you will learn how far and few are the extreme cases requiring foreign adjustment for breathing purposes. But most people get adjustments for every other reason except actual respiratory issues.

I went to sleep Saturday, last night, thinking this Sunday morning there could possibly be nothing more Stillness could offer me for digestion that I have not already processed.

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New York City is flip-flopping between summer and autumn before it falls into the next phase which is autumn.

My basil plant is demanding I change pots because its roots have expanded. Mr. basil wants to grow or it shall die. Very few of us are dying every day because we are growing. Maybe that is why mama appears gracefully evergreen: she is always growing.

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Over the weekend I serendipitously opened Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Peace Is Every Step to the short chapter “Our Life Is a Work of Art”. It was sitting in my friend’s house in Philly. I am the one who had lent it to her a long time ago, so long ago that it was officially hers now. I was elated to learn that what I had concluded on my own was indeed endorsed by another who is revered highly. “Growing lettuce is poetry. Walking to the supermarket can be a painting.”

Although I too get sucked in the vortex of frustrations borne out of the fact that I must choose between a creative, more fulfilling life and one that pays bills (until the two may converge one day, and that too on my terms), a fee for being on this earth when hardly any goes back to the earth, it was a nice reminder that on most days ever since 2009 I feel I am engaged with living life on my terms:

When we know how to be peace, we find that art is a wonderful way to share our peacefulness. Artistic expression will take place in one way or another, but the being is essential. So we must go back to ourselves, and when we have joy and peace in ourselves, our creations of art will be quite natural, and they will serve the world in a positive way. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

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On Friday evening I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was mesmerized by this amazing sculpture. I am sure most people who visit there often are quite used to it and hence could and couldn’t understand my state of awe. I took many photos and I felt none captured how I was actually feeling when I saw it. I gave up and in my silence contemplated why I was so drawn to it. I thought about it rest of the night and then while listening to a group of percussion drummers outside an art gallery in downtown Philly it finally clicked. That sculpture is precisely how I feel after I am done writing—be it a paragraph for fiction that traces the thoughts which usually defy conforming to the mold of words or after I am done writing Sunday mornings or an email which states exactly how I feel or a hand written letter to a friend and so and so forth. That sculpture captures how I feel about the written word: words are a bow and an arrow.

Here is the statue of Diana, daughter of Jupiter, equated with Artemis (I am more familiar with the story of Artemis than Diana—in fact my very first email account when email was first introduced was Artemis followed by some digits), created by the famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Of course I knew none of this when I sat there hypnotized by this statute.

Falling in love is some recognizing.

Fall demands we recognize beauty in death, in change.

What never-ending Universe is this Stillness…maybe it is available other days than Sundays…if I keep practicing…

~a.q.s.

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