as it were

"I think today of burning glass; these clear green trees standing in the deep grass, covered with white flowers, from some happier time...

I had, fleetingly, this morning, a sense of the world, one's life, one's friends and lovers as a given. Here it all is, comprehensible, lovely, a sort of paradise. That this will be taken as swiftly as it is given is difficult to remember."

---John Cheever.

Is there such thing as a muslim sensibility? Probably not, but if there was it would be a kind of mellow materialism, not a rigorous asceticism, one that is fully attentive to the beauty of the world without giving in to hedonism or a glitzy sensuality. To know how to give each thing its proper due, not in an overly formal way, but from the inside, as it were. Not a narrowing down of the ego (khudi) but a deepening of it, an enlargement of one's capacity to connect. Already 'ego', 'mind' are the wrong words: the person..now, that's the thing, this inescapable jumble of contradictions!

The Red Man would say: intelligence without character is not really intelligence. And what is character but the groundwork of our being, the formation of habits of right action, clear thinking, disciplined freedom, all nurtured by memory, desire, other people. There is no determinate self without other people: I-we. A life held in common; a common life, commonplace. Each person is a new perspective on a given world, is part and parcel of revelation itself. For is it not written: the creation of a single soul is like the creation of the universe?

Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality.

--Hannah A.

~~~

There are many journeys made in the fading light of mid-morning; the carriages half-empty, the world, like your mind, elsewhere. The rain pelting down at an angle, the red paint peeling away to reveal an indifferent grey. The painted number somewhat familiar, numbers announcing our arrivals and departures now. At a stand still at Stratford, the engines still growling like a crouching beast, the doors flung open, full of ambiguity. Yesterday's papers still littering the dirty seats. Names and loves forgotten. Here we are, on our predestined paths, indifferently floating above all haste, each person isolated in his own suspended dream. Down the sloping tunnel, the intermittent light flashing across our faces, jolting us into recognition. When we emerge, where shall we be? As we were, as it were?

Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

---Kabir (Robert Bly).