Masks

                   

I havent been in the habit of writing down about every experience I have but maybe it would do me good to develop my expressive abilities, perhaps get over an expressive aphasia if that is not too harsh a phrase. So today I indulged in a bit of woman pruning, if that is a mild way of saying torture and willful torture at that! Haircut? fine. Eyebrows, upperlip...that is torture..and you pay for that...with more time, money and effort into maintaining that after messing with nature in the first place that just gets your tissues to produce more of what you removed and then you got to do the same thing again to maintain that state. Monkeys have no reason to bother with hair (!) and they get to swing the birches but not these modern day monkeys; they go to kitty parties and dab at their lips with pressed paper so their compact powdered face does not get that powder off and reveal the true colors within! And then the bohemian me fights the pretense and masks. It is just so cultivated in the very 'everyday' acts. You wake up in the morning and dab on some powder - bang - mask application right there ! and then layers just keep getting added on as the day goes - smile , 'professional expression,' 'adult, mature facies,' a face for the father, one for the mother, one for the little boy who lives down the lane. Even the owner of the face would not have seen their own face..maybe a brief look in the mirror around brush time before making a hurried cover up with masking stuff, an act sooner done for females than males unless the latter has more vanity is what I think coz I am no man...and if 'man' would not bother too much with it is what i think for i have seen very few if any at all of 'men'..too many boys around. As for the female of the species, "look good and pleasant for you are not good enough" is so rubbed into most of them that inferiority complex in a patriarchal society has them rush for the compact powder or some other form of masking stuff - even an indifferent expression works for a mask; it just takes some practice. Masks! bah.

Worlds

                                                            

As alien as i may continue to feel while learning the ways of the world(s) i inhabit - a world of information, a world of survival, a world of relationships built, but mostly my inner world and outer world forming 'my world' as a unit - and then my world interacting with the worlds of my fellow inhabitants, i seem to feel more expansive in my inner world, seeing more commons with perhaps the inner worlds of fellow inhabitants, not just people. My outer world and inner world conflict a lot of the times but cannot not see the validity of info that my inner world is picking up and then 'seeing' as the info is processed. It is the 'many' 'separate entities' 'plurality' of that populating my outer world that i have a bit of a struggle maneuvering with more than the stuff happening in my inner world. Feel a bit at odds with the different dynamics of the outer and inner world. I am sure it is not like riding two boats at once and know it is a matter of time before i see how the two interact. I just gotta wait it out.

Tonsured! (like the sound of the movie title, Tangled!..just the opposite)

Getting civilized. Scary. To me it means conforming to the masses - to their views of 'normalcy,' loose ends neatly tucked into place, straight jacketed with a face to put on every time you walk out of your personal space to face the world. After a thrilling, eye-opening, freshen-my-worldview tonsure experience, I have hair growing that needs to be trimmed and made to look 'acceptable.' Gone is the wash-wipe-readytogo ease. In comes mirrors, comb, oilcontrolling shampoo and barbers, and 'the style that best suits me with the hair I have.' Civil-ization. Now I have a hairclip to deal with the elongated hair which I could just as easily snip off with my home scissors to my fancy to make it be manageable, if not for the fear of 'looking' mousy. I could so easily tonsure again. I am this close to doing it.

It has been 9 months since I did it but it is so fresh in my memory. How was it when tonsured? Nude. I thought it was me feeling vulnerable and naked, a free target for any one and everyone to stare and think aloud and be shocked at, but not surprisingly it is the onlookers who were naked. Unguarded in facing unfamiliarity, not understanding 'why' and perhaps faced with their own fears of being exposed mirrored in my 'exposure.' It did feel like I was skinned, leaving my flesh beneath exposed for the unvoiced questions but naked expressions in their eyes. Everything came into the expression in their eyes, differed from person to person but the range is not the everyday questions, or perhaps it was just so deeper that they took on a quality new of their own. Gender. Nationality. Belief. Purpose. Sexuality. Friendship. Fellow human being. Belongingness. Human. Commercial value. Worthy of association. The separatedness/aloneness in being human was pretty stark in their alone, vulnerable, scared, confused looks when they thought no one was looking but me - the unfamiliar entity with whom they could unwittingly drop their guards and be their vulnerable self for just that little while. I felt sad that my hair was growing in fast and yet wished for it to grow fast for fear of becoming a permanent outsider. The pull to 'belong,' to not be the 'odd one out' and thus become 'visible' is scary and hence seek the comfort of being 'invisible' in the crowd, in belonging, and then again to be 'unique' and to 'stand out in the crowd' and be 'famous.' guess the difference is in 'acceptable' fame, enviable fame, shining star, not vulnerable and exposed. It perhaps scratched them where they dint want to but I would do it again for it peeled away a layer of deadness (dead skin?) and freshened something more important, more essential at my core than any training could have accomplished. I could see the condition of being human from the underbelly and hence a tiny peek into what it means to be human.

