reCAPTCHA, repeat and recount

image: pexel

1.
In this garden,
You're irreplaceable:
With you, I'm thankful.
Without you, I'm thankfully missing you.

Either way, I'm taking the flower.

2.
Couple of days ago, Ben wrote a thought about reCAPTCHA.

The idea is this: Google Books scans using OCR. But OCR is still an imperfect technology. So sometimes it reads something but isn't sure about it.

Book Prints	OCR Reads
from	fnom
and	amd

So Google uses RECAPTCHA for human eyes to verify the words. Every time we enter reCAPTCHA, we're helping Google verify its OCR scans.

3.
I wondered,  "How does reCAPTCHA know that our verification is correct? How does it know that we're not just fnoming around?"

Two ways:

One: Two-word verification
reCAPTCHA comes with two words. One word is verified by the system. And the other word is the word that the OCR isn't sure about.

Two: Algorithms.
If a lot of people enter the same word verification, then it's likely that it's a correct reading.

But, goddamn irrepressible curiosity, that made my head explode with crowdsourcing math.

4.
How many people do you need to amass the credible opinion that their reCAPTCHA entry is correct? How many votes does the engine need to gather to finally concede with the anonymous entrees claiming that the word reads "from" not "fnom"?

The answer:

"reCAPTCHA takes only 10 seconds to solve. There are 200 MILLION  reCAPTCHAs getting solved every day. A problem that would take 50'000 hours gets solved in a day."

5.
That last factoid closed the nagging questions that Ben triggered a week ago. And it came through a book that bored me to death.

It's not a bad book, mind. But after reading "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" and "Willpower Instinct",  the current book I'm reading, "The Organised Mind", felt repetitive. I GET IT!

But even repetition has its values. The book offered insight on how many people solve reCAPTCHA

Without breaking my flow to google the answer, it came to me through force of habit. That's one less nagging question obstructing my flow. So I took it as a flower from the Universe. A tip that I'm doing the right thing even though I've read the same book a million times.

6.
Yesterday, I asked for a flower.

I felt shitty all morning. The book isn't coming out. The story isn't working out. The trip is debilitating the rest of my mental capacity. I wasn't just hysterical, I was a hysterical failure.

So I yelled. I asked for a sign, a flower, a friend. I was desperate, so I didn't care where it came from. I didn't care who brought it in. I was losing my mind and I needed help. And dared asking for it.

It came.

It came in volumes. In this auditorial hell of a village, help arrived. It arrived in metta and conversations. It came in naps and stories. It kept pouring in until I went to bed. And I kept pouring out with gratitude. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hamdillah. You are a Godsend.

7.
This morning, I did my accounting.

You know what I do in real life? I listen.

I listen to stories and try to reframe them in a gentler another format. My main tools of creation are basically mouth and keyboard. I read and talk and write. That's it. All day. Every day. With all the tangible gifts and wealth and books I got, my results are mainly intangible. No thousands of followers. No millions of riyals. Not even an ISBN number to tag on my gajillion of words.

The accounting doesn't seem to add up.

Nevertheless, when I got stuck and hopeless, I was showered with help and love. So much love and hope that I managed to practice my asanas for another day. I managed to reopen that story I've been struggling with for another week. So much love and aid that I had to tell you about it.
(وَأَمَّا بِنِعْمَةِ رَبِّكَ فَحَدِّثْ)

I can't tell you the numbers. But I can show you how it works. How it has and will always work.

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt

You do it all day, every day. You don't worry about results or recognition. You don't worry about past or future. If you're really into your work, in flow with your work, you really won't care. It isn't work if you love it, right?

If the Universe would help me, someone whose main output are just words, then how could the Universe not aid you? How many people have you met with kindness today? How many tasks have you crossed out? How much temptation have you averted? With all that work, how could the Universe not notice and take into you into its account?

Your work, your service on Earth, is your heart reaching God with your hands, thoughts and words.

And when you get stuck, He will come. And when He comes, you don't ask questions. In God's presence, you don't ask questions. You only say, Hamdillah.

((َمَا يَزَالُ عَبْدِي يَتَقَرَّبُ إِلَيَّ بِالنَّوَافِلِ حَتَّى أُحِبَّهُ فَإِذَا أَحْبَبْتُهُ كُنْتُ سَمْعَهُ الَّذِي يَسْمَعُ بِهِ وَبَصَرَهُ الَّذِي يُبْصِرُ بِهِ وَيَدَهُ الَّتِي يَبْطِشُ بِهَا وَرِجْلَهُ الَّتِي يَمْشِي بِهَا وَإِنْ سَأَلَنِي لَأُعْطِيَنَّهُ وَلَئِنِ اسْتَعَاذَنِي لَأُعِيذَنَّهُ وَمَا تَرَدَّدْتُ عَنْ شَيْءٍ أَنَا فَاعِلُهُ تَرَدُّدِي عَنْ نَفْسِ الْمُؤْمِنِ يَكْرَهُ الْمَوْتَ وَأَنَا أَكْرَهُ مَسَاءَتَهُ ))
(صحيح البخاري)

Boundaries

The Timekeeper asked me about an ethnic group going through adversity on an international scale. It was out of character for me to tell him I did not want to find out. When he asked me why, I said:

“Because there is only so much we can do with what we know.”

The Second Flight

When the second flight also got lost at sea, a fellow witch did the very thing that I refused to do. And fortified my distaste for novelty magic.

 How could she have ignored it? I don’t blame her. I get it; the temptation is too great.  It’s impossible not to be curious; to not want to “take a look”.

