august 2nd. wednesday?
what an amazing and ridiculous day. starting with the welcome to gujarat series and quickly blossoming into a suite of Manav Sadhana miracles and meditative chats with (the one and only) rahul brown. and how do i feel? pretty shitty.
i showed up to meet rahul at jayeshbhai's house around noon. jayeshbhai is a personality in Manav Sadhana, this amazing (really its the only word) organization (too good, too real, too true to call an NGO) which has dozens of projects in ahmedabad all based in god and gandhi, giving and giving and giving, helping organize women workers and teach slum children and give away awesome food to the middleclass and set up fair trade boutiques and build toilets and basically All of It.
for his daughter's 11th birthday they invited all the ragpicking (trash-sorting) women from a nearby slum to have a sumptuous meal. we, the volunteers and foreigners, did the cooking and the cleaning. so i helped wash 100 thalis and just basked in the warm glow of thanks from 100 women to whom this meal was a straight-up benediction. with jayeshbhai playing the role of saint (id cast him every time) introducing me in the middle of lunch (late as always) as the boy who walked in gandhi's footsteps and though i may not be capable of blushing having the adoring gaze of 100 women who have worked and suffered more in a day than i perhaps ever will (excepting always my tortured postmodern career angst) certainly gets me close.
the fun never stops with manav sadhana and before the afternoon was over rahul had divulged to me the secrets of his personal meditative path (he started when he was eight) culiminating in some special members-only yoga cult and wild praise of a certain deva known as amaji, in whose mere presence he said five minutes of meditating got you as high as 3-4 hours of meditating, otherwise. this is the same woman whom a sprightly dreaded diesel mechanic once told me about -- while saving our truck's mechanical ass in the parking lot of the Port Towsend Food Co-op -- "amaji, man. she's throwing the best parties in the solar system right now".
even before the climax, shit was way too good and intense -- im still reeling from 40 hours of train overmind procesing and having just left matt, neilu, chandrabose, suharata, kanavu, kuppadi, and coconuts -- and i had to get out. like when i'm dancing for two hours and there's four more to go but so much of the ego wants to leave because... well, shit, i don't know.
jayeshbhai floated by at some moment and drafted me to cook an american breakfast for 170 people the day after tomorrow. a momentary drift of english and somehow written into my consciousness as if in stone.
the last download from this go(o)dly forest of benevolence was a conversation with heena about smilecards, a situationist kitch technique of getting people to Be. every story she regaled us with was better than the last until we were all on the point of tears at the goodness and vulnerability of (wo)mankind, sitting there amidst soft and gorgeous bedspreds and handicrafts manifest by women artisans in the dusty villages of gujarat.
a little much. a little awesome. so why am i not breathlessly ecscatic? why did i leave the party after the combined om/happybirthday singing to come home to a family with whom i can share approximately nothing, where i contribution nothing at all save more work for the servants?
these people, i think, are doing god's work. exactly was the situationists and marxists and psychadelicians and all my other teachers and guides and intellectual influences inspire me to do. women's collectivies. smiling at strangers. extraordinary acts of kindness. and i'm shocked by it, into silence, retreat, and even refusal.
of course, it must be the go. there are no other doors at which to lay this blame. my ego can't handle it. perhaps, though i enjoy and eagerly anticipate its predictable and immediate abolition in the psychedelic voyage, i can't quite handle the presence of people doing and being i want to be and do. maybe i feel shitty, puny, insignificant. a failure. a waste of potential. a cog. a robot. useless.
it's bizarre. have i been avoiding these friends and teachers, who look upon me as an equal and a friend, for years? i have no idea and it makes me want to stop, once and for all, the ceaseless whirring of my brain. sometimes i feel like the only use i have in the The Social Wiggle comes out of my intellect, helping people understand the difference between the structures of capitalism and the dynamics of a market economy, the dangers of the dualism in separating altruism from selfishness, and another purely intellectual concerns. and here i am trying to make music and do reiki and be love and maybe i should just Turn Around once again and start reading. which i really want to be done with. but, you know?
in a twist of self-referential trapping, indulging in these thoughts and words only furthers the conundrum. and the only other live option is to go downstairs to dinner. which i feel i don't deserve.
ack.
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