“The landscape stretched out like an endless ocean of waving grass…”
It’s a peek into a world that once existed more than two centuries ago, in another continent. It’s about the history of a country I visited for a while in the 21st century.
I need something to bridge the gap. Some muse energy. Perhaps a modern day protagonist set in the past. Can I reimagine a present day cultural icon as a 19th century hero?
My fingers type as fast as possible to capture the images and sensations of this world before it disappears from the mental screen. The sights, sounds, emotions and a myriad other sensations that feel almost real.
The phone rings, interrupting the flow, and my imagination comes crashing back to reality. From the thrilling heights of writing a historical story back to the call of real life.
Sometimes, when you get into a state of flow, the creative faculty opens a door to another world.
You get caught up exploring the wonders of that world and it feels jarring and slightly disorienting to abruptly descend to earth when things like phone calls or the demands of this life intrude.
I guess creative people have this tendency to spend a lot of time in their heads. And mindfulness practices help bridge the divide and make these transitions easier. It also keeps one grounded when the mind tends to wander. It’s a discipline. And helps keep fiction and reality in separate compartments.
Mindfulness to ground, focus and compartmentalize
Some people meditate to stay in the moment. This is called mindfulness meditation. I like to turn my everyday chores into mindfulness meditation.
Maybe it’s cooking or baking or gardening or just cleaning up around the house and forcing the mind to stay focused on that particular task and nothing else. No mind wandering into imaginary realms while chopping veggies.
“I can work best now while peeling potatoes.”
This is a famous quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous philosopher. It gives me a little thrill to know that I stumbled upon a similar mental exercise which works so well for sharpening mental focus and mental discipline. It’s always nice to learn how others did things, how they found what worked for them and apply it to fine-tune my own creative days.
Baking is another exercise in mindfulness. I baked walnut brownies the day before yesterday. Sometimes, I bake cakes or cookies or cinnamon rolls and use that time to practice keeping my mind there. On the cinnamon rolls. Not on that cinematic imaginary world.
I’m into Korean and Japanese vlogs these days like Nami’s Life and it’s peaceful, cozy and healing. There’s a sense of empowerment in being able to thrive in an everyday life. Not surprising that she has almost 2 million subscribers. It resonates with people everywhere.
Gardening is a wonderful mindfulness practice too. My balcony garden needed a revamp so I went out to the plant nursery yesterday, bought a rose plant, a pale pink bougainvillea, a chrysanthemum with white flowers and yellow centera and a small areca palm. An assortment of colors and textures to liven up my balcony for my morning coffee time and also to create a sense of nature, peaceful aesthetics and calm.
Memories…
The love for baking and gardening came from my grandmothers. My paternal grandmother, Mrs Oommen, with her typical Jacobite Syrian Orthodox culture from Kerala, used to bake and cook up a storm. I guess this was part of the required social and cultural curriculum for a young lady from that time and place. She was an amazing cook and she’d serve up a table loaded with typical Kerala food, chicken curry, beef cutlets, fried fish, mor kolambu, thoran and cake, butter cookies and homemade chocolate for dessert.
Oommen means Thomas, and refers to St Thomas the apostle who arrived in Kerala in the 1st century BC and lived there for several years before moving to Chennai in neighboring Tamil Nadu, which is known for Santhome Basilica.
She was a Montessori teacher and had an interesting life in different and interesting places like Kenya and Uganda where my grandfather worked as a geologist and finally settled down in Chennai. Those were probably colonial days where people began to travel more and live around the world.
My maternal grandmother was a school teacher by profession and a gardener, musician, compulsive reader of tons of novels and a totally creative type. She had a big collection of books by Anya Seton, Louisa May Alcott, Daphne du Maurier and most of the bestselling authors of the early to mid-1900s. I started reading because of her and frequently used to borrow from her collection of old hard bound books stacked in a glass and teak wood bookshelf, take them up to the terrace with a tape chair and settle down under the purple Jacaranda tree that grew over the top of the house.
Jacarandas are sometimes called Purple Rain trees.
Dreams under the Jacaranda
I grew up surrounded by nature and greenery. It was a peaceful, beautiful place.
