Kirtans

Passing up an invitation for free flowing wine, famous writers reading - the opening of a writer's dojo, I sit at the desk for hours, downloading kirtans.

The way the violin dances, slithering snake, riding the back of his voice, then her voice, and it's the closest to making love than I've been in a long, long time. Dave Stringer's Diva's and Deva's. Surprise, I close my eyes and travel into the beat of the tablas, the hiding bells, and the friendly acoustic guitar. Ancient patterns, modern translative gestures, strands from all directions into one rhythmic wave. I'm in love.

And I'm free again.

He walks into the kitchen, chomps on chips, "Yeah, that's great," he says. I play him a raga, talk about how wonderful it is to see what the musicians have done with it, so many incredible combinations. He walks out mid-song and turns on basketball in the other room.

The ensuing aloneness is not empty. Thing is, it's an easy shot, and I don't stoop to take it. Not into easy at the moment. I want truth. I want to find my way back to the high road. It's not about him. It's all me.

It's about this stinging drive for union. Close my eyes again because I hear it in the voice coming across, in the vibration and tender trail of this other man's voice. I read his bio and understand that it's all the transformation in his life that turns to love in the music. God, his voice. That striving and longing for union. It burns through me.

But I'm careful. It's not about him either. I pull the desire back, make sure it stays in the middle of my own trail, straight down to the heart.

Late and I close down iTunes, get up and look down the hallway. I enter the room, sit in the dark in front of the prayer table, and the image of my teacher, orange shawls down the body, to the ground, beads in hand. I love her and that's a lifetime. That love is on track, where the track is a path that opens inward, inward like those Tibetan tankas, layers so thick with layers that we can only stare at the color, dumb to memory of moving through it all for thousands of circular cycles.

All I know is that love points toward me. Everything I want to avoid. And it keeps pointing, beyond all the particulars. It keeps pointing.

What is it that I really want in making love or writing or talking or being seen or being heard anyway? Why not just go straight to the source. Watch how fast I can run. I'm the stalker in every story, the seeker, the traveler.....and then I turn around faster than you can blink.

Sometimes that turn takes a second and sometimes I turn it slowly for a decade. And then there comes a moment when I wake up. WAKE UP!

Everything stops. Silence. Like a newborn, curiosity and looking. Like new, I want to see the truth again. Rumi in my head, ecstatic shouts:

The Root of the Root of Your Self

Don't go away, come near.
Don't be faithless, be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself.

You are born from the children of God's creation,
but you have fixed your sight too low.
How can you be happy?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

You were born from a ray of God's majesty
and have the blessings of a good star.
Why suffer at the hands of things that don't exist?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

You are a ruby embedded in granite.
How long will you pretend it's not true?
We can see it in your eyes.
Come to the root of the root of your Self.

You came here from the presence of that fine Friend,
a little drunk, but gentle, stealing our hearts
with that look so full of fire; so,
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.