Yo it's been a while

I was in Minnesota and Denver and man were they great trips. I saw folks I hadn't seen in a while. As it always goes, the times spent was wonderful but too short and too fleeting, one day. To the folks I didn't get a chance to say hi to... I'll be back.

As you can see we have a new post from Malli! New Curry Collective member and it was awesome! I'm hoping I can rope in one or two more folks to contribute and honestly if anyone wants to throw in some you do not have the be of the Desh to contribute, just bring the heat, or shiitake if you will...

So, I haven't been reading lately and I haven't been writing or doing much of anything except for traveling and talking with people I care for... what was my take away? Incidentally, that I need to write more and that I need to start cultivating this desire to express myself more and more. As such, I'm going to, ::deep breath:: start releasing a story that I've been writing and editing for the past five years, yes, for all you TEN people that occasionally read this you'll get a chance to read a story that I began in a really tumultuous time in my life and let me know what you think.

I started writing this when I was just out of college in 2004 and haven't really written anything substantial since 2006, so the bulk of it has been in editing and fretting over this being stupid, cheesy, irrelevant whatever. But someone dear to me explain their take on, art, and I think it makes sense. That art, whether good or bad, is really unimportant. The important part, the vital part is creating it, taking care of it and letting it go. And this is a story that back then I needed to write and now I simply need to prepare and finish so I can move on to writing about fishing and other mundane things that will only interest me... this story, is about loneliness and dreams and at the time, post-college, were really the only things I had.

So, expect Chapter 1 sometime this weekend.

Duped by a Spawn Artist

I need to embrace my failure.  I am no longer nurturing shitake mushrooms.  I continue to maximize an ideal environment for some sort of green mold colonizing my shitake mushroom mini-farm.  Colonization with all of its weight and imagery of subjugation is the only word to describe the green mold exploiting resources (water, light, wood detritus) to battle and nearly exterminate my poor, pungent shitakes.

The gentlemen who sold me the wood chip log full of spores warned that there may be some friendly competition for the shitakes, but also alleged their ability to fight this competition off.  The speed at which the fruits emerged from the wood unhinged me a bit.  I keenly felt them as a completely different kingdom of life, so very different from plants or animals.  Initially, they flourished, producing in three days about two pounds of the most delectable fungi I have ever consumed.  I dreamt of never purchasing a shitake mushroom again, and simply picking fresh ones to saute whenever I’m in the mood for some shitake (which is increasingly often, apparently they are quite the Superfood).  The idealized advertising sold me:

I now realize that this may be the best looking shitake farm that amiable Spawn Artist who sold me my spores has ever grown himself.  I wish I had the foresight to take a picture of my first beautiful fruiting of mushrooms, but since I was under the impression that they would continue to produce, I saw no reason to document their success.  You will just have to take my word that they were as vital, if not as large, as the advertisement.  

The second fruiting was when things started to dwindle.  The mold colonized more and more of the log's surface area and I was left with about 8 sad looking shitakes.  This whole experience gives me a sense of fear and foreboding of my future parenting abilities.  I am now at that age where becoming a parent is not some far away dream, but more of a logistical conundrum.  “When should we do it?” seems to be a question that my generation more than ever has the power to control with technologies to expand my gender’s ability to conceive later and later in life.

My failure with the mushrooms has scared a few more childless years into me.  I gave those mushrooms everything they needed to flourish, yet they lost out to green mold at only the second fruiting.  Parenting must truly be a selfless act.  At least I could eat my mushrooms.  If my children lost out to the green mold in this world, I would have nothing to alleviate my guilt and sorrow.  My guilt is the part that I cannot comprehend.  It is an illogical guilt.  I did everything I could for those mushrooms, yet I feel it is my fault that they lost out to the mold.  If the guilt is this bad for mushrooms, it is hard to imagine the weight of such guilt when confronted with the failures of your own children.  There is so much green mold in this world!  Selfishness, addictive substances, vanity, and greed all come to the top of my mind.  I think there is some truth to the whole idle mind being the devil's playground bit, where creating such a perfect environment for the shitakes also ended up being a perfect environment for the green mold to set in.

I’m letting the the shitake log go.  Today is the day that I bury it in a compost pile and give it a final attempt to fruit in nature, outside of my hermetically sealed biosphere.  Maybe all they need is to toughen up a bit.

So I have decided that rather than attempt mushroom cultivation, I shall attempt to forage for mushrooms.  I’ve never looked for mushrooms in the woods behind my place before, but I recently started hunting for morel mushrooms (it is that time of year in Wisconsin for a little bit longer) and all of a sudden, the woods seem to be teeming with fungi of all sorts.  Everywhere I look, I see interesting types of inedible and possibly poisonous mushrooms.  No morels yet...more to come on the shroom hunt soon.

DANCE! DANCE! DANCE!