 My voice grew less playful and more panicky. I begged her to take her inner gaze away from the sunken flight. She kept sharing the details she sensed in her scry. The more vivid she described, the less inclined I was to attend her and what she was doing.

 At some point of her description, I snapped. I got downright condescending and rude.

I was ashamed of myself for a while after that. I could not pardon my attitude until I tried to understand why she was could not resist.

I had to make up her story.

 First of all, she’s new at it. Yes. It’s hard to not want to take a look. As hard as it was to ignore the den in the desert. But after that one time, after that one glimpse, I had learned my lesson and have gotten very careful with scrying.

 The young witch, though, did not stop at finding the vortex of misery. She delved deep, and did not leave out a single detail to describe to my horrified ears.

You know that threshold for sensitivity escalates? Like, if you've been in a working out a while, lifting 5 kgs won't hurt so much. That if you you've been comfortable for most of your life, your empathy dulls. And the idler you live, the more creative you get.

So my friend, the young witch, had an upbringing that gave her a taste for vulgar cruelty. She had a taste for watching dead bodies the same way that gossip hens take delight in feeding and elaborating and exchanging the cruelest rumors.

 This young, cruel witch had no sense of how it felt to be poor or defeated. The threshold of her sensitivity had been numbed by the years spent in comfort. She was innocently indulging in the same magnetism that “horror from a safe distance” would offer.

And she had not been crushed by the terrors that arise from behind the shade. Not yet.

The First Flight

When the first commercial flight got lost at sea, it stayed lost for weeks and weeks. You might have heard about its uncanny story. It wasn't  just one person in a specific hole. But a whole fleet of crews and passengers lost somewhere in the vast oceans.

 My mother likes Facebook and takes her news from there. So one day, she asked me where the plane was, or if I could scry its presence.

I told her I could. But I wouldn’t.

After scrolling down her timeline, she asked me again to take a look. 

I showed her the image of vortex of grief. If I scried this lost plane, I said, I would have to enter that vortex, at the center of which is the lost plane. At the center of which hundreds of dead have spent their last living moments in hopeless dread, and thousands of their living relatives fuel it with grief. Can you imagine what I would have to go through to appease a mere curiosity?

Just describing the vortex made my skin tingle. The terror from the desert had clawed its presence in every shade and darkness, in every bend my mind carelessly wanders. Even more so when I am aware and conscious of my thoughts. For all its faults, ignorance is easier to forgive than intentional trespass. 

My mother scrolled down her Facebook timeline and said, “Aren’t you curious?”

No. And I told her my story with the den in the desert.

Scrolling down some more. “But can't you help find that plane?”

And then what, I said, inform the authorities that I scried the plane’s position at sea? Even if covens of witches got together to accurately locate the plane’s location, it would still sound queer. Not to mention that it would start a modern terrorist- affiliated witch-hunt.

“Not even a tiny, teeny, weensy, bit curious?”

Sighing, I clasped my palms together and closed my eyes. How about this, mom, I said, I’ll take a look, but I will take you with me to see all the details. Touch the decomposing bodies in the dark waters, feel the echoes of their dying throes, and dive into the depths of their grief. After that, you and I can have tea with the despair of helplessness and the absence of concrete, remedial action. Wanna?

Mother shook her head, unplugged the internet, plugged up her ears and shut her eyelids tight. Not another word was offered concerning that sad flight.

The Terror in the Desert

Few years back, a five years old girl fell in a dry well somewhere in a desert in the Middle East. The rescue team could not reach the poor girl. They could not even establish contact with her. They knew she had fallen there, but they could not locate her exact depth to pull her out. 

After about a week of trying, the authorities presumed that she was dead and took permission from the family to close up the hole.

Understandably, the girl’s family resisted. They kept hoping they might at least retrieve her body for closure and proper burial. 

A querent (who knew I had just learned to scry) asked me to take a look on the girl’s whereabouts. 

I was getting ready for bed, flat on my belly and home alone in my house in Jakarta. The barriers were thin enough and I was so new at scrying that, without second thought or preparation, I immediately agreed to scry the girl. I closed my eyes, and dove into the Betweens.

The barriers between the worlds in Indonesia are so thin that even newbie witches and weakling demons can cross through. The Equatorial region is a geographical embodiment to what Wiccans describe in the couplet: “As above, so below”. The Equator is smack in the middle of the planet. It’s easier to go back and forth the Betweens from Indonesia or Brazil than, say, Australia or Mongolia. The further away from the equator, the thicker the barriers become. Consequently, the thicker the barriers, the harder it gets to travel between the worlds. That is, the further we are from the Equator, by North or South, more power and knowledge is takes the cross the barriers.

A dark world opened up to me. I had jumped into a den of lordly demons who were as ancient and cruel as the desert. They noted my presence, turned their attention toward me, and screeched a bloodcurdling cry of war. 

A frosty current of fear ran down my back and pinned me to my bed. Shivering with terror, I opened my eyes, fumbled to turn on the all lights. Turning up the music player's volume, I huddled into a ball under my blankets. Their rage filled up every part of my room, every part of my awareness with dread and defeat.

I texted my querent what I felt and saw. I told him that the demons saw and followed me home. The thick barriers they have crossed over could only mean that they were of a powerful class of demons. And they were pissed.

It took me a while to recover. It was reckless to go under with my attitude. It was stupid to travel without preparing for the culture. It was idiotic to not consider the culture of demons residing in an environment as harsh and uninhabitable as the desert.

