A Blue Star

mihi quaestio factus sum ----Augustine

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Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

------Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

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Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves.

----A Tibetan Buddhist saying

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How would it end..

What did I do to be so black and blue?

----Louis Armstrong.

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People, loved ones, from a distance always remain the same. On returning, though, they are not the same.

I once saw a blue star. I forget the time, it was a few years back. It was not unexpected though. In fact, the papers had been predicting a "significant" event for some time leading up to its actual appearance. Except no-one could tell where and when it would be seen, and as a result most people lost interest in it. But then it arrived, like a stranger from another vast desert that had mistakenly made its way into our corner of the universe, or like a silver fragment that has abandoned another way of life. It was so blue that the whole of the late summer evening sky took on this strangely beautiful hue. And yet the star remained the star-unique and at the same time absorbed in this infinite sea...like a guest that picks up the accent of the host but remains an outsider nevertheless...

For an ancient mind her appearance would not seem that odd, though. Perhaps this was a journey repeated every 10 million years or so? All wonder is lost in mechanism. Just as for a great oak the life and death of a flower is nothing and passes in a twinkling of its eye, so it is that the life and death of the oak is a but a flicker of time in the consciousness of the stone.

Many seasons have passed now (seven, to be precise). And I guess I'll never see that blue again, the very essence of blue itself. And perhaps it only came as a reminder: that we, too, are confused strangers here, tangled, mortal selves, surrounded by unfathomable depths but also living with a blueness that is within...

One could spend one's whole life searching to find that blue again. But it will never come. That much I know. And if it does, then who is to say that I too may too lose interest, or maybe I will not be myself then but somebody else? But that wild blue yonder will always speak to us with the tender voice of those who have long passed away. Calling us, gently reminding us, that the blue of distance can never be overcome, never become accessible, and that all our games are just a version of our childhood ones of 'lost and found'; in that startling instant, I am not I, and You are not You: Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum

So, now I look in the mirror and do not recognize myself. I smile. Yearning makes the heart grow deeper.

At the end of the day:

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, the expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment,the range of experience seemed limitless...

Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep, but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.