I am going to do it again. I just want to get 'civilized' again enough to get the kick out of tonsuring again, so now it is clips and comb ...and perhaps I will get some red streaks for a change!

Submarine'ing

Don't know about everybody else, but I have a peculiar habit of sorts. When I am seen doing something, I stop doing it and submarine, meaning I do it somewhere else where I won't be seen only to stop doing it again when seen doing there and submarine again. It is like playing tack in a queer way. I do know we each have a vulnerable self, one that shies away from being judged and found wanting, from being made fun of, from destructive criticism,..from being treated as anything but as whole and complete. We each are in a journey of some sort, at least I am, trying to make sense, a coherent sense, of the world I find myself inhabiting, often feeling like an alien visiting a strange planet with several things to like about it and like enough that I want to poke around and know everything about it if I can, amazed by a lot of things, want to make friends with the inhabitants and whatever there is that would respond in any way people/animals/plant/stone/forces of any kind/moving/unmoving...several things in this strange planet fascinating. Often feel I dont know the language the inhabitants speak and have to figure out how to communicate with them. Sometimes see them look at me like they have just noticed my 'alien' antenna or alien skin color/tone and will question me about it! Don't think the inhabitants would appreciate much that I notice things about them and about living life on the planet. Do feel lonely sometimes and want to talk alienese but haven't found anyone who speaks alienese the way I do and so have to resort to voicing on posts like this one, and submarine every now and then.

Un'familiar'izing.

The sands have been sifting for a while now, more in a direction that has me see that it is for me to move and it is just my movement that will have anything work. There is not gonna be anyone proding, nurturing, encouraging. Support will come only if I compromise and dance in some manner to someone else's tune but that world will not have me in it, and it is too high a price to pay for too low a life.

My journey has seemed for sometime now a fight: A fight against conformity, compromise, attachment, enslavery, mindless monotony, stagnation, falling in line with the familiar that has been survived through to rags, persistence of dis-ease. My journey is to health. It is worth fighting for. And Life does find a way.

As i am stirred..

As emotions, simple-yet-complex human interactions, experiences and personal journeys ebb and flow from time to time, certain aspects of the components in varying colors and flavors boil up to the surface revealing parts of me hitherto unworded/undefined as well as aspects of the complexity/simplicity hitherto unseen. Such moments make me wonder about who/what the world and its people are to me and who/what am i to the world.

There is only love..

When love glows, it is bliss.
When it flows, it is compassion.
When it blows, it is anger.
When it ferments, it is jealousy.
When it is negative, it is hatred.
When it acts, it is perfection.
When love knows, it is Me!
                           ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Life of the human mind..

Dynamics of human interactions. Flavorizing, color-blending, syntaxing and thus semanticizing. Creating interesting scripts; lending interesting definitions to characters. Layering, deepening, mystifying. Fascinating.

moving to not move

Nothing has really changed yet nothing is the same. The spaces are the same yet the spaces are not the same. I have moved i thought only to find i am more now where i started than when i started. Strange but not so strange: I may be running to come home to me. Nothing has changed: nothing has changed.

The one that got away

The workings of the mind is pretty interesting. When someone seems to be breaking out of the mold, thinking original (?) and questioning the unquestioned beliefs, basically doing things out of the common milieu, much like the Indian crabs there is a clawing to pull that ‘aberrance’ back into the system. And then, when the aberrance continues in spite of the attempts to keep it in the mold, the system expects it to maintain form, expect a perfection of form perhaps more than what the aberration has reckoned, and the system gets angry/aggravated when the aberration does not maintain that expected form. A very interesting love it or hate it, almost endearing but also frustrating trait present in almost every, if not every system. Perhaps it is the ‘surface tension’ of systems at play to maintain its compactness and contributes to its stability in some way. Perhaps it the harmony-chaos cycle at work.

Dinner tonight at my place

Lets dine tonight. Lets make it potluck. Please bring your dish of experiences through living, your dreams, your fears, hopes and wishes, anxieties, the things you have seen and felt and thought of people, circumstances and life itself. If you like, you could invite your people too and ask them to bring their dishes along just as I have you. Lets dine together after the hustle of the day, at a time when idle contemplation can find expression along with a reflection on the lessons learned through the day, and rehear the melody that connects us with everything that sometimes fades out of awareness in the hustle of making it through life. Lets dine to rehear that melody and rejuvinate our life systems before sleep does the same to our bodies, and be born again.