The Desolation of Pity

When the Timekeeper asked me about an ethnic group in the news, I could have answered with a quick research. I could have explained it to him the plight of those people in simple terms.

But between the den in the desert, the planes lost at sea, and the shame of watching someone indulge in purposeless magic, I had enough reasons to keep my senses clear of global disasters. Unless a member of my close society was involved, I find it distasteful to dig into hard selling news. Unless there is a line of action to follow the digestion of hard news, I wouldn’t bother.

It may sound callous, but we're not made of infinite resources. All emotions, pity and curiosity can evolve into a banality. Even the best of intentions can turn into passive cruelty in when effective action fails to follow. For, only concrete action has the power to soften the shattering blows of emotions.

To follow up with action, we need to be aware of as many angles of a story as possible. It's a lot of work just to figure out what to fix first. That process, the process of finding out about others, will lead to more discoveries about ourselves. The more we know about ourselves, the less certain we’d be in the potency of our roles in the world.

Hence, by the time we know full stories, the story of all sides involved, we would rarely have room left for pity – for emotions. At best, we would be more aware of the pitiful things in ourselves, and be driven to actively do something about it. At second best, we would refrain from causing others anymore harm.   

Because there is so much we can do with what we know.

Grace Bait

 

Day's Bounty

"You spend money to make more money," the businessmen chant, in shameless materialism. 

It's true, though. It isn't hard to want to accept Grace, when a day has been spent offering it.

Grace comes through patches of hush. Grace seeps through the pores of dusk and twilight, announcing the changes of roles. Grace is to be able to witness ourselves morph from our dutiful selves to our magical selves.

My cue to receive grace usually comes in the groggiest moments after a nap. (A nap marks the change of day. The switch in my ultradian rhythm, from machine to magi.) There is usually a moment when groggy is actually an invitation to join the muses in their play. To ignore the world and just write.

To succumb, yet again, to another kind of Unknown.

Compassionate detachment is easier to cultivate and harvest by the end of a busy day. It isn't hard to find the drive to be creative when you've spend eight hours being boring. It's easier to stoke the primal energies when you've spent the day being straight and square.

Ha. After so long, finally the rebel stirring in my loins got its logic satiated: "Not never. Just not yet."

Scrying

Scrying was an accidental discovery.

I was meditating on someone who was living across the world away and I felt his physical sensations. I felt him move, from laying on his back to his right side. The sensations were so specific that I had to break from meditation and text him.

After the initial Whoa!, he allowed me access to deeper layers of his emotions. His darkness and anguish. I felt that I could infect him with my own joy and surrender. Then I wondered if I could make him sweep the yard in the middle of the night, or if he might tell me his credit card numbers.

Scrying works like a search engine for the subconscious, it's that simple. Scrying is also disruptive to meditation, easier than asanas, and more entertaining than writing these long streams of consciousness.

The Betweens

It would help if you believe in the eternal soul, but if you don’t, just hang on to the idea of Google. 

Similar to how the Internet is the middle ground to all information available to man, there is a realm a little above/below/beside/off ours, that works like the middle ground for all things intangible. The Javanese call this place Khayangan. Carl Jung called it the Collective Unconscious. I call it the Betweens.

In the Betweens, unconscious, incalculable and ancient knowledge is stored and can be accessed. When we sleep and die, our souls wait in the Betweens. The Betweens is also where souls meet and exchange news with other beings.

Accessing the Betweens

When we enter the trance state of Sammadhi, or deep meditation, we physically emulate sleep without the loss of consciousness. Since our brain is really, really smart, after a while of practicing Sammadhi, neural paths get forged, creating a bridge between for the Collective Unconscious with the conscious.

While in the Betweens, the sharpest scryings can occur. Questions be presented, problems enlightened, conversations exchanged, and names get dropped.

It is worth noting that the point to meditation is not to scry or develop supernatural glitches. These abilities happen by accident and disrupt meditation. Okay?

Suggestions for Practice

• Scrying can be a useful tool for reflection and self-discovery. Whoever knows herself, knows and takes careful heed of her God, His Grace and Justice upon all beings.
• Scrying can lessen our dependence on note-taking and gadgets (and those gadgets’ chargers). We would just need to close our eyes to find a general direction to serve our purposes.
• Scrying also lessens the complications of socializing, especially if one member of such society is inconveniently dead or yet-to-be born.
• Between the living, scrying allows access to physical sensations. The scryer can take away some pain, and offer her own stock of wellness in its place. On the other hand, the same process is possible with negative sensations. This leads us to the importance of grounding.
• We came from earth, we live on earth, we eat from earth, and in death we return here too. Illnesses and emotions too are part this planet. Grounding is the act of directing illness and imbalance back to earth. Grounding can also take from earth the restorative energy to recalibrate our inner balance.
• Both scyring and grounding begin and end with meditation, but you need to eat properly to meditate properly. Yalla think about that.

Free for All, But

Once a person has conscious access to the Betweens, she also has access to the souls and secrets residing there. And just like Google, abundance of information means nothing without the patience and strength to apply it into daily practices. An idiot-savant has all tools to think and create, but not the ability to offer meaning.

We cannot comprehend beyond our capacity for coding and rehashing information. A scryer might have access to the secrets in the Betweens, but without wisdom and empathy, there is little meaning that can be taken from there.

Still, anyone who can access the Betweens, has access to our subconscious memory stored there (dreams, past lives, probable future). Someone who loves or hates you very much, would think about you a lot. Thought is another word for meditation. Long meditations naturally lead to creative discoveries, good or bad.

