The book as a sacred space

In my last I gave a quirky personal response to Bryan’s request for a piece about sacred places; quirky because conditioned by personal circumstance, geography, history, temperament—and a unique moment. After posting it, I felt a yearning to express something more inclusive, more universal. I don’t think it is possible to express anything universal unless and until you can be deeply personal, delving entirely into your own experience, not repeating any fashionable opinion. Years ago I discussed this point with Ghetu. We agreed that “The personal is the universal!” I don’t know where we found that saying: perhaps in one of 40,000 instances catalogued by Google. If it’s true, all persons share an essence. Some call it God. Others say that Atman, Sanskrit for individual essence, equates to Brahman, Sanskrit for the Universal Spirit. As we used to say, “Far out!” Let that idea evaporate into the ethers whence it belongs, while we come back down to earth.

In my last I mentioned literature as one of the places where sacred spaces can be made and found. In a comment on the post before that, “Drifting Away”, DaRev2005 (I call him Rev) said “most if not all of my sacred places are books or songs”. That stuck in my head, set me brooding. And now as my fingers dance on the keyboard, while I look out the window to yonder hill shrouded in mist, as in my upper photo, I suddenly understand why it was, late last night, that I turned to the Book of Psalms, in search of an example. (The second photo shows a rainbow moment from another day.) Actually, I was looking for no. 121, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”, but never got there, as I shall relate.

I have two bibles. Both contain text of the King James Authorised Version. One is the Holy Bible. Being no Christian, I treat it as a ritual object. It’s also handy for look-up, as the chapters and verses are all numbered. The other one is The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature, edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates and first published in 1936. I was introduced to it at school aged ten. Sixty years later, I have my own treasured copy. It wasn’t for religion’s sake that we studied the Bible’s stories and poems. It was for culture’s sake, to be schooled in our own civilization. These were the tales and songs of our tribe, and in learning them we were little different from any tribe of Aborigines learning the oral traditions of their Dream Time. Can anything be much more universal than that?

Today  is the 70th anniversary of Desert Island Discs, a BBC radio programme in which celebrities are interviewed about their life, interspersed with their personal selection of eight gramophone records. At the end, they are invited to choose one book and one luxury to take along to the desert island on which they are to imagine themselves marooned. Following the programme’s tradition, they are reminded that the Bible and Shakespeare will be provided in any case. Like millions of people in Britain, I often wonder about my desert island choices. It’s less morbid than choosing music for one’s funeral. I’ve decided, quirky as it may be, that when they start inviting nonentities on the programme, I’ll ask for the Bible as Literature as my book choice.

Let it speak on its own behalf. First this, from the Introduction by Laurence Binyon, poet:

Some time about the end of the last century I remember waiting for a train at a little country station; and I was approached by an old shepherd in a smock-frock who, I learned, was making the alarming adventure of travelling by train (to the next station) for the first time. We fell into talk, and as he told me of his frugal life and the contrast between present conditions and those of his youth, when there was never enough to eat, and he had “neither home nor habitation,” I was struck by the Biblical character of the speech in which his thoughts seemed to find their natural expression. The Bible probably was the only book he knew; its language had soaked into his mind and fitted all the needs of his ancient solitary calling.... His world is gone, his language is heard no more..

Now I turn to the middle of the book, to “The Book of Psalms: an anthology of sacred poetry”. Here’s no. 104, where I wondrously find the proper answer to a comment made by Billy (BBC), appended to my last-but-one post. I’d said I’d “been seething with ideas for a post on sacred places”. “What the f— for?” he responded. “Isn’t the place you are standing (or sitting) on this very moment sacred? No one place is more sacred than another.” And of course he was right. And this is what the anonymous poet-psalmist expresses below. Joyously he sets out a great vision of ecological wholeness, undiminished by ignorance of modern science. Nowadays we have the scientific and technological visions together with updated definitions of “sinners” and “wickedness”. New ideas, true or false, have arisen to poison our minds with fear, in place of the poet’s reverent certainty, his vision of a single beneficent uniting force. A modern atheist fears that there is no such force, that the fragile agents of harmony can break. Who knows? In any case it is sad.

