On the other hand, that sort of squishy, bloated, heavy softness of moths’ bodies and their voracious appetites for things I’d rather have kept to myself (dry goods in the pantry, tender leaves in the garden, and favorite fine woolens) fills me with nervousness that makes the revulsion they inspire in horror stories utterly plausible to me. I can’t help but remember the sweltering summer night when I was young and my family, having been out for a happy holiday evening, stopped at the local gas station to refill the bottomless tank of our giant station wagon; since it was so sweltering, we all piled out of the car to go into the tiny, grubby cashier’s hut where an electric fan was humming and, having an uneasy sense of something untoward behind me, I turned around to see a veritable dust storm of fat moths, attracted by the shop’s fluorescent lights, throwing themselves in spongy, flapping frenzy at the glaring glass until it was almost opaque with their wing-scale dust. Oh, yes, and the fabulously nasty short story ‘The Cocoon’ (John B. L. Goodwin) has never quite left my subconscious mind (awake or asleep) once I read it a few decades ago.

On top of all this, I married a guy who had once had a small moth fly into his ear, get caught and frantic, and instead of finding its way out, worked its creepy, fluttering way right down to beat against his eardrum until a doctor could eventually get the creature out of there. Enough said. I can still look, at times, with a certain dispassionate interest and think of moths as intriguing bits of scientific wonder and visual astonishment, and then I must quickly look away again and reassure myself that there’s not something truly wrong with them. I did at least decide to write a little bit to see if, in the incident of the attack on my husband’s ear, I could imagine the experience from the moth’s point of view.

Labyrinth

I crawled the narrow halls in

Darkness ever deepening,

Thinking I might find some clear way through

But too tightly fitted in, too close,

No chance of going back or backing out,

No scent I could recognize to bring me

Back to the distant shore,

No vision, not a speck of spectral light to give

A guide around those curves crepuscular, those turns

Winding ever more toward claustrophobia, to where

The heat was growing more intense, the sound

Of a pulsing drum seeming to speak of waves, making

Me dream the ocean lay ahead—but behind me, in

The now impenetrable night, some Thing, a dragon

It seemed to me, began to drown the liquid lure

Of the drumbeat ahead with its own more frightful,

Louder noise, and then to scrabble wildly at me

With its terrifying claws, at which it seemed

The labyrinth must finally swallow me and

Draw me down into its fatal end—but then—

In a turn of events that was quite shockingly detached

From any turns my path had made

Thus far, the whole puzzling place tipped

Over on its side—there I lay, too fixed

In the halls’ constricting ways to turn and follow or

To roll, and the sea broke forth on me at last, a rush

Of saline waves tearing upon me, heaving me out

Of where I’d wedged, and in a cataract, sent me

Blasting right back through all the sightless turns

Of that preternatural dark, shot me with my sodden

Useless wings back into blazing day where I

Could lie, quivering faintly in my long-lost world,

Deciding whether it was time to die or time

To spread my fragile wings and see

If there was any life left in them.

And when he goes,
he leaves plectrums.
Piles of plectrums.

And empty bottles of Jack.

 – Benjamin F Jones

I am going through my old work – oodles of drivelling angst from when I was a teenager. I found this from a time when I filled up poetry with punctuation and capitalisation. This is one of the few that doesn’t rhyme. Hard to believe that it is 23 years old.

Polly Robinson © 2012

a work which reminds me of becky routley‘s illustrations mainly in the colours used and the detail which goes for photo reality. such an unusual expression. imagine really being eaten by moths. i guess that would feel kind of annoying though i’m not entirely at ease that kind of annoyed matches the facial expression here. see more detail here.

Background to the post:

Today, one of my best friends, a master chef in the making, had a luncheon at his place. We discussed Bridgestone tyres, Michael Schumacher, the JNNURM buses, the idiosyncrasies of an old lady wanting to stay young, auntie’s obsession with the current Delhi Belly jingle and almost every other weird topic that you can think of. The discussion moved to my current fascination, the devadasis in the Indian temples; during which I discovered that uncle, who was a connoisseur of art in all forms, especially dance, had researched on the maharis and devadasis and had an article to his credit. This got me into a flurried frenzy of rummaging through his room, which housed his belongings in the exact position as it used to be, before he left for his heavenly abode.

Coming back to the post, I discovered archaic letters and diaries stacked neatly, albeit with a layer of dust, in one of the cupboards, slightly cracked with a sliding glass door. Those were his personal musings and letters to his loving wife, which I deemed best to keep away. However, scrawled on one of his picture memoirs, was a verse which read Dec’94 and left me rooted to the ground for a while. I believe he was a man of innate sensitivity and profundity. I would also like to believe that the verse if shared with a wider audience, will fulfill its purpose of having been penned down. It goes it this manner: “One can fathom the true beauty of life, only when lived alone. If you share your life with someone, you can only experience half the world. However, if you do not, the whole world in its entirety belongs to you”.

Vivid flashes of the times spent with him, came back to me, with an urgency, I cannot explain. Needless to say, the feeling of just respect, will be an understatement.