If it is any consolation, even if we are scrying for others with their permission, our intentions define our findings. Scryers can only find good in news and in others if they are good themselves.

Notes on Privacy

Privacy, whether on the Internet or in the Betweens, is a sacred privilege, and protecting it is a practice. Accessing the Betweens at a conscious state of mind automatically exposes the scryer. It's a karmic balance. Experienced scryers honor the sanctity of privacy for their own privacy's sake.

Finally, nobody leaves bed in the morning planning to return to it with a heavy conscience. That said, practice good faith but make use of the facts.

The Writer’s Lot

Somewhere out there, words like these are set in titanium and diamonds and stars:

Human child No. So-and-So will be born to So-and-So parents, on the So-and-So time and place, and will expire on the So-and-So time and place. During her life, she will go through This-Much of experience that will feed That-Many of her stories and tweets, based on So-Many-Number of Drafts and Rewrites.
She will not expire until she has written her entire allotment. She will write her entire allotment and not a word more. She will reach This-Exact-Number of readers and not a reader more or less. How her stories will reach each and every one of her readers are enlisted in the attached documents and is available for the thoughtful.
How she feels about her allotment on these Preserved Tablets will fluctuate between Doubtful nights and Caffeinated mornings. Regardless, what's maktoub will be true. Thus it is revealed, this we shall believe and to the Truth we shall all return. Amen.

The She-Demon

She smelled of velvet midnight. Something sweet and inviting. Something that Saudi women wore to weddings or seduction. She smelled extremely atypical of me, that I had to look around for broken perfume bottles before realizing that it wasn't, couldn't possibly be me. And that I wasn't alone in my room.

I've been meditating more regularly, which made astral projections easier. I’m so new at this that it’s impossible for me not to be curious, hence my travels to Saudi more, uh, frequent. Rituals aside, the way she announced herself said a lot of things. That she didn't slam into my face or started goosebumps or chilled the room. The way she announced herself allowed for slow comprehension, "What is that smell? I have nothing that smells like that. Who is…shit!" It was the most polite I've ever been announced to.

Demons aren't usually that polite in announcing their presence. Usually, when they do, they jump my awareness with sudden show of face or limb or roaring. One of the residents in my mother's house in Jeddah, announced himself by rabbit-jumping between me and the elevator. He was all teeth and hollow eye sockets, limbs spread apart in a pre-hug stance or utter mischief. (I frowned and walked through him.) The ones in my house in Jakarta are more aggressive. On certain nights of the week, they gather and party around my bed. The tiles reverberate, the windows creak and the she-demon from the Ring crawls towards my bed in menace. I would itch and scratch myself like mad. (Remember Lady Macbeth's insanity?)

The she-demon from last night got credit for politeness. Which meant that there was a message or a purpose in her visit. Not a random show of mischief. This morning, over breakfast and as flat as brick, my master told me that she had brought a male companion who did not enter the house and waited outside on the porch.

Their message was, "May we serve?"

I don't know why they do that, why they offer their services to humans. I’m only guessing that being a demon can be pretty boring. You know, extended longevity and deep wisdom and lack of twitter followers. If boredom is a common experience among jinn and man, then I can relate.

Though I still wonder how they found me. And if that's obvious, why they chose to follow me of all astral travelers. Sure, I might have been visiting people in Saudi a little too often because, well, for every reason you might guess. And to be perfectly honest, I may not always travel with the purest and most celibate intentions. (Shush. Stop smiling like that.)

Which made realize that, if increased traffic gave me away in their radars, then they might have retraced anyone else who has been traveling here to reach me too. And if intent had a smell, and the one that appeared last night smelled like velvet midnight, then...Oh damn.

Succubus?

And the one at the door...Incubus?

Oops.

Clear Voice

I started trusting the voices in my head last year, on the last meditation course I attended.

Around the seventh day, I started feeling so woozy that I barely managed the mountainous terrain between my sleeping dorm and the meditation hall.

That was when the first voice said, "Low blood pressure."

During these 10-days courses, our diet is a twice-a-day meager vegetarian with very low sodium. It had happened to me before, coming home with my blood pressure so low that I needed to eat a whole kid to fix it. By the time I started feeling the same symptoms again on that course, I had already slipped the stairs and nearly killed myself in the drizzling dark once. I started fretting and worrying about dying from being too good a girl. There was no way I could manage getting a Big Whopper in that place.

Then the second voice said, "Soy sauce."

And I said, "That's gross. I ain't so crazy to listen to that kind of crazy!"

They said nothing. And on the next meal, I poured soy sauce on all my food , the only source of monosodium chloride available in the sterile dining room, and swallowed quickly because it there was no point in indulging medicinal food like that.

And the next time I heard them, the bragging voices in my blood-pressure-normalized-head said, "Glad to have your trust."

Paradox

We can’t explain ourselves all the time.

For one, there are no words that could explain better what our actions could not. Even if we tried explaining it in tidbits, it won’t be the whole picture. The supremacy of time and seasons is just something that we have to obey and accept.

The more we understand, the less we are able to share it with anyone. 

If lucky, we might meet someone with similar experiences, and from them the best companionship is a nod of recognition.

Otherwise, when the divide has been cleared, the others won’t matter as much. That is why we try so hard to understand, in spite of time, rejection and failure. We are trying to develop a resiliency of faith in ourselves and actions.