In the old-style Bible, typography* as in my illustration above inhibits the eye and soul from seeing this poem as it truly should be seen, below.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.
O Lord my God, thou art very great;
Thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment;
Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters;
Who maketh the clouds his chariot;
Who walketh upon the wings of the wind;
Who maketh his angels spirits,
His ministers a flaming fire;
Who laid the foundations of the earth,
That it should not be removed for ever.
Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment;
The waters stood above the mountains.
At thy rebuke they fled;
At the voice of thy thunder they hastened away.
They go up by the mountains, they go down by the valleys
Unto the place which thou hast founded for them.
Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over,
That they turn not again to cover the earth.
He sendeth the springs into the valleys,
Which run among the hills.
They give drink to every beast of the field;
The wild asses quench their thirst.
By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation,
Which sing among the branches.
He watereth the hills from his chambers:
The earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.
He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle,
And herb for the service of man:
That he may bring forth food out of the earth;
And wine that maketh glad the heart of man,
And oil to make his face to shine,
And bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.
The trees of the Lord are full of sap,
The cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted,
Where the birds make their nests;
As for the stork, the fir trees are her house.
The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats,
And the rocks for the conies.
He appointed the moon for seasons;
The sun knoweth his going down.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night,
Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey,
And seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together,
And lay them down in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work
And to his labour until the evening.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works!
In wisdom hast thou made them all;
The earth is full of thy riches.
So is this great and wide sea,
Wherein are things creeping innumerable,
Both small and great beasts.
There go the ships;
There is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.
These wait all upon thee,
That thou mayest give them their meat in due season.
That thou givest them they gather;
Thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good.
Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled;
Thou takest away their breath, they die,
And return to their dust.
Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created,
And thou renewest the face of the earth.
The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever;
The Lord shall rejoice in his works.
He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth;
He toucheth the hills, and they smoke.
I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.
My meditation of him shall be sweet;
I will be glad in the Lord.
Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth,
And let the wicked be no more.
Bless thou the Lord, O my soul.
Praise ye the Lord.

Yes, that would be my desert island choice.

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Postscript I didn’t want to weigh down the main post with more quotes, so shall append here this further extract from Laurence Binyon’s Introduction, especially apposite in relation to Psalm 104 above, as if the author had it in mind at the time.

It was De Quincey, I think who noted in the precept ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath’ something characteristic of the literature of the Bible; namely, the seeking for a harmony, a correspondence, between the actions of mankind and the larger movements of the universe in which man’s life is set. And I think that this is one thing that may especially impress the mind in reading Hebrew poetry. There is no description of things for their own sake; they are vividly seen, but all things are related to one another; we are made aware of them all—the mountains and the streams, the vineyards, the olives, the desert places, the sheep and cattle, the wild ass and the lion in the wilderness, the tender grass, the rocks, the sea and the ships upon the sea, the fishes under the water, the stars, the rain, the wind and in all this world men moving and going about their business, acting, suffering and rejoicing; all these are related to one another because united by the presence in the poet’s consciousness of the pervading power of the invisible Creator. A modern reader may have quite other ideas about the constitution of the universe, a quite different approach to it; but he will hardly deny that it is a living and mysterious whole; and through this profound conviction of the pervading, eternal spirit, touching all life with a kind of glory, Hebrew poetry has a grandeur of horizon together with a kindling warmth and passion which we find in no other poetry with the same constancy or to the same degree.
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* “The Bible is the worst-printed book in the world. No other monument of ancient or modern literature suffers the fate of being put before us in a form that makes it impossible without strong effort and considerable training, to take in elements of literary structure which in all other books are conveyed directly to the eye in a manner impossible to mistake.” (Dr R. G. Moulton in his “Literary Study of the Bible”, quoted in Laurence Binyon’s Introduction.) [return]

Sacred places

I approach this subject with a certain awe. I cannot simply tell what I know, in an ordinary state of mind. To be properly aware, I need to be tuned in, and I imagine there may be a set of rules to follow. But not having been formally trained in such rules, I have to discover them for myself. It rather reminds me of Ghetu’s story, in my last. His hero wanted to sail in a boat, but first he had to build it from scratch, acquiring the varied lore of boatbuilding in the process. Having built it, he had to learn how to work with the wind, to become a master mariner.

