A Wandering Man

A telephone call from home awoke me this morning.  Actually, I had been in one of those semi-sentient modes of doze: The type when everything feels still connected to you, when the room and the sounds of the birds are all one, and the current of waking consciousness gradually eddies into a comfortable position on a soft spot, tucked into a bed, savoring early morning peace.

After the conversation with home, I left to buy daily ration of milk and water before brewing up a cup of Indian joe.  Like a drying clay pot, its earthy color--if well-prepared--matches that of the brown-red cow that ate some spoiled bananas that I had to offer it while I purchased the milk.

There are sanyasis who wander the neighborhood some mornings.  These are older men who have renounced their worldly pursuits for a life of asceticism.  They carry only a metal basin for water, the clothes on their back, and this bell that doubles as the basin's lid.  The bell's sound is soft, meditative in comparison to the occasional bursts of voice that emerge from their frail bodies that shout for money to sustain their worst habit--being born.

I was taking my laundry down to hang out, so I grabbed three rupees from my desk and the old, gentle man offered me the bell lid, held out flat, for me to place the money on it.  I suspect the intermediary of the bell's surface purifies the money I offer him.  Here is a man, a slave--from one perspective--to the very social system he has renounced.  But the three rupees' clink, somehow, magically removes him from the interaction.  The gentle man funnels the rupees from the bell's surface into some or another fold of cloth; and falling in, the clink of rupees to rupees doesn't issue.  These folds must hide some secret.  One, I am sure, that is not easily known--if it is even possible to know it.

The bell sounded again, "Who might iron out the wrinkles the sun refuses to take?" I asked myself as I hanged my clothes, and relaxed into thinking on the solitude of the gentle man.

Like two deaf men communicating, their conversation--unfamiliar measures and strokes of silent signifiers made to dangle into an unknown space fraught with meaning yet untouched by words--exists in harmonious counterpoint to the general din of otherwise daily life.  A peace not too far distant from that of these two men must also exist in this gentle man's solitude.  Like deaf men he, too, cannot avoid the realities of the world.  Those coins clink not here, not in front of me, but inside the magical, unknown folds of some world known by words, yet far beyond anything they convey when wise men string them together over time, constructing a chain of behavior that contorts our heart, mind, legs, and knees into otherwise awkward positions at mysteriously specific times, measuring our genuflections.

We, too, are left to wrestle with this frustrating handicap: A body that doesn't care, at times, to recognize the quiet movements of its soul.  Ears, eyes, and sex.  These are things we can get behind.  Touch, taste, and smell our way safely through hordes of people; but when it comes to subtle operations of the soul, a body tuned to fives sees sevens as awkwardly bent, wearing a hula-hoop and going about daily business.  Strange.  Exhaustion characterizes operating in those realms free of truths emanating from a horn behind us, blatant like a thorn in our toe.  There's also uncertainty because reason, too, has its limits.

And so today I set off, and I won't leave any sound behind.