On the surface

KS has some sort of chesty thing and I am completely lacking in energy. So we are taking it easy today. It feels my heart is hard at work. I have not been sleeping well. Falling asleep doesn’t come easy and then I wake up far too early. I am too alert in the night. Listening to the irregular rhythm of his breath. Being worried.

I have had some lovely meetings with friends this past week. Walking in parks and sipping oat lattes. And on my way to these meetings: reading on busses. Doing some work in between. So it is an unpleasant surprise to find myself so very tired today. I am also bored. Which could be interesting. Something will always come. A spark of something. A small incentive to write a few words or to look something up.

In the other room KS is trying to do some writing. One of his projects is separating the wheat from the chaff in the diaries he has kept over the years, often during his numerous retreats. He has a vast amount of notes on his computer. I have lots of diaries too, both on my laptop and a box of handwritten notebooks. Occasionally I search in my digital diaries for certain episodes, phrases. Wondering how things were at that particular time, how I was feeling and what I was thinking. And every time I do that, I can get lost in reminiscing, hopping from fragment to fragment. Rediscovering lost thoughts. I can barely imagine what it would be like to somehow curate the whole body of my writings. I would be completely overwhelmed. Half written books, forgotten poems, notes, articles. Traces of the life I have lived so far. That part of life that has been recorded, reflected on. How to value those thoughts from the past. Are they still relevant now? Is there something to learn, to be kept and treasured?

Kamalashila told me he used to have a pile of notebooks. One for each year. There was a year around the turn of the century when he gave most of his possessions away. He gave his diaries to a friend. I am not sure how it happened, but these diaries were burnt. Only one was left. The 1976 one. I read it ages ago and it made me smile in places. Like how KS felt he needed to do more yoga, the same way I have heard him saying it time and again over the years. How he sometimes felt dull. I could not relate to that word ‘dull’. But perhaps it is a bit similar to how I am feeling now. Lacking in spirit. Slightly bored. Not much happening. On the surface.