Looming Mountain
It took me many, many years to find my voice.
Actually, as I look back on so much of what I've written, even back to the late high school years when consciousness first dawned, I see that always, even then, the voice was there.
So, let me say instead -- it took me many, many years to learn to access my voice consistently, stably, at will, and to let it flow freely.
Whereas before it was like trying to find a spring in the wilderness -- every stumbling upon it a delight, a surprise, and a relief -- finally, I established a well at the inexhaustible source, from which I might draw as I wished.
How?
It would be immodest, or rather dishonest, to say I knew how then, when and as I did it; what I tell you now, anyone with the view I have of my past could tell you, so plain it is to see.
Gorakh said, "Laughing, playing -- the knack of meditation... He laughs, he plays, his mind untroubled... Discarding hope, living without hope."
Yes -- the knack of meditation is the knack of creativity.
The tighter you grasp it, the quicker it slips from your fingers.
When I worked a job I didn't like, a Friend showed up at just the right time.
That job was the lowest job in the organization. I told her, "I don't want anything from anybody, and they all want to talk to me -- they just corner me and talk and talk and talk."
I hated it. It made me furious.
She said, "That's why they want to talk with you -- you don't want anything from them."
This, too, is the knack of creativity.
Elsewhere, I mentioned an incisive teacher from the spring-in-the-wilderness era.
For many years, until I had a well to sit by, his memory loomed on my longing's horizon, far mountain in a dry desert.
So -- at a balding 28, having subjected myself again to what, I was assured, was an Education in the Letters, I wrote the following, both as an Assignment and, true to character, as an Eff Yew to the Assigner.
You can read more about that era here and here.
05 April 2022
Dear Mr. -----,
Finding myself driven as by a whip to bleed a few words for communal amusement, I will make a game of it, and so show you how lightly the laughing man bears his burdens.
Do you remember me?
As a beardless boy I first sat in your classroom, starry-eyed and empty-headed, hungry as for mother's milk, yet with teeth cut for flesh. I had been wandering in a haze, stomach shrunken, and -- you fed me!
See then the man this boy became and tell me -- is he the same?
Where words once were dammed, now they flow, sometimes quick and bright, sometimes slow, ever clear and pure; falling on waiting ears with the weight of mountains, they soak one to the core.
In these waters, all are dissolved.
But these words, if water at all, still will not flow in a bed; and though many lesser streams feed their flowing, finding end and beginning in them both, still they cannot be called tributary. Wild waters carve their own course, and men build bridges over them afterwards.
Have I been understood?
How is it that the formless has form and the one appears as many? "Be like water, my friend, and you will see."
You will forgive my riddles, I hope; as you understood me before, so may you understand me now.
Words then I loved as things; words now I love as signs. You taught me how to read them.
Tell me, teacher -- can you read my signs?
Your student,
Jian Lotfi