And when understanding has evolved into faith, disregardful to endings and judgments, we know that we’ve done our work in the world.

And know we have been happy.

Wide Hush

Start Herein

If we spoke quietly, our audience would be forced to lower their tones too. And if we stayed quiet despite the noise, the quiet will spread. Because even the Unquiet needs a loud audience to stay loud. Simply because speaking loudly fills one's ears with deafening ring.

So long that one of us is quiet enough, even the loudest and most chaotic will one day run out of voice and find wisdom in hushing up.

What happens then?

For one, we'll hear better. Then respond more efficiently, and get to have more time to do things we actually like. With the people we really like.

For another, it gets easier to look out for ourselves and each other. Like steroids for awareness, for our minds and feelings.

Just from hushing, see?

Meetings – I

I met four of my ex-boyfriends by coincidence in one week.
I don't know how it happened. I had been trying to meet Ex-Boyfriend No.3 for months with no avail. Then that week came, and I met him and three others.
No, I didn't check with the astrologers to figure out what in the stars happened to allow that to happen. It just so happened that with every one of them there was a message; something important I had been wondering about and I needed a sign. And they were the ones who, one by one, answered the questions that I have been wondering about.
(And they heard what they needed to hear through me too, I think.)
For instance, the married ex-boyfriend taught me how to fix the house. The one who came all the way from Dubai gave me a story that - on the internet - turned slightly viral. The one I had been hoping to see, Ex-Boyfriend No.3,  actually showed me what happens when you insist on seeing someone before the meeting is due: Nothing.
The last one, by contrast, wrapped me with understanding. That, when it is time to meet, the Universe will cancel every flight, slow or accelerate processes, and simply rearrange all the stars and cars in its belly, to make that meeting happen.
Likewise, there is nothing you could do, not a wish or prayer or organizational genius could allow a meeting to bloom if the Universe does not yet deem it time to ripen and fall.
(No matter how hateful is your absence.)

Meetings – II

I'm a witch. I don't know what else to call the amalgamation of characteristics that has been appearing since for the last few years.
I need to call it something to accept it. I need to accept that I'll never work for profit. That I can't have a calculated income or apply for insurance. That I have to stop expecting things and only facilitate for them to happen on their own. Obeying the supremacy of time and seasons.
(And the Lord who commands and reigns over all beings and times.)
Witchy things are considered outdated and wrong. Who cares about the stars and demons when you have twitter and supersmartphones?
Then again, every time I mention it, everyone turns superstitious. (You, too, are still reading, I see.) It's a pliable icebreaker, even with the most rigid rationalist. Unlike religion and politics, it's safe; nobody will be offended. And it's as delicious as a dirty pleasure.
You know? Maybe I'm not a witch. Maybe I'm just a good guesser because I listen well. Maybe the witchy thing is just a ruse. A ruse that will allow you to start talking about yourself. Because you need someone to listen. Because you needed your burden to be shared. And I just happened to be the stranger who'll love you anyway. Whatever you say. I'll listen. I won't mind.
I'm just a witch, after all.

Meetings – III

Our biological design is meant to hold a certain form for only few periods at time, before deconstructing again into tiny-tiny atoms.
The same goes, I guess, for memories, words, bones and stories. Everything we sense and remember and understand are meant to pass on. To flow from one container to another.
I'm romantic about death. I hope to be buried rather than cremated, one day. (It seems environmentally friendlier.) Either way, my bones and memories would turn to dust and even tinier things. So I wondered if it's possible for atoms of my bones and memories to dilute in the water that's going into grains of rice. And if it's possible for someone who consumes that rice to remember how my bones held me up on my journeys. How my memories were filled with stories.
(And how much I have loved you.)
And then I wonder again, if the person who ate the rice that held my atoms would, after that meal, feel joy for the rice, the farmers, the waters and the land that has cycled and reached him in that wholesome meal. I wonder if my atoms would touch his. If they do, I hope the good ones would make him pass through the day better. And if they don't, I hope someone else has had better memories to pass on to him.
(And would inspire him to love his girl, as much as I have always loved you.)

Tame the Beast

The voices in our heads are the autopilots of our decisions. All decisions are emotional, a marketer would say.

Sure, you might manage a story of 300 words once a year without knowing the voices in our heads. But to write 2000 words everyday, a story every day, will take a bit more courage. It will take a bit of self-excavation through the crooks and crevices of the convoluted noise in our heads.

If you are not accustomed to seeing demons and spirits and goblins, you would not know how to react when you do see them. Similarly, if you are not accustomed to the voices in your head, it is more important to stay cool and listen to all until you can differentiate between them.

So listen. Listen carefully. The voices in our heads have been living there for years of abandonment. They’re cold and scared and vicious. They might have been affecting our behaviors without us knowing. They might be harder to woo and control and understand than we care to admit. That's okay.

Knowing the voices in your head is always a good thing. It will take a while of getting used to. Don't fear. Acknowledge them, but keep writing. The only way they could hurt us is by letting them take over our courage to write, move, and call that bloody repairman to come and bomb the house.

• Read

And not just tweets, if you please.

One way of differentiating between demons is to see a lot of them. One way of hearing a lot of voices in your head is by reading.

Reading is an intimate activity between the reader and the voices that have been living in other people's heads. If those people have managed to listen to the voice in their heads and come out of it just fine, with some practice, so can you.

You Don’t Scare Me

I had the slightest window to shower.

The master's annual Eid sermons and prayers were renown for their brief simplicity. He did not like to indulge in what nature was more efficient in doing. He also knew that the bulk of change in the conscience of man did not lay in public performances.