Books that I’ve recently read convey snatches of the lore whereby sacred places may be recognized and visited. I find myself wanting to quote from them. But I must refer only to what I know, sketchy or part-submerged in the subconscious as that may be. David Abram for example speaks of certain peoples, on the fringes of our civilization or beyond, whose languages don’t stretch to distinguishing space and time; or not as definitely as ours. For the Hopi, there is what we would call a “manifest” reality, and another that we might call the “manifesting”, or that which has not yet come to pass: including what we call the future and what we call the human mind, with all its dreams and plans. Whenever we make ourselves think rationally, we in this Western civilization (fast becoming a mono-civilization, such is its all-devouring power) apply the template of Science, mono-science, if you will; which asks us to see space and time as separate dimensions. Abram also examines the phenomenon of synaesthesia, whereby one sense blurs with another. So that for example in our alphabetic written languages, letters strung into words and sentences are read with the eyes yet felt internally as sounds; whereas someone’s spoken words are heard with the ears yet felt internally as spelled a certain way. And in this we see how much our education has shut off our sense of wonder, to the extent that we take for granted vast realms which don’t exist in oral civilizations, those people with vivid traditional culture but no writing. We are not aware of our blinkers (blinders you may call them). We don’t give indigenous peoples, those “primitive savages”, credit for their own forms of science, which enable them to survive in harmony with nature in ways that we might envy. They have their own scholars and adventurers too, those shamans and hunters and guardians of oral lore.

What is a sacred place? Is it mainstream or occult? Both. I like to define it simply as the place where one might go on a pilgrimage, as to Lourdes or Mecca. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, all kinds of person join for the trip to St Thomas’ tomb. Why? Because there you could touch relics of the murdered Thomas à Becket and benefit from their magic healing powers. People, not all Catholics or even Christians, still flock to Lourdes, for the same reasons. Not all do it for self-healing but they get something from it all the same. My ex-wife used to go, taking one of my socks along to dip in the healing spring, to see if it would cure my chronic illness whilst I stayed behind. Did it work? Possibly, if you allow its effect a long germination period; for it is incontestable that ten years later I was instantaneously cured.

It’s easy to be sceptical and to apply prejudice against superstition. I’ve known my neighbour as a man with many worries, money being not the least of them. He went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. It’s not a cheap package! This was a few months ago. He came back so glowing, I felt it strongly myself and the other Muslims in the street visited his house on their own mini-pilgrimage, to get a taste of it. It might have dimmed a little now, but his worries still don’t seem to have returned. I firmly believe the Hajj to be a superstitious ritual, but as to its beneficial effects, I’m a believer.

For me personally, the sacred place is not superstition but empirical fact. I’ve identified many such places at various times over the last twenty years. You may ask what I mean by this. In the course of my wonderings, I would come to a place where it felt good to be. (“Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if you will, let us make here three tabernacles; one for you, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”—Matthew 17:4) Yes, I felt like making a tabernacle there. But the place would remain unmarked, except in my heart. When I visited again, from curiosity, the feeling would be the same, only more so: stronger each time. So I could imagine from this, that the power of a place revered by many people over hundreds of years would be stronger still. And if this sounds bizarre, consider magnetism (more properly ferromagnetism) before it was scientifically understood. Stroke a needle with a lodestone, float it in water and it points North. Magic, surely.

So that’s a kind of introduction to what I have to say. Two weeks ago, I had just finished reading David Abram’s book, The Spell of the Sensuous. I knew I could not write a review, anything like that, for its effect in my life was too huge. Some of it was still vividly resonating within me, in a process of absorption that may yet take some time. That morning, I went to a diagnostic centre to have my neck X-rayed. I asked the technician to show me the images and say what they meant. There turned out to be nothing deadly, more of an age-related, wear-and-tear thing. To get to the X-ray place, I’d gone on foot through a self-styled Nature Reserve, a shrubby hillside criss-crossed with footpaths. It’s my standard route for destinations due South, a little muddy sometimes but perfectly navigable. On the way back I took a different route, different hillside. My house, you see, is in the main valley, where a little river winds between the old factories and workers’ cottages. Unless you go due West or East, you have no choice but to climb steep hills or the gentler slopes that separate them. I’m speaking to you as one pedestrian to another. Driving a car, you wouldn’t bother yourself much with the lay of the land. I was wandering randomly because lost in thought (“I wander’d lonely as a cloud ...”). I told my thoughts to the little voice recorder I always carry. I was expressing joy at the sudden realization that reason and science are not my enemy at all. I can use all my intelligence, and even be a scientist, gathering data every day. But it’s a different science, one which has continuity with Abram’s “indigenous oral cultures” as well as the more modern tradition of phenomenology, which could be called the science of subjective experience. I felt I was ready to come in from the cold, no longer alienated from the society all around me. I wasn’t condemned to pointless eccentricity, constantly paddling my boat upstream, against the comfortable flow. I could go on living a half-dream-world existence, but be part of a recognized movement essential to the revitalizing and rebalancing of human society, and therefore the entire ecosphere; for both are going sadly askew. It was a nice feeling.

