Goodbye Maria. A tribute to Maria from Tarun & Celia.

Goodbye Maria.

It was an odd sound,

somewhere between moan and deep pain.

I looked up,

Celia’s face was crumpled,

staring numbly at the computer screen,

tears rivering down her face.

She’d received an email, that last Thursday, Maria,

her bestest friend had passed away. Silently in her sleep.

She was 40.

_______________________________________

Celia & Maria were inseparables in college.

The wild ones. The kind that danced against all rules.

What we remember most about her was her wide smile.
So big it could swallow up a sun.

40 is way young to go.
And yet in the 40 odd years she lived many lifetimes.
Some with a searing intensity, some with inner depth.

Like a meteor, she blazed bright & brilliant.

Like many who charge fierce through life, arms open wide,

she got an unfair share of magic.

And muck.

Some muck you can wash off.

Some muck sticks deep.

Maria closed shop.

Put away her smiles.

Buried herself in a nowhere job.

9-5. Then she’d go into her room.

And wouldn’t come out.

Wouldn’t take calls.

She took a golden handshake.

And sat at home.

If she went out it was to church.

Church helped.

She made the motions of life.

The bright bold Maria, Celia knew in college, disappeared.
Only in rare moments did the Sunflower girl peek out.

In her 40 odd years she packed raging life,

and also deep shame, terrible festering hurt and extreme peace.

I’d like to tell you that things turned around.

That rainbows burst in her sky again.

Did the blue win?

We think that just maybe she needed to touch both sides,
the blazing yellows, and the Mother Mary blues.

A sun went out.

After a long twilight it went beneath the ocean.

I'd like to think that her light was needed in another place,
like God felt maybe he needed a light, a smile to cheer him up,
what with the world being so depressing and all.

But maybe the answer is simpler.

She’d lived with such fierceness. Been hurt so deep.

She could take only so much.
___________________________________________

We are healers.
And the last thing we could gift her,
has been to help free her from the dark claws that encircled her.
I cannot say it was easy,

that the darkness wasn't real,
that the jaws that held were not iron black.
We escorted her spirit -- she looked like a brilliant white bird,
as she encountered the light.

Yeah she looked like a brilliant white bird.
________________________________________

Most of you reading this have lost someone, you hold dear.

A best friend, a father, a mother, a sister, brother…

or worse a child.

Now unlike a Van Gogh Maria has not left paintings behind.

Or like the singer she once wanted to be,

there’s no Janice Joplin songs, trailing through the air

to celebrate her free spirit.

No.

But what she left behind however was something deeper

than Janice’s songs or Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
It’s a memory of sunshine in human form.

And here’s an excerpt of what Celia sent Maria’s family:

"Maria is no longer with us,
but her smile is.
I promise to smile a great Maria smile more often,
to live more as Maria I loved did, arms wide open.

"I suggest you do so too. "

Go ahead smile a Maria smile.

Go ahead smile the smiles they couldn’t,

dance the dances they can’t.

Live for two.

Love & Light,

Tarun for Celia

The Darkness of Elephants. By Tarun. For Appicha & a time gone by.

Some children fear the dark.
Perhaps you did.

Perhaps you were lead
by an elder sister
past the fanged bogeyman.
I was.

In Kerala, when my father grew up,
one way to face the dark,
was to run beneath an elephant,
if of course you had a granddad
who had an elephant
or two.

You are 12.
And an elephant’s huge.
Even now when it comes with dancing flames
at Ayyappa time
and we stand at the balcony and watch
it is, well… huge.

On the one hand an elephant.
On the other the added enticement
of an elephant hair ring
and of course an end to mockery
by those who cannot see the dark in the dark..

Think of the two to three tons
of a grown elephant
and think of a child’s bones
that can snap as easily as twigs.

Scurrying like a mouse
he runs.
Down the dark weight
to the light.
Scrambling among the leaves.

Sometimes the way to face a fear
is replace it with a greater fear.

Sometimes the way to face it
is to face it.