A few acres that my grandparents planted with ornamental and fruit-bearing trees.
Mango trees, coconut palms, tall eucalyptus and flame trees around the periphery, casuarinas with their drooping needle leaves, and a jacaranda tree that sticks in my head more than anything else. From the terrace, there was a view of rocky hills in the distance and green paddy fields around. The house was surrounded by grey granite stones with bamboos and bougainvillea draped over it.
There were hardly any neighbors, plenty of greenery everywhere and loads of space and privacy.
Perfect for dreaming. Perfect for creating. Perfect for absorbing the thoughts that flow into the mind like ripples across the surface of still water.
A clear wide open space with no other noise. No jarring energy from crowds. No dissonance. No discordant emotions. Just peace and tranquility. A place where the soul could breathe. A place where everything flowed in harmony.
My grandmother had planted the Jacaranda tree years ago.
It leaned over the top of the roof and over the spot where I liked to set down a tape chair, sit on it, put my feet up on the wall and look up at the clouds through the trumpet-shaped purple Jacaranda flowers. It was also where I liked to bring my books and read them.
Sometimes I’d read, books from my Grandmom’s collection, from the school library, books I’d bought from the bookstore in CMCH where my parents studied and worked.
At other times, I’d stretch out there and listen to tapes on my Walkman (those days before MP3s and music streaming), mostly 80s and 90s rock hits. Most of the kids at my school did back then. Most of us were into MTV in the early to mid-90s.
My grandparents influenced the love for music too. There were stacks of old LPs of Johnny Cash, Elvis, and OST albums like “The Sound of Music” and “My Fair Lady” in their collection.
I miss them.
Decades later, I look back at that time and the mental image of the Jacaranda brings back all the other memories. I can still smell the fragrance in the air. There is a particular fragrance in the air when winter sets in. Winter in South India is pleasant. Temperature around 17- lower 20 degrees (Centigrade). It’s not cold.
It’s mild and pleasant with warm sunny days, wispy clouds, azure blue skies and this particular fragrance of the north wind that blows in. A fragrance of leaves and trees.
A memory of sunlight and shadows dancing across the floor.
My cat Spidey from my school days and the background of the Jacaranda tree, a Glyricidia and a whole lot of climbing bougainvillea.
Purple rain
I miss those Jacaranda dream times. I miss those purple flowers falling on me.
I live in a city now, in an apartment, and miss those days of wide open spaces. But I can still have a bit of that magic of dappled sunlight, leafy shadows and bougainvillea on my balcony.
I miss the small town life with small populations and green places.
I still keep a remembrance of the people and places I knew years ago. The way we were.
Sometimes it's hard to come to terms with the fact that what once felt so real no longer exists. The people we knew. The places that have given way to other places.
Sometimes, it feels like this material world is not as real or tangible as it seems in the present moment. Time passes and these moments, people and places wash away like footprints on a sandy beach that the waves erase.
Is that all we are? A few years of feeling like life stretches out ahead like a wide open horizon and then the landscape shifts suddenly and that boundless feeling only remains as memories frozen in time.
I don't believe that. I think we are eternal spirit beings in a temporary vessel.
And that’s why we remember. We create. We don’t let the waves of time completely erase everything. As the years go by, they live on in memories, in the soul spaces, in some ethereal realm.
A mental stream of consciousness storeroom
I write these blog posts not as a complete project but as snippets, stream of consciousness thoughts, and beginnings of ideas to develop later. A kind of creative journal. I’m not writing to grow a following or to promote my creative work. Maybe I'm old fashioned. Others are vlogging and I'm still blogging.
But this blog is a kind of mental parking space for ideas and random thoughts. A shrine filled with memories of the people and places I knew.
Freewriting also helps get me back into that writing head space. This random writing helped shift the mental gears, unstuck the flow, eased the transition and I’m going back to my creative projects now.
The metaphors are brewing. The muse energy is incoming. And I’m mentally going back two centuries into the past, looking through that window into a world where time doesn’t exist and the boundaries blur into fiction. And I write my stories in that space.
