OT: Flute Player by Bill Martino....

Kismet

Kismet

Joined
Jan 30, 2002
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From an older thread:


Here's the link:
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...ighlight=tamang

Finn: Don't forget that lonely flute player.

I won't.

Sometimes when I'm up very late fighting the insomnia that comes with this current territory and it's very quiet, I'll hear him in my mind. Yangdu's in bed, the TV's off, the lights are low, I'm in my recliner and in front of me are thankas and numerous other Buddhist icons glowing in flickering candlelight.

I'll close my eyes and let my mind drift back to that Tamang. He's over on his roof with his basari and I'm on mine with my Khukuri rum or an iceberb beer. It does not sound like a spiritual setting -- rum or beer and a basari player -- but it is.

The sun is setting and up on the hill maybe a quarter or half mile away I watch the golden spires of Swayambunath, my favorite Buddhist temple in the entire world, turn into a glowing golden red, watch the prayer flags flying in the evening breeze, listen to the bells and gongs ringing softly in the distance, and always in the background is the Tamang and his basari making sweet sounds that I have never heard before and have not heard since.

And I can feel myself dying, drifting away to I don't know where, floating away with the prayers of the prayer flags, here and then diminshing like the sound of the basari, here momentarily, alive and full, and then gone. I can feel Bill Martino dying and being replaced by someone new. The experience is mystical, wonderful and comforting. I do not fight the death and welcome the new unknown. All my old misbeliefs and misconceptions are fading away, being replaced by a new philosophy and realizations which fill me as nothing ever has in 50 years. Without really realizing it, I am becoming a Buddhist. It is a slow and gradual process and I am not even aware of what is happening to me.

Almost every evening I go up on the rooftop and experience this evening ritual and then one day I awaken and realize that I have changed. I am no longer my self but am someone new. I am a stranger even to myself. I find all my old fears and regrets have somehow washed away to be replaced by something new and peaceful and fullfilling that I do not quite understand and that old emotions have vanished, replaced by better and nobler ones. Although my old self is dead I have never felt so alive and vibrant. I suspect the transformation is what Christians call being born again.

One does not forget such an experience and the Tamang was a part of it.

No, Finn, I will not forget the lonely flute player.
__________________
Blessings from the computer shack in Reno.

Uncle Bill
 
Play on Uncle Bill

We love ya!

"a stranger even to myself..." always new, always beautiful, the inner self. Dharma washes away the dross.

Stay faithful.
 
Somehow Uncle Bill's beautiful letter takes me back to growing up on a south Georgia farm.

We had little. My father's family had lost everything in the Great Depression. Dad moved from Conneticut to Georgia and took what little money he could get together to buy a four room house and 13 acres mostly towering pines and four acres of rich "bottom land."

We planted vegetables. As a very young child I was entranced by growing life. I placed a tiny hard seed in the fertile earth, watered and tended would yield an enormous harvest.

Dad used to say that a "Bushel of acorns could become a thousand oak trees or one good meal for one hog." He took what little money he could get together and made sure that I had the finest education he could find.

For three things, in particular, I thank my Dad, now deceased:
1. A good education
2. A founding in the Christian religion
3. Have your own business.

We had no central heat (a coal buring stove in the kitchen) and it was so cold in the winter that I remember the ink freezing in my fountain pen because the bedroom was so cold. The toilet was an outhouse (wacth for wasps!)

Now that Dad and Mother are gone it is up to me and my sister to dispose of the things he left behind, including the Farm. The Farm is for sale, the memories, never.

Dad developed a form of Alzheimers. The sadness was watching his body fight for survival while his mind went crazy. He could not remember breakfast, but he remembered, in great detail, WWII.

Certainly I romanticize the memories, but I remember the life growing around us, particularly the plants. There is an incredible power in Nature.

We had climbing bean plants. Just plant the seed and have a string or stake nearby. Soon a green tendril would break the earth and head for the stake.

I was curious about how the plant knew where the stake was. So I experimented. When the tendril went for the stake, I pulled up the stake and moved it.

The next morning I saw the tendril was heading for the new location, so I moved the stake again. The tendril changed directions. After five stake-moves an even more fantastic thing happened, the plant began to ignore my moveable stake!

It went for a different stake that was further away. I even pulled up my original stake and placed it in the tendril's path. It ignored my stake, went around it and continued until it reached the other stake and climbed it!

I was awestruck. The plant not only was able to find something to climb, but it was capable of making decisions!

It was an epiphany for me. That life was ALIVE, conscious! Even plants had some form of consciousness! I remember sitting on the ground, my red bone hound, Chum, sitting beside me and feeling a oneness with all life. Even the stones and earth seemed alive.

Maybe, like Uncle Bill, I heard a far off flute.

I think that if I am still, and grateful, I can hear it now.
 
I often say that people who remember the great depression and WWII are different. Your post verifies this observation.
 
Bill Martino said:
I often say that people who remember the great depression and WWII are different. Your post verifies this observation.
Click to expand...

"You must have testicles to write great tragedy."
------------- Voltaire
 
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