Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Two Containers
from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life
Last night, in the a/c supermarket at the foot of the holy mountain, I happened to buy two plastic containers. And I am still hearing about it. The containers are small, clear, and rectangular, with colored lids. The smaller one (blue lid) cost 18 rupees and the other, slightly larger, (green lid), cost 30 rupees. That’s a total of 89.83 Japanese yen or exactly 75 American cents. After studying the containers, I decided that the smaller one could hold milk powder and the larger, crystallized chunks of palm sugar, or arenga sugar, as it is also known. I was concerned the blue-lidded container might not hold all the milk powder, but thankfully it did.
Actually I had already finished my shopping and was packing my purchases into a small cloth bag when I noticed the plastic containers with colorful lids stacked just outside the door of the supermarket. And I coveted them. But I didn’t just covet them, I also needed them, at least two. I have ants. My ants are very, very small, but there are many of them.
Please don’t think that I am someone who takes the purchase of plastic containers lightly. I am haunted by visions of the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of five major gyres worldwide, and by the likelihood that my plastic containers will one day float there, estranged from their lids, gradually dissolving, lodging plasticine molecules into the bodies of single-celled organisms. I will try to delay this. I will keep my containers as long as I can.
The lids of the containers are durable but the bodies are perhaps flimsy. I will be careful. Also the blue-lidded container fits inside the green-lidded container, which is a boon when traveling. And I am not just telling you this for my own literary purposes. I checked.
The lids are very snug. I have confidence in them. I think that they will prevent any problem with ants. The ants are on the floor. They have not yet discovered the shelves, the milk powder, or the chunks of palm sugar. But no doubt the ants will discover them in time. After all, the ants are thinking of nothing else.
Overall, I am satisfied with my plastic containers. The blue-lidded one rests nicely on top of the green-lidded one on the shelf beside my metal cup and spoon, my electric kettle and glass jar of Sunrise instant coffee with chicory. I have very few possessions. Everything I own fits into a single suitcase. These objects are important not because they are mine, but because almost all of them will last longer than I will, longer than this body which is not an airtight container, which does not close tightly, which is flimsy.
I would like to give the future small stories. Instead I am giving the future small plastic containers. Plastic lasts longer than stories. So far nothing has evolved which can digest it. I live simply, so as to give the future as little indigestible stuff as possible. Also, living simply is said to be an aid for establishing a quiet and serene mind, which I reckon to be true in general, but not always.
Last night, in the a/c supermarket at the foot of the holy mountain, I happened to buy two plastic containers. And I am still hearing about it. The containers are small, clear, and rectangular, with colored lids. The smaller one (blue lid) cost 18 rupees and the other, slightly larger, (green lid), cost 30 rupees. That’s a total of 89.83 Japanese yen or exactly 75 American cents. After studying the containers, I decided that the smaller one could hold milk powder and the larger, crystallized chunks of palm sugar, or arenga sugar, as it is also known. I was concerned the blue-lidded container might not hold all the milk powder, but thankfully it did.
Actually I had already finished my shopping and was packing my purchases into a small cloth bag when I noticed the plastic containers with colorful lids stacked just outside the door of the supermarket. And I coveted them. But I didn’t just covet them, I also needed them, at least two. I have ants. My ants are very, very small, but there are many of them.
Please don’t think that I am someone who takes the purchase of plastic containers lightly. I am haunted by visions of the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of five major gyres worldwide, and by the likelihood that my plastic containers will one day float there, estranged from their lids, gradually dissolving, lodging plasticine molecules into the bodies of single-celled organisms. I will try to delay this. I will keep my containers as long as I can.
The lids of the containers are durable but the bodies are perhaps flimsy. I will be careful. Also the blue-lidded container fits inside the green-lidded container, which is a boon when traveling. And I am not just telling you this for my own literary purposes. I checked.
The lids are very snug. I have confidence in them. I think that they will prevent any problem with ants. The ants are on the floor. They have not yet discovered the shelves, the milk powder, or the chunks of palm sugar. But no doubt the ants will discover them in time. After all, the ants are thinking of nothing else.
Overall, I am satisfied with my plastic containers. The blue-lidded one rests nicely on top of the green-lidded one on the shelf beside my metal cup and spoon, my electric kettle and glass jar of Sunrise instant coffee with chicory. I have very few possessions. Everything I own fits into a single suitcase. These objects are important not because they are mine, but because almost all of them will last longer than I will, longer than this body which is not an airtight container, which does not close tightly, which is flimsy.
