A Dervish musing

Dry crackling wood. Ember lifts, imprints the sky. Draped figures transport me to caravan roots. Eyes closed, no enemy in waters presence. Tonight looters shy away from firelight. The desert often dusts off our aura of civility. That dormant primordial instinct awaits the lost and eager. Feral. Individual. Not a morsel to scrape for. Different from the collective abundance in my caravanning imagining. Secure in a warm huddled coterie, tied to our wheels, mules, and familial days and nights like these.

Silver moon mood, dry baked sand glowing in the far distance. Crackled. Electric darkness. From rains long past these barren miniatures paint the umbral landscape with ephemeral glitter, motioned to reflect the dotted circuity of dark skies - and still, the crescent above. Shadowed luminous companion. Swirling around like whirling dervishes, lost, seemingly forever in light and dance.

A shard-menagerie of narratives, that personally entwined sacred mirror woven from the onset of self-perception. Now separate and distancing at inflationary velocity, the self is to be scavenged by a relentless carrion circuitry - one’s demon-mind. Subterranean and lugubrious. But this dismal portent dissipates with faith in the harbours of hope. No matter how dimly lit. Or transient. That is love. One that also binds community, and the familial contiguity of brotherhood. A larger identity.

The heavens begin to pour, a temperamental late-end to the Kumaon monsoon. A range’s high sea, a voluptuous vapour ocean. Even earthly aquifers that spring through the mountains - streaming jaggedly in their wake - are clouded over with mist. The season will change soon, surely.

A mid-september burst of life is airborne, abundant. The valiant tail-end rage of nature before winter’s lull and fallow. Appreciating her joy, her vivacity in action, a favourite pastime. Camera in hand to capture a chimera of Hawk-moths and Painted Ladies as they flitter and prance about, probing the Sage, delirious in his nectar, and some pollen too. Rain subsides as the sun peers again through a gradient of clouds. Rays of warmth in this elevated cool altitude. The budding Begonias beside a withering Hydrangea, making way, succession in life’s cycles, the tinkerer, the goings-on as one considers which unruly stalk to prune off the rose-bush next.

Reminders of evanescent originality, of a subjective individual in the blind march of the geologic towards sentience, towards a collective conscience. Empathy for the other - who is outside is really just oneself in rhyme and plurality. Diversity in form. Written in progress. An interwoven discrete quantisation, flows of patterns of organic energy we do not know, and god forbid we might ever.

We present reason in the clear linearity of thought, in logic that cross-pollinates. Referenced and built on itself. Our affinity for geometric alignment, towards self-similarity, and symmetry. Lofty mixtures, the accidental complex surface to a simplicity within. The ennui of inert description as medium to the realm of mystical experience.

Ethereal embodiments may never be fully glanced. Elusive may they remain from the entirety of visual grasp such that we shan't summarily define the ultimate inquiry nor chance upon it, let alone answer it. At best a map, or a map of a map. If only of a possible question. Pixelated and reduced impressions of a shunyata of sorts.

Despite a constant flow, writing now daunts me. Thoughts in continued analysis. Thought inherent to thought. The counterfactual. Critical conjectures, an afterthought verging on fantasy. This banal circumlocution might urge you to interject. It’s self-indulgent. Spilt gibberish in a vortex of procrastination. You’re not wrong. Don’t take it too seriously.

After all how does one begin to write a note to oneself. Outpours in thought only conceal my experience. That laced melody of time and emoted feeling. A natural flowing forward perhaps. A continuous coterminous collapse of streams, wave-functions, of the infinite tributaries of choice and paths between the next word, the next phrase, the ending to a sentence. I am unsure. Let my subconscious and the ever-simmering do the deed. In a sense, let it write itself. Justified then, a confession of nothing.