shadows

This year I'm home for Christmas. I came to visit my family which I haven't done in the last five years. "Bad girl", I know, Santa shouldn't be happy with my non attachment in the years passed but life has been so sweet to me I could never interrupt it to celebrate christmas to be totally honest with you.
Christmas feels like that right now: an interruption, a dive into a gap that was there, where a bunch of memories and sensations wakes up and jumps out of places where they shouldn't have been in the very first place.
It is strange to be living Christmas again. Maybe that's exactly why: it feels like a repetition and I'm astonished that my family keeps doing exactly the same thing as they did when I lived here, when I was a child, a teenager and a visitor.The same menu, the same routine, the same music, the same film on tv and even the same arguments...But then that's tradition isn't it, and tradition I don't know why is what Christmas is all about, that's what they say...

Last year I was in Rajastan, in the desert near Pakistan. I woke up and walked through the streets in a different sort of dive. I followed smells, birds, monkeys and my intuition as I never travel with maps or goals. There were many black deep eyes staring at me. Eyes that usually cry, looking deep behind my eyes, validating my own emotions making me realise how emotions are made up choices we take.
It was then, in one of those most beautiful quiet small streets of the village , that this woman dressed up in a nice orange sari called us in her house by moving her hand and using no words. I remember I didn't really wanted to go in because by then we had walked so much and have played with so many children I was exausted and I needed to go back to the hotel and have a rest...I needed the toilet. But it was impossible: her persistence and confidence that we would follow her was clear and her will to have us in her house was too strong to deny.

We went into her small round house made of earth. In the floor there was a small poor carpet and she asked us to seat there so we did. There was a smell of animals and spices in the air and it was colder inside then outside because the houses are prepared to protect from the heat which in the winter as then is not the most convenient. In the center of the house there was a hole in the ceiling and in the floor ashes from a late fire.

She kept smiling to us and made a sign with her hands for us to wait. She might have said something in hindi but by then I didn't speak any hindi so I don't know. She left the house and went out. When she did a donkey popped his head in, his dark eyes staring at me. Silently. Guarding me.

It is very funny when a donkey stares at you. It is a very rare experience because they are not the sort of animal who does that in the very first place but when they do they bring a sort of information we are not used to receive from any other animal....it says: life is empty. Life is empty...but doesn't bring any feelings about that fact. It's just there.

I looked away from the donkey and passed my eyes around the house with humble curiosity. There wasn't much to look except for the sun passing through the walls creating shadows of awareness that there is a world outside, there is one reality that is not yours.

The woman came in again and this time with her came one, two, three, oh no four and five children....and finally the father. I wasn't expecting this and felt suddenly very tight in such a small room without windows, so tight and so low I couldn't stand in with so many people. They were all smiling and they were all wonderfully pleased that we were there. They left one side of the round house for us and just used the other side for them. They were all really tight with each other so it's obvious they are used to share this very small space between them. Their clothes weren't rich and their smell was strong and real- people from the desert have a very specific smell, it stays with you when you leave it, like ashes and earth. They don't smell sweet like flowers or water, they smell a condensed sort of existence and experience. Their hairs is full of mess and sand and some of them actually use ashes and mud to create drads.

The woman went out again and quickly returned with a chocolate cake where it was written: Happy Christmas Day 2005!!!
HAPPY FUCKING CHRISTMAS DAY 2005... WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? There I was in bloody mary and joseph house with a bunch of kids who got no bed to sleep in having a chocolate cake specially being offered to us...? This was surreal, I could not believe it.
I was really godsmacked. She asked me to cut the cake and eat it.

And for an instant I believed in miracles. I believed in shooting stars who bring voices from other worlds. I believed in gifts from the unknown. I believed how partying is more important then misery.

Just like that, out of nowhere there I was, looking around to all the dark eyes smiling at me, so happy to see me, so sad to watch me leave, so open for me, that I realise seriously what it means: we are all one family. And I realised what Christmas is then.

Just like the dream I'm having now: My mom, my dad, my sister, the dog, the cat....the sun, the shadows, the shadows, the shadows......

and all the unknown realities out there.

May the spirits sing to you wherever you are.
Love
Pray

ANA