Indeed, he had a very long day ahead of him. A very long week, actually, filled with an influx of villagers who have worked abroad and were home for Eid. And with them, the master exchanged blessings. And for them the house was opened, allowing them to fill the house with noise and children and curiosity. Touching everything with their thoughts and words and fingers. Thus, for a whole week, at least, I was pent up in my room to avoid the nemesis of hermiticism.

Hence, that one small window of calm. When everyone's attention was averted to the Timekeeper and Eid ceremonies. It was the only chance for me to slip in and out of my room without getting ambushed with chitchat and stares. After a few years of miserably spending the week cooped up in my room in past Eid seasons, I had counted on that small window of calm to take my one final break from being eternally constipated and shower.

I stripped and stepped into the shower. Naked and soaped, I remembered that I was also facing a window of doom. If I had known about this small window, would not a lot of other people - more destitute and desperate for more important resources than showering - knew about it too?

It was the golden hour of loot. I've heard stories of thieves squeezing into the tightness of that window, pushing on desperation and murdering anybody found behind the unlucky windows they have cracked open.

I turned facing the shower door. Naked and wet, I thought, if I was going to share that window of calm with anyone I might as well try to get a full view.

That was when I saw it.

Looming taller and wider than the shower door, it stood behind me, blocking my view of everything else behind it. Its thick fur and stocky figure overfilled the shower stall. Its cookie-monster eyes rotated insanely, never meeting mine, offering subordination in its language. Naked and wet, I nearly slipped off my feet laughing.

Did the master send you? To protect the house?

And the master’s servant genderuwo's massive head stilled for a moment in humble and silent acquiescence.

Guardians

I fall in love every time I write a new story. It is one of my terrible writing habits. And it is one heck of a potent source of power.

Love that is as profit-oriented as that can never be consumed. It has to be a zipless fuck. A fuckless love. Because fucking is too messy. Nowadays, the cost is always too high. The young ones might not understand this, but every fuck costs lots of risks and hail marys. And the older we are, the less risks we want to spend our time on hail-marying.

Yes, grown ups want to fuck too. Very badly. It shows in our gestures and grins and disgustingly intimate conversations. But we can't afford it. We can't afford everything else that comes along the choice to fuck.

Being older meant that we come a baggageful of plans. We did not plan on having these plans; they just sprouted and imposed themselves on us. Every day. For instance, he believes that if he was good enough, God will unite him with his wife, rest her soul, in the afterlife. I believed that if I kept my legs closed, I could write about the experience in a public blog and not suffer through the misery of not posting for another day. That was the plan.

Unfortunately, our plans came with a set of habits. A set of habits that we stuck with. We sure did stick with them. We cursed through every moment that brought such ridiculously fuckless plans and habits. But we did.

***

Like everything else that turns out with plans, this too surprised us. Mostly because we didn't plan on making a habit of being friends for such a long time. Relationships just happen on their own too. You don't get an internet identity because you wanted to end up in a foreign place twelve years later, at the airport asking the only friend left for you in the world (whom you have met as that foresaid internet identity) if he would like to hang out with you for a day.

You do not spend years living in an exotic country because you want to develop an insatiable taste for tomatoes available only in his dusty kitchen, either.

And you definitely did not learn an intellectual language to lose this argument: "I'm a greasy man. Detergent removes grease! What's wrong with you, woman?"

No. Things just happened. That's the way the world works: Plans and habits form whether or not you want to fuck. And every time we do something in the world, planned or incidental, we can only hope that it is going to return to us kindly. We can only hope that we are braced with enough habits to bear through massive tests of character with residues of our identity in tact.

We spent a whole day alone together in the privacy of his home, in our shorts and t-shirts, and separate beds. Through our meals and giggles, we kept our eyes lowered. The subject laid itself on our eyelids so heavily that we only sighed and cut more tomatoes when silence wrung between us for too long.

And besides, we, the older ones, have developed habits so strict that they come to us in crude, undeniable forms. They came to me fully-armored, whispering angrily, from the moment I laid foot in that house until the airport gates closed behind me in the next morning: "Who are you? You don't belong here. Leaveleaveleaveleave..."

***

I feel like I’m breaking new rules every time I write. I promised I would not exploit my private life. I promised I would not divulge on sex. I promised a lot of things to guard my writing voice.

I've broken most of them by the end of this post. Soon I won't have anymore rules left to write with, and I'll need to make up new rules. Or a new habit. I don't know if I should care anymore. Things just happened. Even this post just happened to come on its own - Finally! - after a thousand rewrites.

I fell in love with him every time I rewrote this. I don’t mind that habit. I'm proud of him, and hope he will forgive me eventually for writing about us like this. About the rules we that we broke to test our friendship. And to test the plans that we have duly observed. And the habits that served and protected our identity.

Maybe some of these broken rules have some truth in my writings, and strum words that reverberate with someone’s tune.

Ila’s Mother

Over breakfast, the Timekeeper started telling me a disgusting story about pigs and poop. I flipped, "I'm still eating, man!"

He laughed. "You ought to have a stronger stomach than that. I don't get sick from stories." A thoughtful pause. "I do get sick if someone got sick, though."

Then he remembered the night Ila's mother passed away. Ila’s Mother was the Timekeeper's step mother, the one who raised him after his own departed when he was younger. He was with her that night. She awoke with a fever and was vomiting blood. Her body couldn't take it and she died.