Freedom to be is when..

The ultimate inaduthenticity is that there is any innate significance to me or to life. It is when the ultimate inauthenticity is accepted and owned that any freedom to be becomes possible.

‘There is something fundamentally wrong.’

Wonder if wrong-doing and punishment has been wired into our psyche so much that what is possible can go only up to a certain point after which the ‘what is possible’ sphere needs to involute, consciously/unconsciously/subconsciously creating limits and boundaries and to put an effort at consciously thinking ‘beyond’ those limits.  Part of the difficulty in thinking beyond may be dealing with the wrong/punishment wiring that is so much part of the system. The wiring is so much evident in the language, and a whole lot of words derived from wrong/punishment - negative, backward, fail, bad, beat, etc.etc. It is much like there being the primary relationships (mother and father or people who come to represent their role/authority) and then all other relationships with people and things being a derivative of the primary in some manner. 

World in words

A world lies open to the one listening - a world that lies in the words, sequence of words, and between the words - woven from the fabric of the speaker/writer’s mind. Entropy and analysis and whatever else be kept aside. The uniqueness of the person is getting worded, if only one cares to listen.

"I am"

Excerpt from a forwarded email.

Crabbit Old Woman


Who is really inside?

When an old lady died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in England, it appeared she had left nothing of value.

The nurse, packing up her possessions, found this poem. The quality so impressed the staff that copies were distributed to all the nurses in the hospital.

This poem then later appeared in the Christmas edition of "Beacon House News," a magazine of the Northern Ireland Mental Health Association. This was the Lady's bequest for posterity.

What do you see nurse, 
What do you see?
What are you thinking, 
When you look at me?
A crabbit old woman,
Not very wise,
Uncertain of habit
With far away eyes.

Who dribbles her food
And makes no reply;
Then you say in a loud voice,
"I do wish you'd try."
Who seems not to notice
The things that you do,
And forever is losing
A stocking or shoe.

Unresisting or not,
Lets you do as you will;
With bathing or feeding,
The long day to fill.
Is that what you're thinking,
Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes nurse,
You're not looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am,
As I sit here so still,
As I move at your bidding,
As I eat at your will.

I'm a small child of ten ...
With a father and mother,
And brothers and sisters
Who love one another.

A girl of sixteen,
With wings on her feet;
Dreaming that soon,
A lover she'll meet.

A bride soon at twenty ...
My heart gives a leap;
Remembering the vows
That I promised to keep.

At twenty-five,
I have young of my own,
Who need me to build
A secure and happy home.

A woman of thirty,
My young now grow fast,
Bound together with ties
That forever should last.

At forty, my young ones
Have grown up and gone;
But my man is beside me
To see I don't mourn.

At fifty, once more ...
Babies play 'round my knees;
Again we know children,
My loved ones and me.

Dark days are upon me,
My husband is dead ...
I look at the future,
I shudder with dread;
For my young are all rearing,
Young of their own,
And I think of the years
And the love I have known.

I am an old woman now,
Nature is cruel,
‘Tis her jest to make old age
Look like a fool.

The body, it crumbles,
Grace and vigor depart,
There is now a stone
Where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass,
A young girl still dwells,
And now and again
My battered heart swells.

I remember the joys,
I remember the pain,
And I'm loving and living
Life over again.

I think of the years ...
All too few, gone too fast,
And accept the stark fact
That nothing can last.

So open your eyes nurses,
Open and see ...
Not a "Crabbit Old Woman,"
Look closer ... see "Me."


~ Phyllis McCormack ~

Nobody

Anonymity beguiles. Be one in the crowd, invisible. Sense and experience the happenings with people, around them, within them, inside their head and because of that inside the head. Be with the expressions and the experience that gives the expressions. To savor the words uttered. Feel the tone and cadence.  Linger on the fleeting lines on the face as emotions flicker across them. Follow the gaze and picture the image forming in the brain layered, interpreted and juxtaposed by others already available in the memory database from past experiences. Invisibility beguiles hence. A name, a face, an identity, a persona. All needs maintenance and right now they are kinda annoying distractions from the wealth available to explore by being anonymous and invisible and a nobody.

In a league of your own..

"And of course there is nowhere to hide at mile 25 of an Ironman run!" - Anuradha Vaidyanathan

Interesting how she notes when one is in a league of their own, there is nowhere to hide; directly alluding to the human tendency to not view each one as unique and to the tendency for seeking acceptance and belongingness.