Salman Rushdie is a wizard. Reading Luca and the Fire of Life, written for his 12 year old son
On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay a terrible thing happened: twelve year old Luka’s storyteller father, Rashid, fell suddenly and inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one could rouse him. To save him from slipping away entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through the Magic World, encountering a slew of phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and exceedingly dangerous task.
FLASH! I REMEMBERED! Words are a magic carpet with dancers whose lettery movements play. I remembered that Fantasy is reality’s flip side.
With language I zipline over to Mystery’s Play Land whenever I want where wisdom is a tree and love is a river, color is queen and pattern, her king. Scary monsters, like the Giant Mockingbird, the Noxious No-No Nanny Goat, and the One Toothed Slobbah-Mama are in plain view.
What relief! Solutions appear spontaneously around the corner from somewhere “out-a-sight” right when I was sure there was no way out and land like morsels on the tip of my tongue, so tasty and sweet.
Do you know how to catch a ride to that place?
To get your ticket–you have to say the magic words “I want to play.”
- Then, you have to learn to improvise and not lose your mind. (love really helps if you want to keep feet in both worlds: sane and insane).
- You need a carpet like Music, Dreams, Art, Wandering, making ridiculous prayers, taking on big “huh’s,” and it will be something you love but not likely master. You will be an A M A T E U R, a lover and devotee. NOTE! If you are trying to escape life you’re liable to wind up in the stinky throw-back tunnel that keeps spitting you out in the “real world” to pay your love dues and find the real juice of life. Like I said, you have to love life to take the big mystery ride.
- Lastly,to ride you have to be a goof, willing to goof up. This is easier if you learn to laugh.
Many of my Mystic Tech friends are stretching their capacity to be on this ride. They call it THE CAPACITY FOR THE UNKNOWN! It’s quite tricky, Many of my friends are good at things. They know a lot and carry on big work in care-giving and transporting things from one place to another.
If you are masterful, words are a portal. But they also block big love, big mystery.It depends on how you relate to them. Anytime I “use” something A LOT, it starts to degrade. I no longer find it novel and forget to add the love formula that propels its whoosh and whoa. If I mistakenly put the old elbow grease of “I-have-to” in my words they retract. I forget to care for their very nature.
I confess I use words a lot!!! I sometimes love them too much for in my culture words are a form of power and status. But I have self compassion. Once I hated them, believing that words were an evil spell that the Mighty Muckusup cast on all head honchos.
Gratefully, the very real Doctors Judith Rock and Robert MacAffee Brown, pre·em·i·nent Professors of Peace and Poetry, conjured their own magic words and broke the spell. Words took wing again.
Year later when I ventured into the dark cave of Anti-Life, trying to free myself from the demons of racism, I discovered that I needed to free my intellect from the rule of Madam Macademia whose scepter knocks you over the head if you don’t do it HER way. Yikes.
Blah Blah Blah…
1000 words later…where am I? Nowhere? Wonderful. I love the weather here and My words are excited to play. Off I go….