"How could someone die from vomiting blood, man?"

"She didn't just die from something she ate. She died from an illness in her lungs. Only, she never knew about it until she started vomiting blood, which was a few nights before she passed away."

And that resettled the air between us back to its snug storytelling mood. A life loved and productive to its last moments, oblivious to worry of illness, almost always promises a happy ending story. Death comes in many forms. This was one of the better ones.

When she awoke that night, she asked for milk. Since it was the Timekeeper who was on watch, he was the one prepared it for her. And she sipped it all with a straw.

Then the fever cooled, and it bloomed in beads of perspiration on her brow. The Timekeeper began to wipe her face, but she said, "Leave it, child."

Then she fell into deep sleep. And then some.

"It's one of the signs of a good death." And he said it in a heartbreaking sweetness that children reserve for the memory of lost embraces.

"Did you cry?"

He grinned. I shook my head laughing. How could I forget? One who sees both worlds is never lonely even in grief.

The hospital wanted to keep its reputation. Hence, when Ila's Mother's family requested to carry her body home that very night, the release process was fast. Fast is intimate.

They didn’t even bother casketing her. The men who loved her carried her body closely in their arms. They traveled through the night. They held her on their crisscrossing laps, inside a hired pick-up tub. The Timekeeper held her waist.

And it might have been the cold, or maybe as a private joke between them. That her post-mortem bladder relaxed, releasing its liquid memories into his living embrace.

Fealty

You know

• that feeling that made you stay in the same hateful place just to make sure that your elders and children are in comfort?

You know

• that feeling that stretches your patience for the little mistakes and tilted frames on the wall? That feeling you get when time and space doesn't matter anymore and all that you know is the orgasmic present, and that is all the goddamn certainty that you'll ever need?

You know

• that feeling that reasserted your entire value system and beliefs? That feeling that bundled the cycle of life and death and rebirth in a blink of an eye, in six days of creation or a million years of evolution?

Yea, man,

• you've just spent irreplaceable minutes of your life on a rambling prose because you've got it. You've been waiting for a conclusion. You want that validation. Concerning a feeling that we can only define when broken down into objectives and minutes, into labels and things, into kisses and diamond rings, yet never definite enough. Never enough.

• That feeling that leaves brokers and soldiers and prosaic poets and kafirs staggered by the throngs in its absence?

That feeling?

Yea, man, we do. We really do.

We've got it too.

Fluid

Few days ago, I caught fire thinking about you.

That was pillar, right? Sparks that only a fellow writer could trigger are always pillars. Something to hold on to and elaborate until you grace me again with your presence. Then what? Foundation? Walls? Windows? The love of writing? Obviously. The trust in everydayness? Yes. The simplicity of being? Always.

There were so many complex ideas that poured in too; about society and culture and quagmires like that. I couldn't go there. I wanted to make love to a table. With a table. On a table. Based on that love around a mere a table, couldn't we reach other planes of writing too?

I wanted to love.

I want to talk love. Because that's the butter that is making my day so fluid. I had an awesome day. No arguments. Got my hurdles figured out. I felt hopeful, concentrated.

I sincerely believed that, “Oh this discomfort is not going to last. Everything is going to be alright again.” And I was right. Everything was fine again.

Everything was awesome, actually. Because after that, you and I talked about the things we loved. We talked about writing. About feelings and that it ain't cute. About distances and sleepy hugs.

And you called my name.

***

You called my name in a voice that only a long, long illness of nostalgia could have honed. (Nostalgia for what? For whom?) Your voice dressed me in mist and morning and mindfulness. Reminding me that - if not everything, then that very moment - was going to be fine. That, even if we didn't have forever, you won't betray me that moment whence you loved and called me from the depths of your awareness.

You gave me that moment. Fully. Openly. Systematically taking all that I had offered in return.

(Who in his right mind would do that, call my true name with so much reverence?)

Isn't that love? A form of love? A love that is true and irrefutable because, if only for that moment (and a moment could last forever,) it was true. What are great big words and promises without series of little moments like that?

***

I'm thick with failures. I've traveled too far, feared too deep and worried too much. But when I was there and you cared to attend, when we chose to be present for each other, I breathed in relief.

I got to let my failures take a break from infesting my fields of thought and take a long hike to Uranus. Or somewhere as far. 

And the good news is that anyone, anyone who cares enough to pause and attend anything she deemed worthy of even a smidge of love, could take that break too.

And breathe in the fluid relief of self-acceptance.

Yoga Notes: Asanas and Feelings

Last week, coming back from a month-long rough trip and a while of not practicing, I entered seated forward bends and had to stop practicing because I could not stop crying. It raised the “WTF is wrong with me?” alarm. I blamed all the possibilities: travel weariness, meditation, fasting, PMS, dairy-product-withdrawal, etc.

Few days ago, I tried practicing forward bends again. And of course, the feelings reemerged. Though not as overwhelming as the last time and I thought, “Hey, absence of crushing social pressure really helped.”

What more, I managed to hold it down until the end of the forward bends variations, enter the twists, and whatever weepiness I felt were washed away. I felt cleansed.

Both forward bends and twists are like internal massages for the back and core muscles. Massage causes a rush of fresh, oxygenated blood into the massaged areas. It made sense why feelings (either physical or emotional) emerged after twists and forward bends; because of the mental and physical bruises stored in the muscles.

But why the contextual difference between the two? Why did I feel grief and fear in forward bends, and then felt cleansed and rejuvenated during twists?

