Move the way Love moves you.

Touch the way Love touches you.

Shatter, the way Love shatters you.

Break down and be reborn, the way

Love breaks you down and gives you life again.

Breathe the way Love breathes with you.

With a touch of a finger, you start spinning like a porcelain figure.

Move gently, no matter the scars.

And gently I run my fingers through your hair and call you by your future name, golden boy.  

The threads of the nightshirt form ripples on the infinite shore of your forgotten dreaming.

You who cannot see your own dancing, what beauty you are missing!

Change your past if you want to change the future. You cannot change what happened, but your perception of what happened can change. Take another look with someone else’s eyes.

Your future is a direct reflection of all omissions of the past. The unlearnt lessons just take a new, more solid form.

We cannot quit the game of learning. We cannot say, “I know this game, it ends up in tears, I won’t play any longer.” Life will bring it again in a new form, and next time it will be more dramatic, the stakes will be higher, and the price dearer.

We cannot reject our life lessons. It is not in the power of the conscious to do so. What we think we are is a mere reflection of a sun upon the sea – our true self is both, the sun and the sea, and the space in-between.

Life lessons are currents in that sea. They carry us with more power than a mortal person can ever muster. These lessons we call life are part of the contract between the sun and the sea, where the conscious knowing is a momentary flicker upon the surface. We float, carried by deep powerful currents which order the hidden symmetry of our lives. This miracle, the play of waters and light we call life.

The sun sheds light on the highest waves when we can emerge from the water and take flight in the infinite space beyond. Free in the sunlight. Our true home.

Take a good look of what your life is about. What is the deepest meaning of your actions? These actions, your choices, what do they say, what matters to you the most? What brings the best, the most out of you? These three questions should have the same answer.

Do this before you die, so you can live the rest of your life in deep knowing, focused on what matters the most. Otherwise, we just float and sink, without knowing our own purpose. Back into the water then.

You hold your pain like a candle in your palms. You protect its flicker, although letting it to the winds would allow it to burn away. Drop your palms. Don’t be afraid to stand alone, empty-handed. All those you loved and relied on are gone now. They left without telling you how to live your life without them. They left without returning the love you gave them. You grew bitter, you called it “the women’s curse.” It was not. It was just about letting go.

They have hurt you, you say. You show me the flicker of a knife before it stabs between your ribs. Two actors on a stage act a murder. When the play finishes, the murderer offers a hand to the victim to get up. You walk away together, laughing. You are an actor, your life is a play.

And look further beyond. You are the director who wrote the plot of the play and decided who will kill you on the stage, why and how. The hand that murders you is your best friend’s. We don’t let souls not kin to us play such important roles in our dramas.

Find the plot, find the hand, and remember the pain. It’s a teacher. Try again with a different plot. The teacher is always here until we get it right.

Things have been already determined prior to our eyes falling on their final form. Pray to see with the Mind of the Spirit. Mortal lips cannot tell what they do not determine, the future, the unpredictability, fate and choice. Desire loves to promise the loudest, its punishments are the fiercest, and yet its promises are the most in vain.

The Spirit speaks with a gentler voice though our hearts. It says, “let go, gently.” The place inside where you stand with the Spirit is where you let people come and go. From this place, bid farewell to those who pass you by.

You too pass them by, even when it seems that they are the ones leaving you behind. You pass each other, both on different paths, each in their own direction, toward a different meaning. A meaning you helped each other shape and you shared it - and then you could no longer create meaning for each other. You passed by.

Letting go does not mean not to cry for their departure, or yours. Your grief measures their meaning in this short lifetime. So cry well and long, with all your heart, just like you loved them, with your blood and bones and veins, cry. Tears have an end, we don’t. Grieving means respect, acknowledgement of significance. It can be immense, and it has an end.

Let them go, because they step forward, and your way ahead is not theirs. Each path is right, even when it seems that the traveller is spiraling down and away. Let people choose their own flight and fall. Some flights necessitate prior falls. In the eyes of the Angels, it might be difficult to distinguish between the two.