At the end of my rambling monologue into the little device were these words, more or less transcribed verbatim: “And at this very moment, I am now discovering new footpaths, the most wonderful birdsong, new vistas—and it’s all so near where I live.” So there it was, a newly-discovered secret, a sacred place just half a mile from my house. So much for thinking I knew every footpath for a radius of several miles.

With intent to investigate this wonder, I’ve returned there several times since: to dictate ideas, take photos and record the birdsong. K and I visited it yesterday together. I’ve put together a little YouTube thing—see below; whose main purpose is to show you that a sacred place need be nothing special, just some disregarded part of your neighbourhood. This one for example is a plot for low-rent housing erected by the Council.


Below is an edited version of what I dictated. The words came from my mouth, but it seemed to be the place itself which drew them out. It sounds like a sort of recipe, but it’s not meant that way, more as real-time research into what helps me tune myself to the magical.

- - - -

Find a sacred place, enter into its spirit. It doesn’t matter where or what. New spaces can be created where none existed before, as in literature, painting, cyberspace. But your body, your senses, demand to be outdoors, in the great shared space, breathing shared air under the common sky. Obey those senses.

You have to tune yourself to the magical. There are various ways. You have to be directly connected to the space you are travelling through. You cannot be in a car. You could be on a bus, but the space you connect to will be the interior of the bus, with the specimens of Nature it contains at the time. To help tune, try sunrise and sunset; a patch of clear sky; a wall, fence or tree glowing with reflected rays of the sun; a sense of focused expectation, fostered by the performance of ritual, fetish objects, or previous encounters with the place. Fetish objects might be the things you take to the place, such as walking boots, camera, voice recorder, a notebook and pen given by a loved one. For novelist John Cowper Powys, who understood this topic far better than I, it would be a walking stick.

What do you tune to? Lightly banish from your mind all concept of the picturesque, for this can only chain your vision to stereotypical beauty. In some cultures the shaman might use a psychedelic drug, such as peyotl. But these are not necessary, and may coarsen the sensibility. What you are looking for is a crack in the world, through which you can pass, not to escape to a different reality, but to view the same locale in a new, more glowing light. And remember always that you cannot make anything happen. You can only prepare yourself to receive a gift.

Various auspicious signs may occur, which help you tune to the miraculous. I guess they are individual. Their significance arises from your own personal history. The more you cherish them, the more potent they become, just like the sacred place itself. It gathers power with each visit. For me, the following signs are always auspicious: washing hanging out on a line, dogs barking, children playing, bubbles or balloons floating free, a dead-end road which continues in an almost-hidden footpath, the sight and smell of smoke, the loud song of birds especially the European blackbird (turdus merula), the cheeky behaviour of a group of sparrows, mysterious noises from an unseen source. Scents of every kind. Tutelary clouds that hang above the horizon. Mothers with prams. Small black children. Bicycles thrown carelessly down, trustingly left. Unexpected sudden vistas. Being looked at by any animal, whilst it decides if you are too close for its comfort, especially if it is too young or incapacitated to escape; or a rat which regards you without fear. Become aware that your whole life is magical, its preciousness infinite. Reflect that when your time is up, you’ll be ready to leave without a struggle; because you have truly lived, you have eaten the fruit of the tree called Now. Its abundance exceeds all possible appetite. How can you be greedy for more?

