Up from within
View(s):“The Kraken wakes”
I am in my garden – another garden, in another house – pacing up and down, alone, grappling with a seemingly insurmountable problem……
Something there is, deep within us, that wells up, erupts, in moments of stress. No, I am not talking of Kundalini, coiled serpent-wise at the base of the spine. This something erupts unexpectedly as a flash of understanding, of clarity. No, not a flash of lightning, insight, but a silent, instantaneous surge. I don’t know what it is; it happens only when some button is pressed.
It is a response and needs a trigger. I recall my first experience, of Awakening……
….. “The clamour of night” is never the best time to think rationally. Things seem to be ganging up against me and I am getting tired of fighting. Pacing up and down, going over the same thought processes, the same scenarios, I am at a dead end.
I am alone in the eye of the storm: but my family and my parents would soon be drawn into it. My thoughts are like an old gramophone needle stuck in a repetitious groove. I am pinned against a wall.
Suddenly….. between the lifting of one foot off the ground and the placing of it on the ground…. the Solution rises up from within me. Unbidden, unconnected with all that has gone before. Caught,
literally, in mid-stride I stop.
Suddenly, everything falls into place. The problem lies revealed in all its simplicity. What I have to do is crystal clear. My mind is stilled. I breathe deep, feel the cool breeze and hear the cicadas sing.
I have had my Awakening. I have never forgotten that moment.
Where did this come from? From within me, so it must be Me. The distillation of all that I have learnt, understood, experienced, feared: the moment I must have prepared myself for all my life, waiting in the wings for the Call. There have been other moments where, faced with a conflict between rational thought and gut feeling, I have gone with the gut. But every time it was after much thought, with Time somehow elastic. Not a sudden impulse, not independent of thought. They don’t count.
But then, there was another……
My Uncle Arlin, joking with us yesterday, dying today. His duty towards Wimal, a nephew, in a sanatorium not yet ended. Impatient, irritated, he calls for me: he has been holding on so long and irritably to ask me something. Motioning me to bend down, he whispers, “After this, will you look after Wimal?”
This, I am not prepared for. Who is Wimal to me? Do I want to be saddled with that cross? Am I his nephew’s keeper? No way! But….. what answer can I give this dying man? Questions and doubts criss-crossing, ricocheting in my mind, I know without pause, there was only one thing my life had prepared me to say. “Yes”. And the cross settles itself comfortably, heavy on my shoulder
And then…..
“Black Friday”, 1983. Schools, offices, factories, all closed hurriedly. People scurrying home in fear. I lock up the office and, like them, head for home with my elderly Office Assistant, Gnanapragasam, who also lives in Dehiwela. Streams of traffic all going one way: away from the city. Soon the traffic coagulates into road-blocks: motorists rubber-necking atrocities. Don’t stop. Keep moving. Choose by-roads. And then we see the first horror. Rapid U-turn. My car is attacked but I am away. Waves of raw fear emanating from Gnanapragasam. My first duty is to him. Seeking shelter in a quiet cul-de-sac I ask him where he wants me to take him, or what I must do for him, as it doesn’t look as if I could take him home. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I can’t think,” he says in a strangled voice. I hear myself say: “Then, you must do what I say. There is no time. You must do what I say.”
As I say this, I experience, again, that sudden moment of clarity.
It is clear what I have to do, where I have go. I am handed the complete “Operation Order” and told: “Execute”. I comply: retrace my steps, go back to office, from where we recently fled – now an oasis of eerie calm after the exodus – and I put him in a cocoon, place him in a safe bubble. Phone his wife and say he is safe but he cannot come home. Extract a promise from him not to phone anyone and then, only then, do I go for help – for him, for me – all my frenetic energy spent.
We are like icebergs. So much of us below the waterline. And how deep are the deeps within us?
How little we know.