Let yourself dive in as well. It doesn’t make you a worse person. It just makes you a movement of a greater Wing we are all part of.

You know, there is no denying that. Why not act upon what you know?

I am not noble. Tonight there are battlefields strewn everywhere under the brisk moon. In the morning only dewdrops remain.

Tomorrow, we’ll lay solemn and buried, and the grass will lay its blades upon our silenced hearts as if in a barrow, while our spirits dance upon the dew…. Oh, but the loves we shall remember….

Once there was a man who, on his way home, found himself  in front of an abyss. He saw a narrow path running along the side of the cliff, leading away from his destination. He looked ahead into the abyss and saw the struggle, the crush, his own death. What he didn’t see was the leap, the flight, the revival - the miracle which takes each brave man in its hand and carries it across and above the cruelest landscapes, so long as they are carried on the home-bound wind.

So he inched along the edge of the abyss. As soon as he reached the other end, he realised he was on an entirely different road and he could not track back. He was now on a way to a destination not of his own choosing. His heart remained at the edge of that abyss looking beyond into the place where he belonged.

Many people struggle through life trying to reach a destination which their hearts advise them against. The Spirit keeps calling but who will reply? I would die for you if that would bring a single spark of the Spirit in your eyes. I am calling you from the place you call home and I call ‘the Spirit.’

Listen… listen….. We… love… you….

But there were boys outside at hunt. The battle cries subside at night, and the passionate restlessness silently begins to burns, ungratified, in turmoil, tossing and turning awake in wine and secret deeds. These young men who met in each other’s houses, womanless, the shenanigans, the unpunished sins sweetened by the shared secret misdeeds.

Here, like in many prohibitive cultures, love among the men is at the forefront. These boys dress up and put on make-up for their male friends. They do not have girl friends. They get married to procreate, for family and political reasons, but keep loving men as their mates and comrades, and lovers. In the same time, the unmarried boys dream Indian soap music, the roses drop from the foreheads into water, the sleeve embroidery flows in the air, the dark eyes cry for the desert lovers - city dreams on the dusty streets and white flesh under the young beard. A people at love and war, where every death and love is a sharing and a ripped off veil. But the blood keeps silent, heaves dangerously at every wound, until it heals. No love or death inflicts something that the next boyish kiss will not wipe off; and the blood will mean yet again.

Sensing these images in the distance, under the anonymous rooftops full of crimson passions, unrecorded ecstasies and despair, I found myself a woman, a non-woman, manless and fleshless, floating behind the walls of a fortress. I was full with unadmitted and uncommitted passions, chest-full for man’s kisses, hidden behind my own invisible walls, protected with heavy weapons and harsh vigil. I would have given myself softly to nocturnal fingers, my body would have yearningly risen to meet the heat of pure male skin. That was a secret I had to deny and pace on. I stood above the rooftops of Kandahar like a fortress within a fortress protecting nothing but the desire to love.

Everything that meets us is set in motion a long time ago. The desires, the fantasies, the little openings and soft spots in the being - they tear into major doorways for life’s blessings and disasters to enter. We summon what brings out our true nature, and it is in the nature of this world to bring out the best and the worst in us. Our destinies are already made within our hidden recesses. We know our destiny insofar as we know what is hidden inside us.

We, made of drives and dams of which we know so little. Our knowledge of our selves blindly flickers like    reflections on the ocean. Nothing new happens to us. We happen to ourselves. We just don’t know ourselves. What can a reflection know of the oceanic depths?

My hidden nature, I concluded that night, was a sea of passion fenced by a desert of fear - and the pleasures and the disasters that were coming my way, I knew, would be their exact replicas.
The moment ended, and I did what I had to do: I went to sleep.

(This is the sixth segment of Chapter 1 of the White Book of Feathers, which will be reproduced here in parts in the future. Please refer to the previous five posts on this blog for Segments 1-5 of the Book)

That’s what we seem in our perishable form. Dreams of yesterday, lost in the nakedness of the flat day. We, on the compound, were strangers to this world. We had almost no connection to life, we were lost. We cried long and in secret of each other on the shoulders of the trees, we hid in the shallows of the noon. We waded, tracking the thin threads of dreams which disappeared as soon as one set a foot on them. We were lost, and in the morning we might not exist. But butterflies were being born each day.