The encounter with a stranger: perhaps a dog-walker, perhaps at a bus stop. The eavesdropping of conversations on a bus, perhaps the loud chatter of girls just come out from school. A gathering of sparrows in a hedgerow of thorn-bushes. A growing awareness that everything is significant—everything human and non-human, including the coloration of the clouds. Everything becomes significant, speaks its own meaning. The riches of Now is too much to take in. It becomes silly to photograph everything, describe everything in words. Even if you (Heaven forbid) lost some of your senses, became simultaneously deaf and blind, like Helen Keller, there would still be an overabundance of significance: the scents, the feelings on your skin, the vibrations of things in the wind, the taste of the air. But I have two eyes: I can have my being in this world of perspective, and walk amongst these hills.

Drifting away

I’ve published one of Ghetu’s stories before, Free as a Bird, and written about another, Ghetu Files a New Story.

Ticket to Paradise
© 2012 Anup Roy
(Inspired by Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’)

He stares down at the ticket. The only other thing on his table is a coating of grey dust. Tears roll down his cheeks, splash in the dust. Ticket to paradise, ticket to life.

He sits down with a thud. Ah, the years gone by! He was younger then, restless, carefree. What could he have done differently? Nothing. How could he have lived better, in his twenties? There was no way. His childhood was a struggle: not financial, just emotional. Having to be responsible for everything, a firm anchor. Deep down he wanted nothing more than to drift away on a strong current. But his overriding thought was to keep things anchored, precisely to resist such a current. They might splinter in a thousand pieces on some alien shore. So he kept them in calm anchorage. Now what?

The storm has calmed since then, the anchor now winched up, dumped carelessly on deck. Its years under water have thinned it with rust. The pull of the sea has bent one fluke out of shape. But it did its job. It held.

It’s a different landscape now. He fends for himself. Can this rusty anchor be refashioned to a sleek craft? Then he can explore the wide ocean, its turbulent, desolate spaces. Through his twenties he’s floated friendless, in an uncertain world. Enough! He’s had to learn boatbuilding from scratch. To be best in the world will be good enough. He’s reached his thirties and ready to sail the seven seas.

He looks again at the ticket, colourful like the new life it promises. A life all his own, in which nobody else may stake a claim. Forged inch by inch like a chain. Strong enough to pull his sleepy existence from its backwater out to the encompassing ocean, which connects every continent. Will he be ready for the right tide when it comes? Can he wait silently till then? Mustn’t be caught unprepared. He’ll say that he did it all himself. From now on, he will control his own direction; or just cast his fate to the winds. Either his own doing or the wind’s. So be it, let the wind decide. But let him live!

He looks back to his youth. Oh yes, girls came and went. Some would have offered themselves as crew for the long haul. But they didn’t come ready to trim the sails, take their turn at the oars. Some he would have picked, but they didn’t stick around. Let him travel alone then, with only the wind for company and no pilot. His boat will take care of itself. If it crashes on the shore, there’ll be nobody to weep. He’ll go with the flow.

You wouldn’t have known about his preparations. You’d never have guessed. You’d have thought he was quite the young man about town—the one who’s got it all, cutting a dash without being flashy. But all this time he was getting his boat ready to sail. First he laid the keel, then he assembled the hull. He had to start again several times to get it right. Then he carefully installed the mast, attached the sail, unfurled it to see how it responded to the wind. He had to try different weights of canvas, fitting and retesting till he’d got the balance right between hull, mast and sail. Not till he’d mastered boat-building and sail-making, not till then was he satisfied.

He lights a cigarette, sighs softly, watching a silver wreath of smoke curl up like an unfurling sail. Perfect, diaphanous, shapely.

He glances out the window. There’s the world, it never gives a damn. Cars whizz by, people walk purposefully past in the yellow darkness. Dogs chase a cat, the cat runs up a tree. The dogs wait patiently round the trunk. There’s a man with a bag of apples to take to his kids. He doesn’t want to be jostled by the proles. Drunks stagger, curse the world, vomit beside the hydrant, collapse on the filthy sidewalk.

Nobody cares. Nobody looks beyond his immediate vicinity. Children turn into youths, fall in love, fall out of it, fall again in love, marry, have kids and then die. Life is simple. Thus are they blessed, that they never had to live submerged, like a trusty anchor. They didn’t have to die each day to learn how to live. But this rusty anchor has broken free. It has chosen life.

