Ruchira's Ramblings

I The water pours itself against the sand. Pour? All that energy, all that ephemeral, inexhaustible passion, all that momentary beauty- how do you find quite the right word for it? The water crashes against the sand in an endless exuberant dance, exuding something of the essence of life, stirring something like a vague residual memory in you. Look at the shapes as the froth breaks in and disappears into darkness. Look how it returns in a tremendous triumph. There is no endgame, because the sea knows it doesn’t need to win. It just is. The energy that moves the world. II I was part of the sea once, born of it as a single cell. Everything that I am now, every cell, whatever impulse that quickens life came from the sea, the original womb. And having evolved, I am so far from it. Does a protozoa have a soul? What is true? The evolving form or the eternal soul? When, in the long epochs of mutation and adaptation did consciousness enter the scenario? Why us? Why here?...

My dreams weave in and out of train stations, crossing perilous oceans on un-navigated ships- always an anxious waiting for arrival, never reaching- promises of fabulous cities drifting away in meandering mazes or wrecked vessels, like that omnipresent thirst as cups of tea become as elusive of the alchemist’s secret formula cooked in holy chalices and old faces masking mine warble incoherent delirium that I cannot translate though they always speak languages I know in my dreams. And I wake from dreams where I am a drifting castaway in an island being dug all over by an army of automaton Man Fridays for treasure far more potent than Defoe could have imagined, the treasure forever slipping my grasp, with only a lingering sense of terror that I carry over to my Duolingo lessons. Je suis une femme. La pomme es rouge. There is such comfort in the familiar stability of these words. It is easy to learn a language as a child, for the child’s world is still whole and solid and unta...