It’s hard to go into details about body-mind connection without sounding too hippie or New Age. Enlightenments, ecstasies and orgasms are private experiences; the only measuring tool for them is the rhythmic meter in a poem. Eastern medicine is richer in vocabulary and theories about how food, feelings and form relate to each other, but the more I talk about them, the shyer I relate to things as jarring as sudden, uncontrollable bouts of weeping.

Physiology and anatomy, however, are tangible enough to dwell writing about. And the closest biological explanation to the emotional rush in deep back extensions starts from the Psoas muscles.

Buried deep within the core of your body, the psoas (pronounced "so-az") affects every facet of your life, from your physical well-being to who you feel yourself to be and how you relate to the world...Intimately involved in the fight or flight response, the psoas can curl you into a protective fetal ball or flex you to prepare the powerful back and leg muscles to spring into action. Because the psoas is so intimately involved in such basic physical and emotional reactions, a chronically tightened psoas continually signals your body that you're in danger, eventually exhausting the adrenal glands and depleting the immune system.

- Yoga Journal, The Psoas is

Since forward bending requires the kind of muscular extension that is counterintuitive to stress-reflexes, it challenges our sense of security. Getting that hurdle over with, forward bends brings forth a submissive kind of peace, kind of like the one we feel right before an orgasm. (And we stayed in that asana longer, we might, actually.)

And twists are just awesome stretches: they open our chests and bring out the booming, happy soldier in us. Try it. Try releasing your psoas. Try yoga. And experience the swing. Just be safe. And make sure you go over the weepy hurdle.

Crash, Diet

The month I spent on Yoga teacher training was (mostly) supported on vegetarian diet, and getting off that diet felt like the Kurukshetra War in my intestines.

Mostly vegetarian. I can't tell you just how much exactly because I think that my teachers read my blog and they might have slipped a microchip in our digestive tract to monitor and report to the yoga fairies whether or not we behave yogic enough. I think.

I hated vegetarian diet from the beginning. I did not work all the way up the food chain just to end up eating vegetables. I have always been a proud carnivore; and if the custom of a certain area celebrated by serving roasted blue whale, or sautéed panda medallions, then I'm all for it. The bloodier the better this yogini shall banquet, see?

And I hated vegetarianism more because I had to fake it for a whole month in return for validation. I have been practicing yoga for a LONG time. What cow has the mind to object and tell me that I am not good enough to practice or teach Yoga because I like having her cousins for dinner, medium rare, with mashed potatoes on the side?

Of course, once I was formally off the leash, I indulged: For three days straight, everything with a formerly beating heart was swallowed, consensually or with regrets.

On the fourth day, glory!, right after a highly caffeinated breakfast with Oreo cookies, my stomach said its Hail Marys and took me aside for undivided attention in the privacy of the furthest bathroom in the house.

Me: "I don't understand! I thought you had the guts to digest skewered crocodiles and baboons."
Stomach: (Incoherent grumbling and bubbling and bursting.)
Me: (Flushing defeat.)

***

Still confused at my stomach's rejection, I had to take the car for a tune up, because the car isn’t yogic enough to care about environmental disasters like we do.

It was lunchtime, and there was a mall near nearby. The mall, of course, had always been like my second home. I have grown up and napped and ate and took my writing degree (MBA: Mistress of Blogging Arbitrarily) at the mall. Leaving the car at the mechanic, I decided to hit the mall's foodcourt.

But my stomach gave a warning rumble at the sight of every food item on the menu. In every restaurant. In the entire mall.

I'm sorry for sounding so hyperbolic. I have never been aware how every minute we spend at the a mall with our mouths open is not dissimilar to mass culinary suicide. Anything you eat or drink at a mall is either overly-sweet, overly-caffeinated, or just plain insulting to the evolutionary dignity of having taste buds. The longer I stayed there was the bigger chances I had to die from food poisoning than my a-pack-a-day smoking, and not because a woman can't smoke at the mall.

It was nearly impossible not to see a variety a cow or duck or chicken or all of it meshed together on mall food. My choices for lunch, without alarming the vegetarian demon in my belly, was left plain rice and salt. Which none of these restaurants served without the additional complimentary dirty look plastered on the waiters' faces.

I practically broke speed limits at plain rice consumption.

***

Lunch aside, I was left with another hour and fifty-five minutes to waste until I could take the car back.

Back in the days, a whole week at the mall wouldn't have been too much to bear. There's just so much to eat and drink and buy while eating and drinking and buying some more.

This isn't about vegetarianism, Sattvic dieting or being tastefully stingy. The microchip they installed in my digestive tract was too patent that the alarm went off everywhere I tried to sit. I was turning into an involuntary healthy-eating hippie because wanting to deepen my Yoga practice has indirectly lead me there.

To sit at a mall meant to do justice to that precious space that your bottom needs to rest upon, and without getting the complimentary vicious looks from your chairowner's herd of underpaid peons, you need to order something more solid than water.

But what is there to consume in a mall without risking napalm explosions in whatever is left of my guts?

To think of all the breakfasts, lunches and dinners that I spent fighting and/or silently cursing my diet Nazi gurus over this kind of garbage shiny-packaged faux-food?

***

By one miracle or another (and an expensive stroll into the bookstore and underwear departments), time and shopping-possessions were passed and I got the car home, humming happier than my diet shocked belly did all day.

And there, with his subtle teasing and smiling reproach, my master and adopted-father brought forth three kinds of bananas and counting, to keep me afloat until my stomach chose to regrow its guts and digest the dead.