Methodical rows of recorded cassettes graced the sides of the bed. Long playing (LP) phonograph records heightened the creative essence, so prevalent in the space around. Books on various dance forms lined the shelves, almost screaming out to be felt and read and understood. An invitation card for the opening of Nrityagram, the dance school by Protima Bedi, fell out from one of the hard bound books. As I went through the cursive text, I wondered what his thoughts would have been, while reading the same.

A gifted creative soul does not single out one passion in life and hence the multiple engagements he kept himself busy with. The genre moved to books on photography and various international journals on music as well. Various musical instrumentals, enveloped in dusty black bags, laced the corners of the room and bed too. On opening another antiquated trunk, I discovered piles of books, ranging from Animal Farm to Osho’s Golden Nuggets and The Autobiography of Jimi Hendrix to that of Beatles.

What perhaps will always remain with me, however, is a book by the name of Gitanjali. This wasn’t the one written by Tagore. The anthology of poems was written by an adolescent cancer patient, who has described the beauty of life, as she fathomed, through the window of her hospital room. She passed away soon after. A gift to his wife on their first anniversary, the message reading…May your life be as beautiful as these poems, in mirth and in sorrow! I was choked and almost in tears. I can best put into words, my feelings through William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” :

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

Achieve. What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down.

Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.
~ December 28 prompt

As I’ve already said, I want to be debt-free by the end of 2011 in order to manage to make a huge change in my life.

I know I’m gonna need help on that front as I’m just not particularly sensible with money. I’ll need to do a bunch of research and take a cold hard look at my money spending/saving habits in the house of mirrors. But I know it’s possible if I am relentless in my thriftiness!

But… oh gosh, how will I feel once I get to that point? Of being debt-free? In the clear? Out of the red?

I’ll feel…

• proud
• purposeful
• accomplished
• excited
• relieved
• Oh, and free

Yeah, definitely!

Because I’ll be on my way, with Part 1 of my Grand-Bold-Stupid-Reckless-Awesome-Totally-Kicking-Life-Plan done and dusted!

So how can I feel/think those feelings right now, with that goal of mine still off in the distant future?

Hmmmm… I’m proud of how far I’ve come, the shit storms I’ve had to face and how deeply I’ve had to dig for the truth. Its way better out than in.

I most definitely feel purposeful already. Dudes, I got myself a plan, the first one I’ve had in YEARS. And that causes a huge amount of excitement!!

There’s a lot of stuff I feel accomplished in – such as completing my first yoga teacher training and having the courage to start teaching. Although… that’s not to say there isn’t more to learn and become accomplished in for those things. Just that hey… what I’ve done so far is cool.

I guess I’m relieved that I know where I’m going for once. Even if my plan changes, even if nothing works out like I want it to, at least I’ve worked out what I want. That really helps.

There’s freedom in being clear about what I don’t want, too. And in the joy of learning to teach, discovering new things about myself and other people as I do. There’s even freedom in making mistakes along that journey because those mistakes inform and refine what I say and do while I teach.

And all of it gently leading me onwards, sometimes with a gentle nudge and other times more forcefully. Forging this new, expanded sense of self: a version of me with a wide open heart, smiling, and with a direct line to my gut instincts at all times…

::

Defining Moment. Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year.
~ December 29 prompt

A series of defining events, you say? Yessum, I got those!

This year has been choc-full of Big Healing Moments. But rather than give you the reader’s digest version, y’all can read (or re-read) these posts if you like…

• Rock ‘n’ Roll, Love, Hate & The Universe – on how sometimes your greatest nightmares can manifest right in front of your face…
• And so now for the Epic-ness – on sisterly love and finally being seen…
• Happy 5 year anniversary to me! – on what happened on the very night at the very time this post was being written 5 years later…
• Blowing up the Death Star – on what I did with all that anniversary business…

We all have defining moments, don’t we? But unless you write them down they’re easy to forget, their colours fading like a painting left in the sun. What was once vibrant and colourful becomes watery looking and a little fuzzy around the edges.

Especially if your memory is anything like mine: all pock-marked, moth-eaten and ragged around the edges.

Reading back over some of my earliest blog posts, I’m sometimes surprised by what I’ve written. The intensity of those experiences, how desperately sad and devastating it all was… thank goodness I don’t feel like that now.

It’s the nature of pain to fade – even if it takes years to do so – becoming less sharp and pointy over time, turning into a strong memory that’ll never be forgotten. But it fades so we can keep going. So we can survive.

Of course, it’s not like I’ll ever forget what happened but it’s a good thing to have a record, like this blog. If I hadn’t spent so much time writing about it, I might’ve completely forgotten what it was like to be in those moments and I sure as hell wouldn’t have worked through things as (relatively) quickly as I have. Five years isn’t too bad, right?

But I won’t allow myself to forget entirely. If I did, then how could I ever help someone else who is dealing with PTSD, depression or anxiety?

The writing helps me work through the worst of it, and also helps others in need of their own dose of hope. I know this because every now and then I get an email or a comment on one of my posts that says as much. I can’t tell you how much those messages make my heart sing!

So I write about my defining moments because there is hope, there is healing, and somewhere out there is what the BlissChick calls “Big Happy” for all of us.

~Svasti xxx