He waits in his wings

A very warm day, the sun is out, big billowing clouds shroud the mountains, a nice day in fact to paraglide?  Five years coming and I haven’t yet soared with the buzzards and hawks. 

At seven this morning I arrived at the grandparent’s homestead for fresh curd and chia with buffalo milk.  Baba and Ama are leasing their two rooms and courtyard to a group working on the colossal hotel.  The kitchen they now use has room for two chairs and a table.  It is small. Beem churned curd to make ghee the old fashioned way and I tell him he can sell a liter of ghee to the new hotel and triple the price.

 I take a chair out and sit in the road to smoke a cigarette. 

Seven male Japanese twenty something tourists arrive and take four rooms. They hang their wet clothes on the balcony.  What are they going to do today, checking in before noon?  Well, with seven Japanese men comes seven smartphones and tablets and what internet connection existed thirty minutes ago is gone.  Not that it really matters, right? 

Do you really think the answer to stop the fighting lay in another dimension?  Do spirits have the solution that cannot be found by man?

The leg muscles are sore, the abrasions are there.  For a second I considered a visit to a clinic in Pokhara after my feet first slide into the bush, a sore back made worse, I considered then how a local would handle such a scenario, is it a hmmmm kind of problem or is it a ka-toi kind, mostly a hmmm, bistarly bistarly it is said, take ‘er easy, slowly. 

An afternoon nap was necessary, woken by chatty Japanese boys who’ve congregated outside room four.  They’ve come all this way to bond on a balcony, giggling like they’re out of their parent’s home for the first time.  Should I peek outside, make my presence known, redirect their internal enthusiasm for the wilds? 

Maya washed my clothes yesterday and they are dry now on the roof.  The Japanese have firmly planted themselves on the balcony with chairs and clothes racks and I will make myself known.  Konichiwa!  Maybe they’re not Japanese, perhaps they are…Burmese.  No they sound Japanese.  They could be Hong Kongers, Cantonese sounds nothing at all to Mandarin. 

I’ve put my sandals in front of the entrance, a reminder to the boys, maintain space and respect.

Indonesia.  I wasn’t even close.  But a trend appears:  the Chinese diaspora.  It’s 4.39pm and 

they’re all sleeping.  I hope this doesn’t mean 11pm chatterings fellas.  Sumatra was my highlight.  And the Komodo dragons.  And north Bali with the black sand beaches.  I can’t forget the birds of Ubud and the fresh volcanos and the citizens of Maumere, who ten years earlier lost a quarter million in a tsunami.  I’d never seen bodies with no souls before. 

6:50pm

Rain from the north arrives and the day closes at the same time.  Samyog, coincidence.  Two non-related events coming together for absolutely no reason unless you can prove a third party.  I can and there is no other reason.  I’ve learned in five years not all coincidences have any meaning at all and ought to be forgotten.  Mine happen because someone can see two seconds ahead of me and thinks he knows best simply because of this skill.  Spirits and humans.  Intuition is a skill, foreknowledge a gift, instincts, from the belly of the beast.  Or you can say all of these come from one, perhaps unfortunately more than that, spirit.  Alive and well, active in my case sometimes too much because I pay attention to everything that happens to me and some things are not explainable unless I understand the spirit.  My spirit.

Perhaps the longest question running in my head these days is the case of the missing spirit. I know this comes up sometimes in writing but it hasn’t been resolved nor forgotten.  Nyima told me through his medium my spirit left and left an opening for this present one.  I didn’t ask then, and I should have, where did my spirit go?  When did my spirit go?  And of course are the tangents; were there other spirits inside me?  No sign of the spirit of Jesus?  Strange, I was never angry with Jesus, go further up the chain.  I have a number of dates in mind though I cannot prove any correlation with them and the time my spirit left.  That is so strange.  Does this happen often to people though they never know it?

The day I woke up in my parent’s basement after an episode of sleepwalking.  I was afraid but I was also angry and intended to never let that happen again and it never happened again.  I was around 12 or 13.  And I’d say my life wasn’t exactly any different after that moment that would indicate I was soulless, surely there was Jesus he just didn’t talk to me very much.  He waits in his own wings I reckon. 

During the days after the divorce I kept a journal, thanks to Harry Truman, and poured out the most angry vile attack against God in black and blue and sometimes red.  In 2009 I destroyed the journals.  Maybe my spirit left me in the summer of 1998.  I certainly didn’t have much faith in much then of anything but I can say today I do believe.  Just not all of it. 

These are the most likely moments when a spirit of any kind might have left.  The first date has nothing to do with God, it has to do with who must have been a restless spirit who couldn’t synchronize with me and I told him or whatever to leave and it did.  One proof of that is I rarely dream, and haven’t much since I stopped sleepwalking.  I wish I did dream more asleep than awake.

 9pm

The Indonesians come in from the rain and eating supper elsewhere on the mountain, the rain sweeps the trees to the left and to the right.  Suraksha and I enjoyed  frozen reese’s chocolate bars, pieces of apple and Ram and the driver finished off two pieces of Starbucks bean cake I thought disappeared on the second day I arrived.  There are two men and one woman in room six.  Locals.  The woman is on hire.  Their voices rise.  All is calm outside.  My door is open, the bathroom light is on.  When I turn the overhead light on with the door open, hundreds of insects arrive.  I hear more than three voices now.  Boy was I wrong.  It’s the Indonesians I hear all gathered outside.  The woman and her client are alone.  I took a good nap, someone turned the light on outside my window and the rain comes down hard.  Just a little harder and they’ll be inside, thank you.  Am I an old crank?  The cough still hurts the side, a slow healing we’ve got here.  I just prefer listening to the rain and not those who don’t listen to the rain. 

Two Indonesian boys go inside, some come outside.  The woman for hire plays Nepalese music on her smartphone.  It’s still relatively early I reckon to say anything, like you will not.  I do have to go outside when they do shut their doors and turn out that balcony light.  Meanwhile…the woman sings to Anju Pant.  The man tries to join but trails off when his mobile rings and he talks, and she talks to someone and there are the chatty islanders.  And here’s a big rain, nothing new to those on the balcony, but where’s the wind?  The locals sing through it.