full moon nov 2015: letting go of partition

there is a partition that separates india bangladesh and pakistan. it is an invislbe line that was drawn by (under) lord louis mountbatten and other colonial architects to ensure a steady control over the region, in the departure of the then imperial british power.

partition, the invisble line, separates me from you in this cafe, even as we sit next to each other and stare intently on our screen. partition.

you are staring at me through a partition. and i am wondering about you.

the walls separate our today from our tomorrow. tomorrow becomes a fantastic place that we will get to one day, just not today...tomorrow is the treasure pot at the end of the rainbow, is heaven, is neverland. a dream deferred, langston hughes lamented. what happens to a dream deferred? 

thing is, the window to there is here. right now. every action leads to that.

what is it that you want to accomplish the most? what is your life's purpose?

for the past several years, i have been saying that my purpose is to be a medicine man, by way of the path of yoga and ayurveda. i chose this angle due to my genealogical proximity. i figured my dna would have memory of yogi movement, vedic knowledge.

as i began studying islam more, the path of yogi and ayurveda, folded into the holistic system of non-duality, that the prophet/guru-muhammad laid out. my writings focused a bit more on quranic teachings  and the words of the example of these teachings manifest in the guru. 

in recent times, when i've fully meditated on the path of medicine man, i've come to understand that this is only a road to a deeper path. that medicine man is not an end to my Purpose, but itself another road to the One.

i've also come to understand that medicine is more than herbs, and herbalism, yogi, and yoga asanas, meditation and nutriton and being physically active, and sleeping and waking early.

i've learned that medicine is prayer, and hence my delving into scripture. vaidyas/hakeems, like my grandfather and greatgrandfather, are versed in scripture, in the laws of the One. 

i've learned that medicine is activism, is being of service to the world we inhabit, more than just to any one group of people, or one issue, or one type of being (more than humans - peace to plant life, water life, land life, air life). medicine is taking in the whole and working for the balance of the whole. as the son of the medicine man, my dad, showed me through his life example. he has been serving community, rocksteady, for 60 plus years, and continues to do so, understanding the consequences this has had on our family economically, and socially. poverty never came to my tongue until i was shown statistics on income brackets and jeered by peer on the discount-store clothes i walked around in shamefully. 

i've learned that medicine is showing up for those who have shown up for me. blessed with the struggle of holding onto the tightrope of scraping by. the closest in my life repeatedly remind me of this - my ammu, abbu, brother (one-who-Knows), cuzin smack, cuzin pin, cuzin chris, cuzin d, cuzin mo, cuzin chino, cuzin shah...

i've also learned, from the teachings, that medicine is going beyond tribe and communalism, to get deeper with those who bow down, whose humilty is deeper than leather and kicks, whose spiritual linguistics speaks intrinscially to a language without time.

last month, my letting go was of addiction. i've grown fond of coffee and vegan/gluten-free fig bars, and binging on chocolate and food, and addicted to feeling self-pity at my invisible-man status, and lack of accomplishment, and sense of failing those closest to me.  

as i write this, i just went through a bar of dark chocoate and my second cup of coffee. with that said, i've also grown back into a meditation practice, in listening to the words of goenka-ji, a messenger in his own right, who reminds me of samskaras and anichya, and the importance of getting away from the maya of what appears solid, and real through the surgery of meditation.

this past month has been trying, due to the happenings in the world. the sadness of the murdered french, and syrian and lebanese and yemeni and afghani and palestinian and nigerian people weigh heavy. 

praying for peace. praying for the cessation of the 10 country bombing of a region under the pretense of killing bad guys, and in the process killing everyone there, as has been the tactic and rationalization for the millions killed in iraq, afghanistan, native america. peace to the survivors of the indigenous holocaust on this soil...i overstand that the tactics of patining the victims as savages engaged inn savagery was as successful in 1492 as it is now. blame the victim. bomb them out of existence. take their land and resources. pathologize them through news, radio, visuals...romanticize them when they are long dead, close to decimated...no longer can the colonial armies cracking whips and the slave master be painted as belonging to one race. the ideology of greed, supremacy, manifest destiny is mulitculutral and open to anyone who wants to get ahead...

prayers, prayers, prayers. prayers for compassion. 

this month, my letting go of the wall that keeps me from purpose. this month i disintegrate that which is not real by being that which is Real. what is not real is tomorrow. what is real is now. what is not real is if this then that. what is real is the process of actualization through actualization. actualization of what is Real happens through the compass of the heart. 