(For those who like sequels – my father didn’t get an elephant hair ring. His fear of the dark gradually fell away. Maybe it was the ‘elephant courage’ that gave him the courage to face railway strikes and a fair share of life, maybe.)

The Luminous Word. Translator Tarun

Early Saturday. Sun still stretching. Ensconced in a chair downstairs at an open window. I look out and the tree in front of our home giggles. Did sparrows tickle the toes, or the breeze? Toss the book I was reading aside. It’s displaced by a subtly inserted thought. ‘Knowledge does not rest in books, but it may rest in them, light like a bird on a branch.’

Seize pen, rough sheets, as I write it down, a shaft of slanting, morning light catches the paper. Bringing a troop of light and shadow, leaf dancing and gold catching the fur of the page. I stop struck. As I bring the point of my pen down again, I am in for a greater surprise. The light hits the metallic shaft and throws glorious reflections. As I write it turns into a dizzying arabesque.

Before the words, like heralds, go rippling shimmers. Behind come hard angular shadows. My mind ponders: If before me the universe strews light. And behind me is that which is ruled by gravity and shadow. Then where am I? Something deep inside me goes ‘boing’ like a Japanese mega drum.

I am at the cusp between light and gravity. We are at the point where possibility turns into experience and experience into fact. Busy nose deep in the textures of life, we don’t notice the shivers of light we send out ahead. We are not privy to how light turns heavy, becomes physical, is the ground we walk on. We don’t see that the moment, beautifully arrayed around us in all its incredible detail, comes from the stylus of our being.

There’s a feeling that we are chasing the light. That we can catch it. That when we open the fingers of our being it will still be there. I open my fingers. It is here.

Rat-velations

Ratvelations
For awhile, we had an unwelcome squatter. A rat took up residence at our home. More specifically the back of our fridge.

It was not just any other rat. It was a fat, nimble, and very smart rat. Out came The Rat Trap. A rusted box, but one that’s caught no less than 25 rats in the last many years. First we tried bread. No bite. Then went in coconut. He tripped it. With disdain. We bought another rat trap, a 200 buck contraption. No use.

As the days passed and turned to weeks he dug deep into the insulation of the fridge. The stench of rat spread. Nights became a siege with us locking every bedroom. Finally, we called a fridge tech who unscrewed the back. It hid deeper. Finally, it left its fortress. What followed was 15 minutes of desperate hunt. The Tech with a wicked umbrella. Me with hammer. And Buffy raging and barking. It climbed bookshelves, ran up curtains, scurried around curios, sprinted round the drawing room, doubled back to the kitchen, back to the fridge… Then Buffy pounced, ancient hunting patterns took over and blood sprayed in delicate shivers, like a Jackson Pollock in his rat phase.

Buffy was pleased as punch with herself. And earned a sausage.

The house came back to order, we stopped leaping and picking a hammer when a shadow moved. Over tea, Celu & I talked, and we realized that we had both, very grudgingly, learnt to respect the rat. It’s sheer cunning, its indomitable sense of life… Were we sort of suffering from The Stockholm syndrome in a minor way?

A day later, I decided to connect with its spirit…. Here are the words of its inner spirit.

The Rat: “I came to earth to learn the ferocity of Life. In your terms I lived 6 months. By your standards, many life times. I hold no grudge against your dog, for killing me. Right to my dying breath I lived. You do not. You live in bursts.

I came to you to teach you how something small can be powerful. To teach you about nature – not just the cartoonish picture. To respect what you hate. No matter how much you feared me, you drew a line at poisoning.

I heard you asking me to leave – why would I? The space {in the fridge} was mine was home.

Much of the time you were in my head as I was in yours. I got through your defenses and so you can get through the wall around you. At inner levels our motives are like the wires I encountered in the fridge.

What puzzled me was your fear. How could you who are so gigantic be afraid of me?

I am a warrior. By fighting for my life, I fought for yours.

I will return to earth, not as a mouse, and meet you. The encounter should be interesting.”

The Worth of a Goddess

Take P in to meet her deepest self. Her Goddess Form.

