Organism and Environment
Early mornings in the village are now properly chilly. You’ll need a long sleeved t-shirt or you’ll end up shivering for the first bit of the morning walk. Some locals start out at a seriously quick pace and warm up but I’ve been in a slump, so long sleeves it is. That’s just until the sun is properly up and then you can pretty much forget it’s autumn until the sun crosses over the ancient sand dune and the evening chill sets in again. The sea has finally returned to the blue that you’ve only ever seen in the eyes of your lover and other pop song refrains but not everyone is jumping in right away. The wastewater pump station is still being repaired and no one’s quite sure just where all the village poo is actually ending up. Still, there’s no shortage of brave surfers out there since early this week. As a neighbour said, ‘maybe they just have strong constitutions.’ Maybe. I’ll leave the assessment of surf conditions, sewage outflows and constitutions to the experts. And there’s certainly no shortage of those in the east coast fishing village of the holy land — experts in every conceivable sphere and a few you didn’t even know about.
I imagine it’s not much different in other villages in the holy land. In a previous life I met several development experts in the Highveld mine dump village. And if Twitter is any guide, the west coast fishing village is renowned for its experts on everything except how to manage their own gang violence and humongous homeless population. But let me leave the experts to expert and watch the world not change an iota.
We’re not here for these little sideshows after all — we’re here to liberate our very being from its earthly bounds, or so I’m told by the dervish herself. In as many words. Or at least that’s how I hear it. I can never be sure. Sometimes I hear the dervish with such clarity I am left in wonder that I am still alive and in human form. And at other times, I hear the dervish and I am left in misery at my slowly dying human form and stuck in my own head for days and weeks after. It’s not that she speaks in tongues or anything so Hollywood-esque.
Mostly she speaks to me in English, with a peppering of Urdu phrases that I’m familiar with from early childhood anyway. The dervish just unfurls the petals of each well worn phrase to reveal to me the why, where and what of these bon-bons. She makes the meaning fill your mouth with flavour and texture, so the next time you utter a phrase or praise, it’s an act of worship. It becomes the very breath of existence and Life itself. The frangipani transforms from being a flower, from visual and scented delight to creation itself manifest at a scale that is appropriate to the limits of the human mind trained to function in a society that reduces this magnificence to a mere tree. To a plant, to a flower. To something outside of ourselves that we can look upon and differentiate from ourselves. The dervish brings you to a space of knowing that any differentiation of what our lofty science terms genus, subtribe and family is merely testimony of what we choose to relate to and how we value that and ourselves.
Some days though, the words the dervish uses are all but superfluous. The meaning of the experience is manifest in ways I cannot even begin to understand let alone explain. What I am being shown is manifest, I fully comprehend the meaning and lesson and sheer presence in a way that makes any kind of words moot. Presence is itself the meaning and the lesson remains long after the season has passed and what is termed a tree is bare. Without reason, I know how and why some tribes believe this champak flower adorns the highest abodes of heavenly deities. It is in these moments of clarity, of being and manifesting knowledge and learning that I see how words can actually limit what we are able to absorb in so many other ways from each other, about the world, its functioning and our tiny little part in all this vast interconnected singularity. That moment of liquid mercury foaming on the shore and wispy cotton wool clouds skimming over the treetops are what make all the days of seeing only what was on the surface more than worth it.
A moment is after all, all of a lifetime and an entire lifetime can pass without a single moment of illumination. Which is all the pity for if we can pause long enough to ask what we don’t know and acknowledge what we can never decode as we run around with our heads bowed into devices that cost more than the minimum wage for a whole year for a cleaner; we might see; we might know that there’s a chance for not just this tremulous existence but an ethereal one too, all while humbly moving along with the daily circadian rhythm. But wait, what am I even going on about here — let me leave the matters of Life to the experts too.
Organism and Environment is a fragment of a tribute to a dervish who moves in silence to the orchestra of Life itself and has never claimed to be an expert of any kind whatsoever.
© Jesh Baker 2022
