by Kunjabihari Adhikari
~~This piece was written by my cousin Kirin (as I call him) who lives in India~~
Time is like an accordion
You can shove it tight together—compact
Or open it up wide and let it extend itself to wherever it wants to go
Because, the part of me that wants to make it dense does so out of a sense of being—‘the doer’
Thus shoves time into so many different receptacles, parcels, filing cabinets, folders:
The body, family, friends, schooling, home, country, creed, custom, language, culture, means of livelihood, job, religion, hobbies...
Constantly going through this inventory and comparing it with others’ inventories—FACEBOOK
Me—a miniature Mother Earth surrounded by a humongous, heavy, metal, iron junkyard
In the form of satellites revolving around, bouncing signals back and forth
Like a bunch of spherical 3D Facebooks, soft, round balls all warm and fluffy
rolling around, on top of and underneath one another.
If time gets too compact, too dense, it becomes like a SivaLinga, with scratches all over it
From where I have (only) scratched the surface, since the hard stone is too hard to penetrate
Hard, cold, dense objects thinking themselves to be all warm, soft and fluffy
So they can get touchy feely with one another,
merging their edges together
These edges are our own personal junkyards that we carry with us, our periphery, our crust, our peel
Others are surrounded by gossamer filaments full of light and love, pure awareness
Nurturing
Sending the light and love on its way
Not trying to hoard for one’s own, in a possessive sort of way – thus retarding the flow
A conductor, a messenger, facilitator, via medium, nimitta matram bhava savyasachin—
An instrument in the hands of another
The only superfluous receptacle / folder
Above and beyond the irremovable ones: food, clothing, shelter...
Of interest and worth its maintenance, is: Lila, Drama, Stories
Translating Vaisnava literature into English
Or, films downloaded from the internet
Or—dramas downloaded through other channels, conduits, threads, filaments
Onto the screen of the mind
This being the only folder of any importance it becomes the proprietor of time
The other receptacles having been minimized to the smallest size possible
So that the glue, the glow that holds everything together is this dramatic unfolding
Invest your time where you get the best returns
So the question is: what films do you like? are you attracted to? What books do you like?
What kind of people do you like? horror stories? tragedies? romantics?
Amazement, humour, chivalry, compassion, fury, fear or dread?
Who are you rooting for? Which characters do you relate to?
Sadistic, vengeful maniacs?
Or, innocent, wide-eyed, sweetness, sometimes a little spicy, feisty
In flirting with knowledge
As if one could acquire it, simply by trying to do so—by study, by supplication, by saturation...
If the one and only receptacle has its junkyard smashed and removed, the outer husk torn off
Only the gossamer filaments remain, converging at the assemblage point—individual consciousness
Awareness
These fibres of light remember how to communicate, how to recognize compatible colours,
Sounds, sights and tastes
Before the days of the heavy, crusty junkyards, impeding any real connectivity
To bare one’s soul
Thus, life (the prana) is comfortable when surrounded by vibrations of the same frequency
Natural attraction
The less awareness is processed by so many calculative, contingent factors, all based on personal gain
This intuitive attraction
Symbiotic nurture becomes the norm
Two sources of illumination, illuminating one another
Knowledge expands in the same way that drops of mercury,
fallen on the floor from a broken thermometer
Bond together by their mutual attraction and contiguity
When the ocean is churned so many products come out, poison amongst them
But the taste of the amrit (ambrosia) makes one forget everything else
Set it free, let time fly
Out of its containers, less, smaller containers
Break the levees, the boundaries, what separates what is inside from what is outside
Break your own cocoon and fly, like a butterfly
