Sitar

I met Cayla and JJ rather randomly. Yay for happy accidents! I was at a health food store, and Cayla invited me to sit down with her and one of her coworkers while we ate our spicy organic mushroom curry. I liked her instantly, and in fact had to stop myself from doing an impromptu happy dance after meeting this awesome new friend. I met her boyfriend JJ a few nights later when the three of us went to an art opening. They rather quickly became two of my favorite people, and frequently invited me over for home cooked meals and Cuban rum. We had conversations about environmentalism and teaching and art and anything interesting that you could ever imagine.

Cayla is a ridiculously talented artist, specializing in printmaking, and JJ is an amazing photographer. I bought a piece from each of them when they had a show in Bangkok, and they are most definitely my favorite pieces of art that I own.

One night, after a meal of vegetarian quesadillas and mango salsa (all made from scratch), JJ rolled out a rug for me on the floor, and I sat in front of him, completely transfixed, while he played the sitar. And, well, it was transcendent and unforgettable.

I wrote this in my journal the next day.

The song starts out slowly, filled with longing, filled with notes like an absentminded humming. The kind of humming used during cleaning and hair brushing and before sleep. And the room is filled with furniture and rugs, and the sitar is filled with knobs and fingers, and the music starts to carve a space inside of my head like a fingerprint in coconut paste, and my thoughts are pushed to the very back where they start to buzz like panicked moths who are millimeters away from electric death. And the notes emerge in a crystalline exhalation. Auditory incense and sacred breath. And the furniture and rugs are coated in it like a sparkling, whirling dust and suddenly the boundaries and angles and corners and doors are blurred and united. The moths in my head start pushing and flapping and flipping until the music gets faster and thicker and they are stunned into a devotional silence and fall to the floor of my brain stem, still crackling with electricity but as powerless as leaves. And I'm trying to write a poem in my head but the notes come through me and carry the words away like seeds and the sitar no longer has knobs and fingers but has become a windpipe and vocal cords, a conduit of Divine Voice.

It is the Throat of God.

The strings are a map of the cosmos and they speak and declare their truth as a love song to Emptiness and Creation and I am no longer just listening but my entire body has become the sound, is absorbing sound and speaking a stillness and the Throat is singing faster now and the cosmos whirl inside of me until my organs are bleeding light and my pores have become a million mouths agape in exultation and there is no more furniture or rugs because this room is everything and nothing, swallowed whole like fire, and my mind cannot grasp or clutch or hold onto anything and each second is an entire universe and I think and hour passed before I realized the music had stopped.

And my senses slowly rediscovered themselves, and the barking dogs and Thai conversations peppered the air once again, and the pattern of the rug found its way back to my retinas, and the smell of the khlong came back through the window, and my lungs started breathing on their own again.

Namaste.