Dear Friend of my Heart,
We were so deeply immersed in a callous darkness, drawing feeble lines of colors we could barely discern… holding on to things we had fashioned out of that which never was. We thought of ourselves, we thought of the world. We found names for ourselves in the names for others. As we called out those names again and again and etched them on stone, they become more and more real… well, before the names there was no real. There was a nameless darkness, soothing and smooth. The touch lasted only as long as it was a touch, leaving behind nothing but a slippery residue and tingling scars… the only traces.
Words appeared… speaking to words, speaking of words, leading to words, forming pretend relationships later to be named: causal. We spoke thus out of habit… we educated each other to speak thus… we traced lines where there were none. Abstractions that became more and more line like, losing all substance… and losing the capacity to touch. We lied. Then we lied again… and we lied again and again… it became easier for words to call upon words without the weight of anything sacred, like the now mythical: truth. Virtual. Virtual became our truth, our home, our work, our pleasure, our dream. The rest is darkness… not the soothing kind.
The subtle emotional movements in our bodies remained unobserved. We lost the continuum of mind and body and we put them away from each other in individualistic cages. When someone madly proclaimed: “I am you and you are me”, we agreed, because it sounded like a really good thing to say. Were we listening? Did these words mean anything?
What is this loss? Why does it make me cry?
Although the afternoon wasn’t without touch. I looked at the ants for a long time. Walking busily on the leaves. It is really something… a very meaningful experience, when I actually watch the world and lose myself in the seeing. These pictures have almost nothing to do with this experience. They are something else altogether… maybe an invitation for you to go out and look at the incredible beauty and intricacy of it all on your own…
Do you feel sometimes that you have lost the touch? Do you feel that you are suspended in a callous darkness and the neon lights are no longer useful or meaningful?
Let’s light the fire.
Eager to hear from you.
Much love,
Prashant Nawani
Story Of The Footloose 
try as I might to find exactly the right words for what it is this has just made me feel and deciding there are none some feelings are so new there is no way to describe but will I give you this sweet Prashant please never stop never ever for all of the days in your life never stop!
Maureen! I knew this would bring you here. Really glad that it did.
If you keep listening, I would never have the heart to stop. 🙂
What a beautiful song! And I really like the video. Thank you, April! The October is drawing to an end.
Reading your “letters” is like being immersed in dream…misted, but weighted with meaning. Yes. The neon lights — though they do not gaze directly at my little home — are much too callous. We grow and manifest what we give our attention to…so I would much rather give my attention to those things that do not SHOUT at me…like the small and intricate creatures in your wonderful photos. Thank you for writing.
Thank you, Carrie.
I think what you say about attention makes a lot much sense. Today I ended up devoting deep attention to painful things. It was however more of a “falling safely to the ground”… time to get up and going again…
I feel there is a difference beween being another, and surrender the self so fully — and accepting another just as completely in return — that the ‘I’ and ‘you’ become suspended, temporarily, and transformed into something else, something new. It is disorienting, sometimes, the return to the self; all too easy and human to close the door to the other. Maybe that is why we end up in the dark, or maybe we remain in the dark because neon lights are rarely signs, and we would be better off to follow the light of moons, stars, suns — those subtle things, those quiet things, those organic things that are both yearning and salvation, all in one. I believe we rarely lose our touch — we merely lose the courage to reach out. Of course, the result is the same: this box or that, alone in the dark, until we find the crack through which the light gets in once more.
What a beautiful thing it is to surrender it all to a moment where the ‘I’ and ‘you’ meet. I feel the return of the self is never to the same place after this transformation. Sometimes I wish it was always the quiet things… A storm is quieter than those neon lights…
No, never the same place. Something lost, something gained…something ultimately changed. I want to say this is the way of growth, but it is more a loose and intuitive association than rooted in thorough consideration. It seems we cannot have the quiet storms without the neon lights — a challenge, maybe, to love all things equally, or a matter of not being able to appreciate the quiet without the loud, and vice versa? You seem to have no problem finding those serene pockets of quiet in the world, though….