a daylight dream

I may be bizarre and outlandish, but there is a certain bizarreness in being estranged in this world. I march out of comfort to the garden while the deep blue arcs adorn the sky in a velvety aura. I march out of certainty to embrace the plantations of loving intentions. How I wish you were here, marching with me. Your boots are covered in dew, rambling and rumbling over the treachery of it. Mine are soaked to the sock, and I rumble on indifferently, the hems of my dress tossed in earthen streaks and moist goodness. I’m not alone. It’s Venus here, shining my way to sun-up. The garden is desolate and forlorn, and it reminds me of you, somehow. I dig my hands into the dry grass and pull it out, and nobody can see is that I’m making safer nests for wilder things to grow. I plant chamomiles. Perhaps, I was meant to be a wildflower in your field. It’s not as grand or as world-changing, but it is wildly sweet, and it lives with such audacity and fervor— ultimately the life I’d like to remembe...

We’ve come home after the ramble, the float and the dive in the little garden of this bustling city. How I love climbing the little grass blades with you, shrinking our human magnitude into something smallness wouldn’t even recognise. We’ve dreamed and trailed our dreams. We backtracked the path and realised the coordinates of the brightest stars are ever so near. But your eyes are empty now, dear, wincing with shallowness and doubtful resonance. Instantly, I know what has crossed your mind— the paradoxical enormity of our dreams and the uncanny life path midst uncertainties. A cloud of compassion hovers above me. I see it in your heart that you’d want to promise me the mountains, the little cabin in the woods and the frugality of a life in service. The chord of promise is in your chest, and it wants to become uncaged. It wants to become the servitude towards a life beyond us. Pause, love. Promise no more. Despite our dreams being so beautifully richly small, I know they are only dream...

I was supposed to be writing this last night, yet my fingers were enormously cold and it was an aching situation to tap repetitively at a screen. Now, the morning has come and January’s still here, but ending. t h e  c o l d It’s been quite cold— so cold in fact, that the air smelled like snow. The mornings were extremely hostile and home was even colder than outside. To make it more bizarre, a wave of flu (or omicron, who knows) smothered almost everyone I know, including myself. I never had a cold that lasted more than seven days, but this one lingered for almost two weeks, blocking my nose and making me feel uneasy with lassitude. Still, it was a lesson to be patient for recovery, to take it easy and to sleep well. Sleep is such a blessing in winter. Most days, I was already in bed at 7.30 pm, and honestly, I love it that way. There is nothing more harmonious than waking before dawn and sleeping as the night settles in. c r e a t i v e   s i l e n c e January was silen...

i have learned much less through doubt than death and by death I mean a sweet surrender when the heart ceases to breathe and eventually, instead, sings sweeter songs than the usual hum in its chest what a caged cavity each friday dawn we lose ourselves to that special kind of sweetness we lay mirrored by constellations and forgiveness something, then, does die so sweetly.

I have failed again and again to give thanks cordially; for divine thanks is an act of constancy, and it is never festive, but humble. A thanks is a sip of water to the parched, and aren’t we the weakness that cries in rapture and enthusiasm—   oh thank you, lord! Still, a real thanks runs amok from grounds of vainglorious tones uttered as a response. A real thanks is soundless, speechless and pathless. It climbs the tree, ripples on the lake, and it is the hare in the clouds I see. If we would teach the artfulness of thanks, perhaps we would teach its constancy: how its song never ceases, and how we have forgotten its words; they were never there after all.

When I asked about the hibiscus flower, I was enmeshed and engraved in disillusionment, watching fingers point at pale, scarlet delicate petals. I knew it was a dishonest name for a flower, for the tea I drank on winter nights did not possibly appeal to such delicacy When time passed and I happened to come across the real one; cruel, shrivelled, reserved, painted in deep burgundy— I knew it was it what touched my lips so cunningly. I knew it was this kind of cruelty that dissolves in the love of boiling water, it couldn’t be anything else. Beings on this gorgeous earth seem to have the signature of their essence upon their form. And like the hibiscus, I must be. I wonder if one can recognise my essence from how my eyes shine when they grow towards the sun, and how I become feathery and lightweight in the face of ancient love, and how my face crumples when all is so beautiful and wondrous. I hope all these tell honest stories about me.

The heart stops singing when it ceases to become a slave to a divinity as whole as God’s. One of my earthly friends came this morning and shared tea with every one she’d meet. It stirred an aliveness in my heart: I’ve never been stirred by the aliveness of sharing before. What if whatever we gained was meant to be shared. What if sharing was the only way to reward success with equality; to give what we have been given, to share our rains with golden grounds; for what is the rain without the fertile garden blooming and green? Is this why we feel so empty up the vertical ladder of earthly climbs? I mean and intend to share the silent goodness of my heart. It multiplies still, in stillness and in silence, but goodness was not made to be a crumb. It is as supple as the sound of a tree's name, sweetening when it is uttered, when it is dispersed and shared along the continental drifts. Is there a way to become enslaved to divine sharing of goodness? Then I must learn. Then I must commenc...

You’re as distant as the other side of the moon. I gaze at you, asleep as the sun rises slow this January, this arctic wave of unbearable cold that no warmth can harness. My hands are too cold to fondle your skin, so they are hands I keep to myself. I wondered if you ever knew how much it hurt me to feel so much but not know how to reach you through the vast steppes of silence between us. I’ve always had those pages to write to you infinitely: my fondest thoughts, my most fiery odes that make my heart twitch with the arrival of much more than morning light. Sometimes loving you is a tidal wave that smothers me. A wildfire that eats away the gaps and the whole of me, too. I’m consumed and I’m empty. I’m the paradox of having too much to say and not a single notion to paraphrase. I wince watching you sleep. There are things you’d never know, love. Things humanness never amassed. Holiness of love to be anointed with but never grasped. When you wake, silence on your face, I realise the dif...

It’s rather mystifying how life is asking me to slow down, incomparably. I’ve never thought life would ask me to do that, it was always the other way round; me pleading for things to take less of a toll on my time and my energy to keep up. Even with things mounting on my list, there is less of an inclination to ridiculously fuss and fester over minor details. It’s now quite expected to rather fondle ideas and nurture them with visuals and make-beliefs, which is mind-blowing. God has given me the slowness I’ve always dreamed of. And maybe that is a temporary gift, and maybe one day I’ll have to fuss and fester plans and random doings— but now that it’s here, I allow the silence to prevail inseparably from my avid heart. Oh, there is much to be amazed about by the sidelines that have less to do with much to do. There is an astonishment related to beingness which is as profound and less constructed. I fell ill last week. It’s funny how one has no choice but to not invest in much rabbit ho...

when the ground beneath me cries in the terror of ones hungered severed torn how could I have known the grace of a smile was made into being experiencing cycles of pain before I was born