The color of the day.

How it felt to be a child.

The feeling of saltwater on your sunburned legs.

Sometimes the water is yellow. Sometimes it's red.

The color in memory depends on the day.

I won't tell the story the way it happened.

I'll tell it the

way I remember it."
- Mitch Glazer (Adaptive screenplay for Charles Dickens' Great Expectations)

Revisiting an old post from September 15th 2009…two years older transcendence still evades, but the sorcery is ever more delightful.

“And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
“What do you want Brick?”
And Brick says to you
“I like an Arch.”

And if you say to Brick
“Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lentil over you.
What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”

Brick says:
“… I like an Arch””

-Louis Kahn

what I miss most about the dirty south is the music (and the biscuits)…

art from art from years ago- words make the most beautiful pictures and I just had to paint hers…

Got drenched in the chilly evening shower today but loved it for the above reasons. There are probably an infinite number of ways to kiss the rain- these are just some of mine…

gotta love that iphone after all

Purple sunset on a crisp evening walk with a friend today- unaltered I swear!

Friends often question my exuberance, asking me what makes me a happy person and I struggle to articulate that happiness is a spontaneous state of being. The list of reasons I rattle off when questioned begins with having breath and consciousness, but inevitably ends with the love I find everywhere.

I remember walking to my student job, tired and beat on an ordinary Louisiana afternoon beaming in the bliss of just being there, then. I remember tearing up in waking meditation simply feeling “So much joy! So much love!” That is the ecstasy of being- what is joy but synchronicity with existence and its magnificent flood? Even when it’s bad, it’s good- it’s all good. Happiness is a state of mind, I choose to exist in joy through and through the shit. And the love I have for and get from my family and friends, helps me shine on- they are my hope.

This Thanksgiving I am evermore grateful for you beautiful people who keep my life whole. Forget the miles between us, I feel the sweetness in you. I love you, my hope- Happy Thanksgiving!

"En amour, écrire est dangereux, sans compter que c'est inutile."
                                                     -Alexandre Dumas 
{ Bon anniversaire Mama }

as the snow flashes by…

fueling my timeless dance with displacement, wheeling out of Boston-

“Never wish away distance. Never wish away time.”
-Bruce Weber

Dark thunderstorms translate into reassuring, soothing, near spiritual experiences for me. Always have.

I grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas whose soil seeped into me when the rain poured down. An expert paper boat maker, I’d chase the rain and sail my boats in the puddles it left behind for days. Squatting little knees bent, toes at the edge of the water, careful not to wet my tomboyish knickerbockers…I remember coaxing my boats and singing to the rain each time I find myself mid-song in downpour…

This painting was an experiment in black…See, black is never black-I wonder if you can see the greens, blues and reds in clouds rolling in-

“All material in nature,
the mountains and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent,
and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light.”
                                                                             – Louis Kahn

I came to the United States as a student on August 30th, 2001. 12 days after my arrival, the WTC was bombed.

Still jet-lagged, skipping Ms. Olin’s 9am class, I was asleep when Alli barged into my dorm room and exclaimed, “Ishi! They bombed the WTC!” But in my fitful fever, my mind couldn’t parse through the information well enough to command consciousness and I zoomed back into sleep. It was only later when I answered the phone to my new best friend’s quivering voice that I realized what had just happened.

Even as I stood trembling, incapacitated by shock waves of horror flowing through my being, living the crash in my head, I couldn’t entirely fathom it all. And somewhere in my trembling, I realized I knew this feeling all too well. It was the first attack on American soil, but the Indian soil in me had quivered before in the face of the same terror, many a time.

Before that morning, I did not know what WTC stood for and had never been to New York. Shy in my newness I wondered if I could honestly be a part of the grief? In which capacity does a legal alien console her 12 day old friends?

Although it wasn’t all 9/11 that did it, since that fateful day, I have grown up. The event gave me a premature preview into the American psyche and this society’s mechanisms of dealing with grief and disaster, very different from the fatalist nonchalance I was used to in India…With typically American efficiency, meetings were called, we were given phones to call home to re-assure our parents and cautioned against going out into town alone. Caught off-guard and cornered into switching points of view, my sense of self questioned itself and for the first time I contemplated my being as the Other.

I have lived and loved, won and lost and surrendered pieces of my heart to souls deep within American folds while nurturing them into mine; I have watched the dispersion of fear and the struggle to overcome it in an intoxicated, unpredictable dance which moves us all through the darkness, through the light. Resilience is a beautiful thing, grace under pressure, that is what defines a great civilization, or a human being.

“I have no fear at all at all, I have no fears at all.”

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