Fire & Flow
Babajaan, from what I hear you say, it sounds to me that to course correct then is to reset to default?, she said.
Her eyes, slate grey in the cool autumn evening. The fire had taken and was at that special stage of crackling, urgent red flame. The Dervish loved this smell of wood and flame, the smoke and heat. Staring into the fire, she quickly drifted into the flow.
The old man saw the child before him flow gently and fully into the rhythm of the multiverse and intentionally joined the moment. It was different for Babajaan, he’d come to the flow by another route to the child. Some would say Babajaan’s route was headed in so many directions at different times, it’s a miracle that he’d even arrived at the flow. His harshest critics even said Babajaan’s idea of the flow was baloney. But Babajaan’s world had no baloney; that was reserved for high civilization. And even these critics knew that baloney was only for the lower classes in high civilization. The people in high civilization who managed to grab onto a rung and pull themselves, sometimes even by their own bootstraps, did not eat baloney. Babajaan often wondered about that expression. It must take a great deal of contortion of the physical form to both pull yourself up by your bootstraps and grasp the next rung on the ladder. Babajaan decided then that the people in high civilization must be great yogi masters and resolved to seek them out and learn more from them.
The fire had reached the next stage, a deep orangey red with the individual pieces of lemon and olive wood stacked in a pyramid style visible through the clean licking flames. The sky was turning its face to the night. In the arid western highlands of the holy land, the universe holds this moment gently and with patience. The dervish wondered about how it was that Babajaan, a child of the morning sun, could have found his flow and much later, a home in a place of the setting sun, a place so different from the natural climate of his birth and tribe.
‘It may well be a reset child, Babajaan said.
He hesitated for a moment, gathering in his thoughts like the night was now gathering up the last of the purple streaks of light in the sky; ‘I’m less sure about the default part though. It might be that what is considered default is itself a yearning for course correction. Maybe the default was designed as another kind of patriarchy made flow. Like two streams, the way a fresh mountain stream and modern water borne sewage both exhibit flow, yet one is the flow manifest and the other is just a bad imitation of flow.
Babajaan, sometimes also written as baba-jaan, is a term used to refer to father in Urdu. Although now rarely in use in this form, Babajaan is also used to refer to a sage.
Baloney, is also known as polony in the holy land. A mix of ingredients including colourants, flavourants, fillers, edible glues, other chemical compounds and waste animal products rolled up and presented as an edible protein.
Fire & Flow is a cautionary tidbit about seeing.
© Oppi Stoep 2023 by Jesh Baker