I would like to give the future small stories. Instead I am giving the future small plastic containers. Plastic lasts longer than stories. So far nothing has evolved which can digest it. I live simply, so as to give the future as little indigestible stuff as possible. Also, living simply is said to be an aid for establishing a quiet and serene mind, which I reckon to be true in general, but not always.
Dog Biscuits
from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life
Like most foreigners in this holy town, I carry a small cloth shoulder bag I purchased at the ashram which identifies me, officially, as a serious spiritual aspirant. In my spiritual bag, I carry dog biscuits. They are chicken-flavored, even though I am a vegetarian and this is a pure-veg town. Honestly I tried vegetarian dog biscuits, but every one of the Tamil street dogs to whom I offered one sniffed at it, then looked at me in a way which I interpreted to mean:
“Even though times are tough right now, they are still not tough enough for me contemplate choking down one of those. Don’t forget that I still have the option of garbage.”
Thus I feed chicken-enhanced biscuits to all my favorite dogs -- the two charismatic pups at Only Coffee, the pack of mutts that roam Post Office road, as well as any I find lying in the dust alongside the murderous main street. Cats will also eat the biscuits, if you can get close enough to one. Monkeys, cows and peacocks will at least consider them and not think less of you for offering.
Along with all these animals, so effortless to love, I also feed my number one least favorite dog: a nasty hound, bleached with age and meanness, who snarls and barks at me like he’s going to take my leg off as I stroll past on my way to score some muesli fruit curd at the green and leafy Shanti Cafe. He appears to be the oldest dog in town, but he must brush and floss every day because he has the whitest pointiest dog teeth in town. Like bleached shark’s teeth.
Needless to say, I don’t get too close when I feed him. From across the quiet narrow lane I lock eyes with him as he barks. Then I bend down and pour a handful of biscuits onto a stone step and slowly walk away.
The very first time I did this, the dog stopped barking abruptly, as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say. Now, every day when I walk past, he still barks at me, but his bark is different than before.
It pleases me very much that his bark is now very audibly confused.
Like most foreigners in this holy town, I carry a small cloth shoulder bag I purchased at the ashram which identifies me, officially, as a serious spiritual aspirant. In my spiritual bag, I carry dog biscuits. They are chicken-flavored, even though I am a vegetarian and this is a pure-veg town. Honestly I tried vegetarian dog biscuits, but every one of the Tamil street dogs to whom I offered one sniffed at it, then looked at me in a way which I interpreted to mean:
“Even though times are tough right now, they are still not tough enough for me contemplate choking down one of those. Don’t forget that I still have the option of garbage.”
Thus I feed chicken-enhanced biscuits to all my favorite dogs -- the two charismatic pups at Only Coffee, the pack of mutts that roam Post Office road, as well as any I find lying in the dust alongside the murderous main street. Cats will also eat the biscuits, if you can get close enough to one. Monkeys, cows and peacocks will at least consider them and not think less of you for offering.
Along with all these animals, so effortless to love, I also feed my number one least favorite dog: a nasty hound, bleached with age and meanness, who snarls and barks at me like he’s going to take my leg off as I stroll past on my way to score some muesli fruit curd at the green and leafy Shanti Cafe. He appears to be the oldest dog in town, but he must brush and floss every day because he has the whitest pointiest dog teeth in town. Like bleached shark’s teeth.
Needless to say, I don’t get too close when I feed him. From across the quiet narrow lane I lock eyes with him as he barks. Then I bend down and pour a handful of biscuits onto a stone step and slowly walk away.
The very first time I did this, the dog stopped barking abruptly, as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say. Now, every day when I walk past, he still barks at me, but his bark is different than before.
It pleases me very much that his bark is now very audibly confused.
What Do I Tell Them?
from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life
Circumambulating the shrine of the saint, I contemplate the one great matter. My eyes are open just a crack, enough to walk, enough to catch a glimpse of my old friend Hannah -- we flash surreptitious grins and signal. Chai? Ten minutes? Whenever.
Three minutes later we’re across the street on folding chairs with cups of chai, surrounded by a small audience of beggars we’ve also known for ten or twenty years. Turns out I’m very lucky to get to see Hannah. In 3 days she will return to Switzerland, her native place, to which she has rarely returned since coming to India in 1980. Her mother is very elderly now and she worries dementia may be setting in. “Every night after dinner she watches a movie, that is fine. But my sister says that for the last month it has been the same movie every night and she does not seem to notice.”
“How does it feel to go back?” I ask.
