Decoding magic...or maybe not.

This time of year, oh this time of the year.

Holiday food, fatness, snow, or simply cooler weather, family, friends, get-togethers, the start of a new year.

I love the first the few hours of January 1st. The world is alive with activity but also sleepy, like a period of time that doesn't quite have any real meaning. Like a lull. Like frozen time. Like it wouldn't make a difference if everything started or ended.

Of course, there's hope just thinking about the possibilities within the new year, like writing a new numerical digit in the date, like feeling old, like being astonished. But in those few hours, there is a spacey nothingness. Every year when I go to sleep at around 2 am (or later) on 1st of January, I wake up to a whole new day, feeling new in many different ways, even though it's all completely psychological. And when I wake up I attempt to do all those things that I'd like to do in the rest of the year. It's my aspiration day and I have as much fun planning it as much as actually living it out. The most beautiful thing about the aspiration day though is simply living it out and then at the end of the day looking at it and seeing whether any of it really matched the trajectory of the year I lived out.

So as this year sort-of-ish ends I'm thinking of January 1st 2010. A three-course dinner to bring in that night, a little bit of tipsiness for reasons unbeknownst to me (I was alcohol-free, I promise), a leisurely day by the beach in Santa Cruz. It was beautiful. And now, I'm looking through the journal I started that day. I wrote a post about fear, about being scared of the possibility of never being scared but I also feared tremendously the possibility of never being able to rise above the fear. And in that submission to fear, I had a weird realization about the vulnerability of humans and human bodies. I wrote of feeling suddenly aware of my muscles and tendons that stretched and turned and played around. Looking back now, I realize that maybe that was the day I made the decision (albeit an unconscious one) to submit to my humanness. In some ways, that has been the entire year for me - a submission to my inner writer, my inner wanderer, my inner risk-taker, my inner meditator, my inner human who stops isolating herself from the world around.

Maybe this is me reading meanings into everything in life because, honestly, that's something I'm great at. But a part of me genuinely believes that this is merely the result of my true being merging gracefully, honestly with the divine of the universe.

How then can I not believe in the possibility of subconscious requests to the universe fulfilling themselves?

Can the poets please stand up?

Conflict, peace studies, militancy, violence, sociology, hegemony, colonization, revolution.

Bas. Bahut ho gaya. Enough with the political jargon, I say. 

Or rather, can the political jargon please coexist with literature? 

I've been reading news articles and scholarly journals, books and opinion pieces and all of them shed so much light on the world, its issues and mankind in general. But today, upon someone's suggestion, I encountered work by Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri American poet and was dazzled by the intensity of reality and emotion that the paucity of words can lend to understanding. Poetry has the ability to touch heart strings that we don't even think exist. So can we please begin meshing creativity with what we deem to be intellectual or expository or academic instead of confining issues into boxes? Can we make space for a revolution in education/knowledge-gaining through creativity? 

Here's a poem. It's long but please read it, absorb it, let it seep into you. And then tell me: can a person walk away from this? 

Farewell

          - Agha Shahid Ali

At a certain point I lost track of you.
 They make a desolation and call it peace.
 when you left even the stones were buried:
 the defenceless would have no weapons.

 When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,
 who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
 O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
 who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
 They make a desolation and call it peace.
 Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

 My memory is again in the way of your history.
 Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
 In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
 winter- its crushed fennel.
 We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

 In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
 reflections.

 Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
 centuries later in this country
 I have stitched to your shadow?

 In this country we step out with doors in our arms
 Children run out with windows in their arms.
 You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
 if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

 At a certain point I lost track of you.
 You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
 In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
 Your history gets in the way of my memory.
 I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
 I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
 Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

 I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
 Exquisite ghost, it is night.

 The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
 It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
 I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
 if it had pity on me.

 If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
 have happened in the world?

 I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
 My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
 There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
 I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

 There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

 If only somehow you could have been mine,
 what would not have been possible in the world?

-- Agha Shahid Ali