The ticket will take him to a country he’s never been. For the first time, he’s living for himself, purely and selfishly. Pleasure has to be seized! Why couldn’t he have indulged long ago? He’ll be going to his dear friend’s place. They’ll drink English ale; talk about love, loss and life. He will learn how to live and will tell his friend about falling in love. Things will fit into place.

He’ll say hello to the world, dedicating his life to seeing, tasting, feeling and touching it. Seeing the sun rise in every corner of the world. Keeping vigil while the moon rises above his head. Waiting for the stars to appear in the darkening sky. He’ll pick out the brightest star and greet her. “Hello, you look beautiful from here. How do I look to you from there?” Checking her out through the telescope, in case she too is starting to show signs of age. She will be his! Following him constantly on his travels, joined in a faithful bond.

Now is his time to see the world, live on his own behalf, be free—as he now is.

Three months ago, he had called his mother.

“Momma, will you let me go now? Am I free now? I fulfilled my promise. Didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Are you proud of me momma?”

“I am.”

“Do you think I could have done things differently, would you have wanted me to be different?”

“No. Not at all. You have exceeded my expectation. I thank you.”

“Why was I born Momma? Why did you drag me here?”

“I am sorry. But that was your destiny.”

“What’s my destiny Momma?”

“I don’t know. Go figure it out.”

“Where do I start?”

“Inside you.”

“I am blank, Momma. I don’t have an inside.”

“No, it is sleeping. Just nudge it a bit, it will wake up.”

“What do I do with it when it wakes up?”

“Ask anything. It will answer.”

And he nudged, and it woke up, and he asked, and he got an answer.

And he called his momma again.

“Momma, I want to live.”

“Live. I am sorry to have kept you hostage. ”

“Am I free Momma?”

“You are.”

“What do I do now?”

“I can’t answer for you, my boy. You want to live. You need to know how you want to live. I can only suggest what my narrow outlook towards life tells me to. It tells me that you should settle … raise your own family. Have a wife. Have kids.”

“I don’t want to start it again Momma. I am tired.”

“What do you want then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go figure out. Give yourself time. Don’t rush.”

He gave himself time. He drank, he loitered around aimlessly, he fell in love. He got hurt. And then he figured out. It was always so apparent. He always knew it was the case. He wanted to drift away. He wanted to drift away to an unknown land. He had made his boat, built it with care. He had hung a figurehead from its bows, in the shape of a vagabond clutching a broken spear, ready for his last fight, unto the last breath. A boat for drifting away.

“Momma, I have found my answer. I want to drift away from everything. I want to live momma. Will you let me go?”

“Yes, go.”

“I won’t be coming back momma.”

“I know. I don’t want you to come back.”

“I am leaving you momma.”

“I am crying.”

“Why are you crying momma?”

“I never yet cried for you. That’s why.”

“Why didn’t you cry for me momma?”

“It would have made you weak. You were my last hope. I was selfish. I robbed your childhood.”

“What is childhood momma?”

His mother didn’t respond.

“Momma, you there?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you silent?”

“I am crying. I am crying for you.”

“Shall I leave you momma?”

“Yes, please.”

“Will you miss me momma?”

“Every moment of my life.”

“How will you live without me momma?”

“I have lived my life. Now you must live yours.”

“How is my elder sister?”

“She is doing great.”

“How is my younger sister?”

“She is doing good. She is on her own now.”

“Shall I stay back for a while more now, momma?”

“No. We don’t need you anymore.”

“I will not return momma.”

“It’ll be the saddest day of my life if you return.”

“I am leaving then momma.”

“Yes, son. Please go. Live your life. Die your own death. Breathe your own air and walk your own way.”

Here is his ticket. Now the boat can be launched. Let the wind take it. Let it find anchorage in the lee of an island, or drift away to a blue lagoon. Let it run aground on Poverty Bay, or take up a berth on Affluence Marina. Trial and Error have taught him in the boat-yard. Now let Wind teach him how to sail. Then he will become a master mariner. The world will be at his feet.

His momma has set him free to die his own death; maybe to die alone, curled up like an old tattered sail, stowed and forgotten. Till then, he will be a pilgrim. The ticket to paradise lies in front of him. He picks it up. Never mind the dust, it can stay. He’s leaving.

edited by Vincent (inspired by Joan Armatrading’s ‘Rosie’)



and we both liked her ‘Me Myself I’