the community house, the family, the book, the project, seven generations, the gifts, ALLAH manifest, is now...

let go of the emotion and work from a deeper place of truth, of satyagraha, of honest interaction, through honest dialogue devoid of emotion, of sadness or pleasure, just pure LOVE. all praise is due...

intend to do this through continuing, growing deeper in meditation, in noticing samskaras and releasing them, of publsihing the health manual that will help me and you come to a deeper balance, through building institutions of LOVE in family, and universal community...what happens when the walls between me and my actualized self are dissolved? what does the i look like? what physically maniests from the thought sprung from the place of timeless poetics?....all praise is due...

vipassana day 1 talk: steps

steps. things happen in steps, goenka tells us through his video talks, aired at the end of each evening during the 10 day vipassana retreat. did it a decade ago. listen to the talks still. 

the day 1 talk takeaway for me was the importance of moving in steps. in mastering each step through steady practice before moving on to the next.

there are many meditation techniques out there, goenk-ji tells us, but to gain strength, mastery in any, requires focus on one, and practice. steady practice. rock steady.

vipassana meditation, as taught by gautama buddha, according to goenka, requires singular focus, unravels a surgical process.

before any major surgery can be done by a surgeon, i would imagine that they have to master the art of a minor surgery - beore transplaning a heart, perhaps, transplanting a patch of skin. 

day 1, begins with a focus on a single patch of skin. the area below the nose, above the upper-lip. notice the breath on this area. notice the temperature changes, notice the tingliness...notice...

...as/when your mind drifts, return to this one patch...continue...

the first step in doing this requires complete silence. requires seclusion. sure, the outdoors is an ideal place to meditate, goenka tells us. but that takes time and practice to get to. at first, you have to be able to meditate in a space of complete quiet, before going into a space of multiple sensation and quieting the mind.

find a time and place indoors. alone. perhaps after prayer. turn off all other sensory instruments - music, scents, touch, sights, tastes...

...focus...shhhhhh....focus....

pray

these days i'm dropping with the rain spilling into cafes to dry my mind of the news that blasts from the corners of eyes that reexamine my stubbles and look away, when they look at all. in ny the looks are suspicious, ethnocentric, drug store cowboys with lassos. but i got the drugs, the green and brown uptown kind mixed with a fifth of jack...

inside a bottle and smoking myself out of corners and public view, i watch myself like kurosawa van-goghing scenes of a poem that haunts him.

far enough from downtown, i stroll through a neighborhood that sees the air in me. invisible like lamposts and potholes...invisible like 19th century graveyards...invisible until the sun sets, when the threat of my most wanted face is no longer disgusied by liberalisms in books portlandiacs carry.

i carry stories, the ones no one told me, the ones that bump like silence after hours, after the club is shut, the bouncer gone, the door closed. still standing outside the cool and fall into an 80's melody of paratha, chicken curry, ammu's kitchen, abbu's philosophics...bhaiya's recreating a world of fantasy from the racist world outside our apartment. 

praying...praying for meaning...praying through these words...praying that we - beings who walk on twos - reach for higher than the ego that creates amnesia...that keeps the whips and scorns of massacre alive...

silencing the the lyrics that surface in my head when the tale of the victorious hunter is aired...lyrics...lyrics like dead prez: everywhere the white man go he bring misery/all throughout history/look it up/ everything them baldheads touch, they f it up/every govt he create, it be corrupt...

the white man is now a brown hate-spitting evangelical from india, a black president that is built more concomitant wars than any other president, a black presidential candidate who went from the hardship of hood to neurosurgeon and f the struggle and the struggling and anyone who is not me; the man is the indian governor of louisiana, a hindu convert to cracker, cracking lies so deep his tongue looks like mars...the man is latino, asian, black, white, red...the cross-burners are uniformed and raping, pillaging, plundering indigenous lands/ways...prayers for you...prayers for compassion...

praying for a world without guns greed and globalization.

praying for a world of honesty...of engaging with each other honestly...

lets figure this out together...

...start with prayer...humble yourself...

pray. bow down. surrender to the Source of Peace, the One-ness. all of us who are still here will also be soil and water and air one day...

...let go of yourself and get to Work...

