Chronicle Mind
Soon, too soon, ever sooner and yet, the day never comes.
I wish to fly out of reach, out of sight and out of time.
I pray for wings of steel to beat my way across oceans and continents, stopping for none, pausing as I please, to drink my fill, and be gone.
I want to fly right out of the curve of known space and countable time…
This should be my dream journey, where I gravitate to mind boggling heights and spaces that gravity cannot reach…my orbit could be twelve thousand light years long, but it
passes by in the second that it takes me to sigh.
I want to see strange people who call themselves gods and fishes that look like people and people that walk on water and fly in the sky…I want to hear fishes speak and
Snails serenade and school going dogs solve differential equations…
I want flowers to haunt with their scent, incandescent gold moonlight to fall cool and watery and freeze on my arms and shoulders in a shower of silver.
I want the sky blue-brown today and bright yellow dotted with gold sparkles tomorrow - and regal gray with silver flecks the day after…and it should bend into my fingertips and eyelids like the caress of eyelashes or the kiss of the wings of a butterfly…
Here in this land, red stars should bake to purple as the lengthy day progresses to night and dawn should break the star into a shower of icy splinters of blue and pink, which melt and paint the sky in fresh new hues, as the sunshine trickles through the fragments like warm syrup through my fingers.
The food should be served on the roadside like an offering to the gods under the Bodhisattiva tree, refreshing the air with an aroma of devotion like cool sandalwood.
Joyous refulgent love should color the ingredients so that if you look at it you are in heaven…and if you just place it upon your tongue your thirst quenched, and if you swallow a grain you are fulfilled. Food that does not weigh us down, or make us stodgy.
but enriches and enlightens our soul.
This soul food is simple yet like no other, new mown hay which tastes of nectar and fresh dew, green leaves which yield honey and milk in its sap, bark and shoots with the aroma of mint and vanilla, chocolate and cream and saffron.
In this land the children bake birthday cakes by the warmth of the purple night star. They gather honey and bulbs and buds of fresh flowers, generously sprinkle corn and judiciously powder a few pearls into the bowl, then add new mown grass, velvety mushrooms and delicious nuts, mix the dough in cider, tangerine and lime, and finally add the goodness of ice blue spring water.
By midday, the cake is completely baked by the heat of the red red daystar.
The children bake their own birthday cakes to celebrate the season of the year they were born in and not just their arrival. So if the children were born after nightfall, the first bite of the cake makes them see the twinkle of stars and hear the chime of the spheres, while silver moon dust showers them like confetti, …for those born after dawn, the deep gong of golden bells resound over the faint music of the chimes, and a rainbow appears with a pot of gold, at one end.
The second slice tastes of the fruits in season when the children were born -nectarines, oranges, plums and hazels according to the season of birth.
.
And to indicate if the child was born of summer or winter, Autumn or spring, the third slice vary from a fiery chocolate rum for summer, to a icy vanilla for winter, to fresh and pungent minted violet for spring babies and savory pop corn raisins and roast apple for autumn children.
And just for fun, for every slice consumed after that all the tastes of all the seasons
intermingle and rotate…
As for the attire of this strange far out land that I shall one day visit…
Dresses soft as muslin or silk, crisp as georgette and crepe, clingy as wool and nylon, airy as chiffon, flowing as viscose and vinyl are worn and all the qualities of all the fabric intermingle and exchange properties, and every one’s attire is imbued with soft yet bright metallic hues and tinted with a touch of translucence...
As for colors, imagine a dress that appears tinted like café au lait, changes to a more subdued beige and deepens and blushes like wine…or a pale chartreuse to amorous aquamarine to a lissome lime and lemony green to the deep devoted emerald…. or a radiant royal blue to peacock’s coquettish glittering hues to the sable blue black of midnight…all the shades appear in quick succession and all at once, soft mossy green and azure blue, luminous lilac and tiger yellow, vibrant violet and faultless sable black, dazzling sheer white to a translucent pearly foamy waterfall.
Such a dress that inspires poetry and passion and makes the bared skin proud to be revealed from under one’s sleeves the only glowing accessory. A dress that floats like a Chinese paper lantern in the breeze and melts like mud at one’s pink shell like feet, ruffles like a child’s lacy bib at the quaint collar and falls like a flawless Grecian robe draped on a sheet of marble…a dress that raises flesh from the bone and make the wearer ethereal yet vivacious and spontaneous..
But most of all my wishes, I wish that when they play music in this land, Love becomes manifest.
I mean it.
No airy outline of a muse, no breath or spirit or idea of love.
Love - clear and radiant and blinding in its highest avatar, love in its purest moment of truth, love in its energetic chain of binding relationships and its affectionate link of memories transmitted through the generations.
Love, which began its journey, in a tale of romance between the wealthy and aristocratic great great great grandfather and the soft and delicately beautiful fisherwoman in a poor
fishing village, where there were no roads and peopled ferried on dinghies to do their daily chores…
The soft wonder of that ancient past love that still lingers on and leaves a trace of its blessing, , in the lives of the crafty silk merchant and his bored anorexic ivory skinned “model-wife”…four generations later.
A listless love that still carries underneath it, a strange current, the seeds of strength of the old true blood bonds formed generations earlier.
And yet this luxurious offspring of the Original Love fails to match in its designer marble palace reproduction, the ecstasy achieved in a stolen moment in a hut, a century ago.
A love that will be passed on as inheritance to the gentle bulge in the belly of the exotic cabaret dancer the unfaithful merchant courts as a pastime – away from his apathetic wife, -- the same love which eluded his wife but lives on in a pale faced son that this anemic marriage long back resulted in, in the moonlit romance of the first year of magical love.
Whenever music is played, the walls of time should ignite and the past should again appear to light the way for the present…the refined beauty combined with vigor of the fisherwoman who was worshipped by the fiery aristocrat, whose ardor was only a matchstick to the passion of the fisherwoman should resurrect and replay in the music.
The grand old lady once again waltzes, in secret, not with the great great great grandfather, but with his distant forebear, the pale timid child of ten, and whispers to him
that everything that begins in love will have the same ending in love, someday…
And that grand fiery old man gives the lifeless ivory beauty in her sunroom where the suns rays do not reach, a meaning to live, love for a son who will otherwise wither and fade like an uncared plant.
In this land where the gods walk upon the earth in humility, and the air sings hosannas
not to the creator, but to the beautiful creation, as the highest most supreme tribute and allegiance that can be paid to the creator, there I wish to spend a while. Perhaps the whole of my life or perhaps, a few last seconds before I die….
There I dream, I shall watch the kites from the past outrace kites from the future in the timeless skies, where past and present effortlessly unite, and the hawk gliding could well be surveying the ancient swamp of dinosaurs, or be a twenty third century avian looking down at a space station of the future…
I do not know, but I will when I too climb the same ecstatic heights…
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(c) Amrita Valan 2014
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