I watched the flower,
the flower watched me,
that was enough.
Poetry is the best, it is appreciating the flower. The longer stuff, this, is pulling it out of the soil to observe its roots. To observe the hole it left behind. Maybe we cannot have understanding without death. So we create our gods with the shape of darkness, with fabricated light. We use our mind to shape the world. We cut everything into pieces to see more. We kill to try and understand life.
I never really bought into the whole no desires thing. It just seemed like a sentence with no practicality. What is life without desire, what is the point?
But, after a while simple sentences seem to deepen and you stumble across the same words in your head, words that sat lifeless once on a page, and you feel quite simple. There is nothing better than simple. There is nothing more real than what is.
I never understood manifestation either, although during meditation I spoke my life story, I spoke of my success, the decisions and moves I made. I speak with a made up person. I think about all the copies I will sell and the fruits of my courage coming to fruition, and the bystanders who were scared enough to judge, learn from me and admit they were wrong. And when the masses came, so did my friends.
Then I keep living and watching and realise the world does not care about your fantasies. My desires. And now you scramble within your conflict of what is and what you want it to be. You suffer and never stop to be.
Manifestation, to me, is this: I wake up at 3am by dogs barking, Indians playing music in the middle of the street, buses arriving from other states, beeping their horn with a melody, and a monkey outside my window sitting on the balustrade, and I am filled with dread and thoughts. My loneliness and somewhat disgust of who I am sits inside of me. Emotions my pretty mind label bad. I have the strong urge to get my phone and message that girl. You know that girl, your ex girlfriend usually. You message her to search for a solace. She does not reply or does reply but not in the manner you wish. Not in a manner that is enough. And now, all those emotions and life that swirls within you are placed on her. Are manifested externally. Then your mind gets busy and does its best to see what it cannot see. Tries to shape the situation with sense, tries to paint pictures with the bleak colours that give it energy. And where am I now?
In an argument between body and mind, with mind and mind, with body and body, not realising they’re just all the same thing within consciousness and you, yourself, don’t know. So when will those feelings go away if I never look at them, if I never become them? Trying to fix the entire world instead of just letting the single flower blossom, no matter how sharp its thorns.
When I lay beside a naked woman I am the wisest man alive, and when I lay alone I watch everything going on within me and only by admitting that I do not know, I feel my body and mind let go.
I write in a café in the hills of India. Everyone around me seems to be searching for more knowledge, all seeking, and I often feel ashamed for wanting to just close my eyes. They expand their memories and their mind says that it’s consciousness. And I say they, to trick my own thoughts to see it clearly, to see myself. But I do see myself, and they label a man with a long beard as wise, but mine has never told me anything. Never idolise a traveller. It does not matter where you are or where you go if you are not there. Escapists. Exhibitionists. I myself am a fraud. Luckily, I cannot trick myself. Selling your house and living in India is easy. Meditating around your family or football friends to truly be with them, wearing a pair of shoes that are different but comfortable, crossing your legs when you sit for your lower back, making your own decisions, the small ones, and taking responsibility to live a life that is yours, no matter how much easier it is to hand it to your surroundings, that is difficult, that is presence, that is true love, that is freedom.
The naked woman looks at me with lust-filled eyes as I speak what I am trying to believe, I realise it is all me. We are all the same just in different circumstances. I am free with you because I am already imprisoned. And she tries to bend me to her ideas, and I see myself in a different relationship, with a different archetype and I show patience, but my arrogance does come forward. Luckily I have been humbled so many times. Battered and destroyed by pleasure to not buy into hierarchies. To not use the relationship to prop up my ego but to be truly compassionate. Knowing I am now the flower, but I have pulled out a million of my own. There I see desire, completely blinding what is. We all bring our memories and our hopes to presence. And as she speaks you feel the grind and the fear that she is not what you predict. So we all never get to really know each other. Just the image put forward. Just fear. Just pleasure and all the pain that is attached to it. Just apologies. Just our own restrictions put on others. Carrying around a full briefcase of contracts everywhere you go. For what?
I guess it feels nice to surrender to something you can see, but I've been watching enough, and impermanence will torture you as you cling to time that is no longer here. It seems you have to let go so many times, and see it is not the right way, or wrong way, but is just the way. Then with trust and new faces, with that big space of emptiness that you keep within, or as it comes out, you can at least watch the whole process and eventually get over it, watch it for what it is and naturally it dissipates, you learn to just never hold on to begin with. All just words, without understanding, and now the pretty daisy that flowed with the wind beneath the sunshine lays as boring black words on the page. Those who hold on to you, allow you to see the restrictions you put on the ones you hold. Every moment is new. And when you truly admit that you don’t know, you can let go of your hopes and fears, of your desires. When you don’t get what you want and learn all the lessons it gave you, when you get what you want and you feel the mind trying to recreate it. Soon, you just stop wanting anything but to appreciate what you have. What you truly have. An undercurrent of pure consciousness, a world too beautiful to find the depths of. A stranger in front of you that you already love, just being. And, if I am free, then so are you. So are we. With all the sorrow, grief, laughter, joy that will flow through you. That will blossom in the garden. That will die. That will live. That will just be. There is no where to go, we are already here.
I watched the flower,
the flower watched me,
that was enough.