99 names: 13: al Mussawir iii: the Shaper of Beauty iii

in the name of ALLAH, the Most Beneficient, the Most Merciful...

jamal shabazz, a brooklyn photographer with mesmerizing photos and intricate stories behind each one, said, during a talk on his photography, that he began taking pictures as a way to connect with his community. it was a way of breaking the ice and having a forum for exchange. in the process he shaped beauty, and the beauty was more than the pictures he took, but the communication, community, collaborations he built. 

i love the idea of living breathing art, as life itself is living breathing art, as al Mussawir has painted landscapes of beauty for us to walk on, through - ja na ta - walking in beauty - my cuzin man-red says - in navajo, the language of dineh peoples. yes, ja na ta...

walking in beauty involves being beautiful, more than the approved, disapproved beauty designated by the state apparatus in prostration to capital and markets and the constant need to profit, which means the constant need for the market to trend.

what's in trend is the over-sized ski hats among hipsters in portland. saw it in ny last year. who knows what the hipsters there are rocking now. their seems to be a syncopation around the carved and constructed identities of genres, like races. they are often parallell - genres/markets and race - to occupy/consume trends for the respective boxes peoples are trapped into, take great pride and perform through. applause kid. i see you. i overstand. otherwise you are out of the wolfpack. 

it's alot to keep up. i gave up. born alone die aloning through pdx, walking in beauty when i dikr through the prayer beads brooklyn gave me. 99 times. 

99 times, i go through reminders of how each moment is fleeting, and that within this constant change, ALLAH remains constant. i am reminded of this with every recall, every moment when i am tempted to speak, say something, to defend, to peacock. at that fork, when i pause to ask what's really behind my desire to speak/show, i recall Surrender, how this is a moment, and I AM of Essence - Eternal. i get moved away from this fact of Beauty, of al Mussawir, when i am amidst the audience of people who see me or don't.

at once i am an invisible man, brown and the color of bombs and newsclips on the world's most wanteds. at once i am disease, third world epidemic, immigrant, refugee, a problem. at once i am taking jobs, and feeding off the government, and lazy and too hard-working, and accented by irrelevance. i seemed to have missed the cruise ship that others - brown, black, yellow, red - have boarded, into acceptance, into natural flow in a babylon that i don't get. don't  get aziz ansari. 

i have ceased putting my hat down for change, for racial theatrics that fit the audiences who want to clap for a fitting in of their bill. 

i get ancient. 

my soul immediately is in dialogue. 

so i get my amma and abba, and ancient indigenous ways, and recognize it across the board, whether i am in cipher with bangladeshi's from the time-zone tucked into village-life, sudanese from khartoum in coffee shops listening to adhan and reciting poetry to possibility, indians weaving jewels off the rez only to hope for return there, philosophers from projects a generation from south carolina, san juan, havana...

walking in beauty, in the path of al Mussawir, in the example set by Creator/Shaper of Beauty, would mean to be alive, to be a living breathing engagement with the world, towards aligning with Height. 

taller than height and larger than weight, with my feet rooted like evergreens in the northwest, reaching pine needles in praise, in all praise is due...

shaping beauty would mean to make knowledge active, to engage with knowledge to build, reach, commune with prostraters and prostitutes, with hustlers and fruit-wallahs, cab-drivers and tailors...

my boy hen-roc says i should do a compendium video for the nutritional map i''ve been working on. if it brings me closer, Closer...Closer to the One...

the sheik rumi, says to lose, lose yourself, and bow down...to stop running to be someone...afterall, isn't this what your life is about? he asks...to be someone?...when you stop trying to be someone...you Appear into the congruence of One-ness...

the  ayurveda professor, doctor, from pune, india, who i met recently, seems steeped in the culture of pride of being a doctor, a professor, someone. many of the ayurvedic doctors i met in programs geared towards americans, in india, seem to suffer from this guru-complex. 

westerners seem to strive for this expert status. westerners are indian from india, bangladeshi from bangladesh, nigerian from nigeria, kenyan from kenya, brazilian from brazil, chinese from china, dominican from dominican republic, american from marcy projects and the upper east side and san francisco...

...no delusions homie...i overstand the truth that permeates through the surface realm of skins you and i are in...i overstand and see the carcinogen of megalomania that is excused and celebrated across the multi-cultural spectrum of devout babylonian-ism...

...i'll pass. flow through the asanas that were set forth by teachers without names, from the path of Nothingness...hope to connect, to shape beauty through the work of non-cerebral engagement with this divine mosque that our spirits respirate in without a breath. 

...to create...to really shape beauty...walk in the path of the Greatest Artist of ALL, the Most Creative, who is known several billion times a day as the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful....

...to do this, lose yourself...really lose yourself...i will too...