title: to my master...
form: text; letter
“I stood before my master with a heart growing more and more day after day.
He said ‘Open your palms’.
By taking care not to let my breath change, I took a very deep breath to unite with the air of the universe, then I slowly opened my palms. ‘What do you see?’ asked he.
I was silent...My eyes didn’t see, but I could feel the weight of the thing in my palm, its dampness, its scent...But my eyes didn’t respond to that perception with a color or a shape....
‘I just asked you to open your palms and tell me what you see’ said the master, with a bright little smile in his eyes still not looking to mine; it was as if a fence broke, a dam collapsed, a wall tumbled down, and as those sacred texts said a curtain went up...
I closed my eyes...
A handful of soil, destined to yield thousands of poppies, trees, fruits, weed, seeds and children’s laughs, a handful of wet and brown soil...I turned away, leaving the soil alone with my silence. First the soil stopped talking, then I did so...Then all the doors of the world closed...Now that my breath was the wind, my body the earth, each deep breath of me was growing up that love flowing from my female body – that green, wet and real soul. As if my chest was pouring out the scent of grass, as if my hair was blown away and turning into a field of wheat...I was awakening and re-awakening every moment with the whisper of thousands of bugs moving inside me. Didn’t every moment bring a new smile, a new birth to my lap? What was moving on my belly was the first steps taken by a fawn; what was licking my fingertips was the wet kiss given by a snail...Here the universe was sleeping its warmest bed, and I was keeping warm all living creatures lying in my arms with the magic spell of the night covering me. And my soul was so vivid, so energetic that I wouldn’t have awakened had the master’s sweet voice not echoed in my ear like a guffaw, but a well-mannered guffaw:
‘What do you see?’
I opened my eyes to see the moist soil in my palm, and a graceful flower growing out of it, blooming in a silent way in order not to break me away from that beautiful world where I lost...
The master was still not looking at me, but his eyes were kind of misty – perhaps I fell into his eyes like they were a deep vortex...
While I was drunk with the magic of that greenest soul standing in my palm, the master had stood up silently like a light breeze, and blown away to a distance place...”
This is only a drop of you reflecting in me,
That first ‘breath’ through which I met you and
that big world you showed to me afterwards,
That light you spread to every darkness of me,
Your smile growing with my smile,
Your ability to see what I could not see in the mirror,
and your laugh covering all of your fragility... you are my master
Deniz