Perhaps the gold is still asleep under the pillow where no one shall ever find comfort again. Perhaps there is gold, like the sun, we leave behind.  After Kandahar, I knew I would never dream again of what I used to dream. When one loses a longing,no matter how obsolete, the gold which could have shone on us is a gold unborn. Dust.

I was tired. I wished that those hard times of overwork and conflicts to be past. Time is where the gold separates from the sand, and lush rainbows shed colors on the memories. I wished all to end so I could become a new beginning. A fresh new wind smothering me in golden sand and a new sun blinding my forehead. I dreamt I was a fragile giant, a statue in a desert without oases, and aeons passed before the hand cold reach the forehead to rub off the disturbed thoughts. Eternity seemed so long that to make a single move appeared senseless, however, it is the movement that creates the meaning of being alive. That’s how I dreamt.

There were days when even the air seemed agitated. Ready for escape; it would take flight under an attack, it would leave us alone and airless to finally entwine with the real violence pressing on our skin. Our security bubble would burst leaving a vacuum of breathlessness. In my mind, I saw naked white bodies dressed in crimson, limbs mingled in our last expression of love, our loyalty to each other. Our trust would lay exposed like a museum.

I saw our spirits there, hovering above our garden, slightly confused, trying to discern the bodies in the pile of generous flesh. It wouldn’t hurt any longer. We would be finally  a-flight, beyond the thoughts of good or evil. At last we would be fearlessly gentle to each other. We had not known anything beyond our shrunk selves, our slightly sad thoughts lingering abandoned in the bones. Confused by the intercession in time. Mild, like dewdrops.

And then, a gentler expanse would open in the unforeseen sky, between the twilight of the worlds of the living and the dead. In a flicker, an oceanic presence would come forth, the ancient embrace, our true heart would open to call us back. Sparkling specks of dust were dancing in the air of this city which has seen thousands of generations bury its dead. We are simply mortal.
That is what I saw one morning in a vision. I wonder whether accepting these seen visions diverted them, or they were perhaps merely figments of a weary, agitated imagination.

Such thoughts were reserved for the dawn. The workday was discipline. I preferred to leave the office and work in the garden. There were dignified trees summoning doves in their branches. Birds pecked in the grass daringly approaching our feet. The roses scented the air, and I was alone on the lawn, amidst our armed Afghan and expatriate security and service personnel. My heart was in that garden. Peace and life dwelled there and no stress was stressful enough to resist the beauty of this surrounding.

After the previous years in the rainless southern deserts, I found myself confused to waddle through the mud on the Kabul streets. I stood at the rooftop balcony of the villa where I stayed, alone and foreign, while the mud water flickered on the ground. I was longing for the South. The distant horizons were as tender as always. The massive mountains descended through space like an unchallengeable curtain. I watched the silhouettes on the Kabuli streets, their sleeves and skirts flowing.

In this country, people walk with strength; the pace is simple, and everything leads to everything else. The feet are in concordance. In Afghanistan, of all places, I felt in concordance with myself. This country, hell and heaven within the same flicker of the eye. I was longing for the South, the regions of stark contrasts between light and shade, between heaven and hell, between one’s hidden depths and heights. The place on earth where one may be blessed with a true challenge. Nearly unendurable. Nearly enlightening. That was South.
A month after I arrived in Kabul, I indeed went to Kandahar, to be close to the desert I loved and to the front-lines of the project I was hired on. Perched on the rooftop in the heart of the city, surrounded by protective barriers and guns, and yet vulnerable, I felt the exposure and loved it. We were positioned like a heart on the chest, put forward for an embrace, guardedly open. I deeply inhaled and imbibed the spirit of Kandahar flickering in the air, carried by the sounds of the markets and busy traffic. It did not matter that the city could kill me. Fair enough. The beauty of its ancient spirit was truer than my sparse human life.