What can it do for me? She asks. Clearly it hasn't registered what's happening. Can she get more money, a quicker promotion?

What use are your breasts we ask her? How much milk can it give? She's not had a baby so the answer's none. Just because they don't give milk, are they useless? Vestigeal?

The first challenge when encountering a deeper force, is to realise it's real.

The second, to realise that just as your mom is more than a dinner-serving machine, God is more than a dispensing machine of favours.

The Solar Eclipse. July 22.

There are two kinds of folks. Those who think the Eclipse does terrible things. Then there's those that think it does nothing.

Decided to check it out. Watched the energy of it. What the Solar Eclipse alignment does is dampen the outer energies and gives the earth shaktis greater play.

For mineral energies the effect is interesting. Almost electric. For plants and lizards it offers renewal. A renegotiation. For the consciousness of the earth, it's vitalising. For us humans the actual effect is minimal for the kind of forces that really thrive on this aren't linked up with the small pond, that is our universe. And it's only those who have really heavy soul twists who will be impacted.

Now the effect it does have is a mixed bag. While it allows subconscious filth greater access, it also makes that easier to spot. It tinges things with lostness but it also lets in greater depth. So making love at eclipse time appears to be particularly powerful. But the children will be less tame, less obedient. Going beyond the soul a trifle easier. Loosing certitudes easier. Meeting the shaktis simpler.

PS: Looked at the semi cut sun. Kinda hurt the eyes.

After Swine Flu comes something worse.

While intuiting about swine flu we got good news and bad news. Good news, while swine flu will touch many only a few thousand will die of it.

However we got the less pleasant message. That something terrifying is possibly arriving in its wake. Is it a mutant virus or bacteria? We're not sure. Only that it resembles a ball and in a cluster looks like a tape.

However, we are not helpless, we can ask for another possibility, another future where this new epidemic doesn't arrive.

Here's what you can do. Give healing to the earth. Imagine it is filled and surrounded by the colour orange. Or if you are an advanced healer go upto the soul level and shower light down on the clouds surrounding us.

The Logic of Emotion

Here’s a film that Neeti Ray passed on to us. Revealing the connect between emotion and reality.

What a beautifully crystalline logic emerges from this:

Thought Thread 1. Emotion influences water. Or emotion influences the world. The world around us reflects our emotive charge. Small or great. Ergo: U create your own reality.

Thought Thread 2. That which is influenced by emotion is alive. Water is alive. Stone is alive. Tree is alive. Space is alive. The world is alive.

Thought Thread 3. The world is not matter but energy, quantum. The world is living energy. The world is E+motion. The world is emotion. We are feeling crystallised, thought given body.

You can know this by photographing water crystals. Or as we do by opening one's eyes, seeing auras, intuiting directly.

Years ago in DH, Ravishankar argued those who aren't happy should be taxed. {Loose summation of argument}. An interesting thought. It reverses our value of success. Relooks at our current over-respect of the ability to think and restores our appreciation of emotion.

Taken to extreme however it demands a feeling police. A world with a single season. For do we keep only love and throw out the rest? But is this love or fear masked as love. Fear of grief, rage, envy. A rainbow without red of anger, without green of envy, without the indigo of grief turns grey. To me, the feeling of being angry is more uncomfortable than when I am suffocatingly loving. Yet both can hurt. A greater love embraces them all.

It’s necessary to remember that from wars have come invention, from emotive storms come acts of genius. From the rainbow of emotion comes life’s richness. When raised to the power of love, it blazes.

The Blessedness of Nakedness.

Ochre-ing and Buffy’s red root therapy.

One of Celia’s cousins, {also into healing and spirituality} sent us a picture of herself going through a shamanistic practice {rediscovered by the new age} called Ochreing. And what is Ochreing? Simple, take off your clothes and get someone to cover you in mud.

The mud chosen is often from a hot spring and so is often a sulphurous yellow, though the connoisseurs of mud have preferences from red earth, dead sea mud… to being buried by sea sand.