“It will be difficult,” Hannah says. “It is Spring. It will be beauty-full. The city is grand and clean. But then there are people, and they ask questions, and what do I tell them?” She gestures around us at the temple and the roaring street, at the beggars and sadhus and peacocks and cows, at the street dogs and dour-faced foreign devotees, at India.
“People want to know what I do,” she says. “What do I tell them? Do I say that I walk clockwise around statues, temples and hills? Do I say that I practice simply being, or that I just try to be quiet?” She shrugs. “Usually I tell them I work at the animal shelter. I haven’t worked at the animal shelter in years, but you have to tell them something.”
We imagine explaining to a roomful of Swiss professionals, “Every time my mind wanders, I ask myself, To whom does this thought occur? To me. And who am I?” We end up giggling, but the truth is it’s hard to go back. It shouldn’t matter what other people think, but it does.
We agree that people respond in one of two ways. There are people who feel envy, because they somehow imagine that I have my life and their life too. Like I am on an extended vacation and I will one day return to a magical home where I have all the things that they do: house, spouse, career, truck, dog, garden, phone, benefits, TV, stereo, fishing gear, power tools, storage unit, time share, photo albums, memorabilia, old friends calling out as they walk in carrying beers. People don’t understand that the price of this life was that one.
The second category of people assume that I am pathetic, self-indulgent, or mad. On my bad days I team up against myself with those people, the noxious clan that lives primarily but not entirely within one’s own mind, a parasitic psychic worm one might as well call the Inner Facebook.
“But we cannot judge anyone those people either,” Hannah reminds me. “The ones who stay in the West. Because their lives seem freak-ish to us too, isn’t it?”
“In the United States of America, many people sacrifice everything in the hope that they will one day be elderly in Arizona.” We shake our heads in bewilderment. The American faith is a strange one.
“It doesn’t matter if I feel like a freak in Switzerland,” Hannah says. “I must help my mother. She was a good mother. She helped me to stay in India.”
By now we’ve given up and bought chai for several of the beggars standing around us. Because they really are going to stand there, hand out, for as long as it takes. Several ashrams provide meals, but everyone needs tea.
I fall into my usual complaints about America, like the way every conversation starts What do you do? Hannah interrupts me.
“Yes, it’s irri-tating. But look at it this way. In a way it makes sense, the way people talk. What are we doing here? We have 80 or 90 years, perhaps much less. What do you do? What do you do? What do I do? Could someone please tell me what do I do?
“Yes, maybe they want to feel they made the right choice, that we are freak-ish to fly away to India but -- in fact we are all just trying to figure it out. What do you do? What do I do? What does anyone do?”
Geckoes
from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life
A thunderstorm so strong -- I’d rather just stay here on the floor, thank you. I had been doing crunches on the bed, then the bicycle, my feet kicking the air, beside the open window with its metal frame, as the rain poured and the lightning flashed, when I had a vision of my death so embarrassing that I chose to retreat down to the cool pink faux marble tiles.
These heavy rains are not seasonal. But then, I suppose seasonal is fast becoming a useless word. Climate change will render it archaic. The adverb unseasonably will be used only by tired and disapproving traditionalists -- the same bitter queens who claim that promiscuity is now passé because they are no longer invited to orgies.
As I watch the downpour -- and flinch with every flash of light -- a gecko dashes through a gap in the corner of my window and darts down to the floor, where we occupy opposite corners. Then another flash, another gekko. The storm continues this way, yielding a parade of geckoes.
Welcome geckoes, we are in full agreement. Help yourselves to ants, there’s plenty. It never occurred to me that geckoes might be afraid of storms. There are now approximately ten geckos in my room. I am happy they are here. They help me to feel safe somehow. Also, I am not so embarrassed to be here on the floor because, if the geckoes are doing it, then surely it is a good idea?
for Marco
These heavy rains are not seasonal. But then, I suppose seasonal is fast becoming a useless word. Climate change will render it archaic. The adverb unseasonably will be used only by tired and disapproving traditionalists -- the same bitter queens who claim that promiscuity is now passé because they are no longer invited to orgies.
As I watch the downpour -- and flinch with every flash of light -- a gecko dashes through a gap in the corner of my window and darts down to the floor, where we occupy opposite corners. Then another flash, another gekko. The storm continues this way, yielding a parade of geckoes.
Welcome geckoes, we are in full agreement. Help yourselves to ants, there’s plenty. It never occurred to me that geckoes might be afraid of storms. There are now approximately ten geckos in my room. I am happy they are here. They help me to feel safe somehow. Also, I am not so embarrassed to be here on the floor because, if the geckoes are doing it, then surely it is a good idea?
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