The variation of substances used to cover oneself is broader than mud… In India, Tantrics often use ash, and in some cases ashes of someone who’s died. In some cases of the high north, animal fat is used… Cleopatra did it in milk, a ghastly Vlad princess used the blood of peasants. Other potent substances include menstrual blood and urine. The most common one, not thought of as ochreing in India, is the oil bath.

The broad effect ochreing {The classic mud variation} has on the aura is 2 fold.
1. It causes a ball of blazing energy to form at the root chakra area.
2. It causes the etheric aura to grow and brighten. The colour tinge varies and becomes a trifle purplish.

Not surprising for Ochreing conceals many potent psychic acts:-
The act of taking off one’s clothes. {The mere act of taking off one’s clothes gets the root chakra cone between the legs to lengthen a few inches.}
The act of allowing the energy of mud to work on one. {This causes deep earth charkas to light and can cleanse the skin.}
The act of standing before someone else naked. {This principally affects the back of sacral chakra & solar plexus egoic complex.}
The act of being touched by another’s hands. {This {do u need to be told?} principally affects the root & heart chakras.}

Now ochreing is an attempt to reach back to a more earthy, natural, animal self. And so it’s not something that came from humans, but is a gift from animal and earthly forces.

Sometime back, we’d taken Buffy on a ten km walk, around the Varthur lake, since the dogs kept running and crissssssssscrosssssssing. They probably did 20 kms more. Buffy was exhausted. Instead of just curling up, she spent a good half an hour digging a pit in Nishi’s garden. Then she settled into it. Ten minutes later her root chakra was glowing a brilliant red, and her whole aura was brighter. Ochreing was in her bones.

Now since many of you have neither the time or the inclination to go ochreing a simpler but less exciting solution is at hand. Gardening. Uses your bare hands to dig the mud and squish the slush. You get almost 60% of the aura benefit, from this absurdly homely task! Which as you now see is fairly pagan. So the next time someone tells you they’re going gardening or having an oil bath, you know what they are upto!

Was reading some statistics the other day, and it said that roughly 65% of Indians live in one or two room homes. And that means that both Indian children are tangentially more aware of sexual activity. It also means that growing adolescents and young adults are less aware of their bodies. Many have to have baths with at least some clothes on. Many don’t have a full-length mirror and so have had no visual take on themselves. And so one of the most potent acts of self-awareness we’ve often recommended has simply been the act of looking at oneself in a mirror and reveling in one’s nakedness.

When you add to this the fact that many orthodox traditions in India like those abroad believe that the sole justification for sexuality is to have children, one begins to see how the simplest acts are sometimes so laden with meaning.

We humans live our lives by rules sometimes inconceivably distorted to our animal selves, enchaining ourselves, amputating ourselves… and yet however deep the cut, deeper lies the cure, for none can stop the earth from whispering in our blood, or drumming in our bones.

The Fool's Teacher

Once upon a time some men tried to teach a fool.

They put four oranges before him and tried to explain mathematics.

But the fool only gobbled them up.

Then they gave him a holy book to read.

But in winter he fed it to the fire to warm himself.

So they beat him up.

And then the fool went proudly round the neighbourhood and showed his bruises
and said see “I've got learning.”

This fable is from the ebook 'The Fable Tree' by Tarun Cherian. If you would like to order a copy of the same, please email us on creatorschild@gmail.com

Once upon a time, a man saw. He really saw a tree. It was so beautiful. To let others know what he saw, he put a label – beautiful tree. Then another walking along the path saw the sign. He liked the idea. When walking, he came to a cliff with a great sunset. He labelled it – cliff with great sunsets. Over time the whole world was covered with labels. And you couldn’t see the trees or the clouds or the sunsets.
So a man suggested – tear down the signs. Now there are three optional endings to this fable.

A) They repainted all the signs with the message – Lets tear down the signs.
B) They tore down the signs – then after a while fresh signs appeared.
C) They actually tore down the signs – and saw.

Tarun on 'Seeing'

I am alone.
But I have so many facets, so I am never alone

Celu on LIFE