For whatever reason Bel Biv Devoe's "Poison" got stuck in my head all day and despite only getting around 4 hours of sleep last night I was on-point at work today. I've had a sort of on-going battle with good friends who either like to dance or cannot stand it. One side can't quite understand why the other could enjoy moving their body in weird ways and the other group cannot imagine not being able to express themselves in movement.

The first song I ever danced to was "My Girl" by the Temptations. Truth be told, I was in first grade and in love with a girl name Jillian Sharon. And as an awkward kid who brought a brief case to school I thought the only way a cool girl would possibly like me was if I could be as smooth as the Temptations. I still think those guys were the some of the most smooth men on the planet. As a kid I couldn't fathom how they could express themself about this girl in such a confident way, while dancing and crooning, and Dave Ruffin, their leadman was just about the most slick guy ever, with his manly voice, impeccable style and how he was the odd man out of the rest of the Temptations and their smooth choreography. I loved everything about those guys.



Then enter the 90s. It was round about 1990 and I was in 4th grade. Kids were starting to "Go" together and I still felt like the odd man out and then I heard "Poison" and saw the music video. The guys in BBD were the natural progression of the Temptations, smooth, good dancers combined with a super confident swagger. Those chunky Timberlands, matching cardigan and hat, I thought it was all so smooth-- and as a result I made it my mission in life to master the running man and a body rock. I never got to show Jill Sharon my moves as I ended up moving out of the city and into the suburbs where no kids danced-- or at least not many. I still tried my hand at swagger, see red shirt, and navy overalls, likely with one strap undone:



I'm sure one of these days video of dancing will surface and if I were capable of blushing I would. I like to dance and maybe a few years back I would have had swagger enough to enjoy it. Nowadays my dancing is reserved for moments where I may have had one too many or alone, while I'm cooking or driving in my car. But the joy of a beat or bass line gives me a small way of expressing my love for the world as it makes its own dance around the sun.

Jona Lehrer is smarter than me.

I watched this talk a few weeks ago and was fascinated by it. I think it has a lot of applications from finance, to art, religion, relationships and day to day life. Watch it and let me know your thoughts:

I've known rivers

A few years ago, I used to dedicate a three-hour drive to fly-fish the drift-less regions of Southern Minnesota on an almost weekly basis. I do some of my best thinking while I am driving alone in the half-light of the morning and beauty of the countryside-- back then was no different. I would think about lots of things, my past and my future, which girl I’d call that evening, if I’d ever fall in love, or get married, why I drank so much, the list goes on and on, and so it was especially apropos that these things were being examined in the drift-less region of the Midwest. I was exactly that, drift-less, but with every mile spent in that beautiful part of the country and every, 10 and 2, cast and false-cast came clarity.

For those of you unfamiliar with Minnesota, it is a mostly flat region of the mid-west, bursting with endless prairies and broken up with scatterings of forests and beautiful lakes.

The flat prairies were the descendents of a massive glacial movement that scoured themselves across the surrounding lands and rendered them flat, that is, until the glaciers came to Southern Minnesota. The term drift-less comes from the lack of glacial drift in this region and so the area maintained its rolling hills although it did so, not without its pound of flesh.

The area was often subject to catastrophic bursts of glacial dams that carved out rivers and valleys over night. Hard limestone was broken and smoothed over by millions of gallons of muddy water and gritty glacial sediments creating the bluffs and rivers of which I waded into unaware of their dramatic past.

And of course during those times I fell in love and out of it just as quickly; there was the medical student who always fell asleep when we kissed, the beautiful girl who lived with her brother-who happened to be very over-protective and gay and happened to be father to a baby, the old high-school sweet hearts, and on and on… Like I said, they were my drift-less days.

Some of those folks, were like tiny prairie streams, they lacked depth, and as such, produced little or no fish and certainly weren’t worth the effort spent walking down their banks and getting to know the stream.

But there are also rivers I’ve known who are deep and beautiful. A stream, a good stream of course is more than just water running over rocks. No—a good stream comes from something beautiful. In the Southern streams of the drift-less area, good streams generally come from underground springs. At their source, you can bend down and literally drink right from the water with no worries. And they are constantly shaped and altered by their surroundings, limestone and lush, green undergrowth help to keep out the bad stuff, chemicals and acid and sediment that muddy the clarity of the stream. And they go deeper than that, even if you were to jump right into the water, waders and all, you still wouldn’t see that there is water underneath the water, underground streams that extend beyond the banks of the river and deep, deep into the earth, but you’d fall in love just the same without a complete understanding of them.

That’s the thing isn’t it? We are all the product of catastrophe and confluences of events that made us into who we are. We are the product of tough things, grit and muddy water, broken dreams and diverted streams… and for some, we are spread out upon the flood plain, shallow pools and ashy rock. But for those fortunate enough, our channels are cut deeper and banks more green from these immense moments and we are made stronger and more beautiful.

And so it is, with all the people I’ve ever loved, romantically or otherwise. I wade into their company and enjoy the songs in their babbling and murmurs and I try to understand the bend in the stream, the cadence of water running over rock, their whirls and splashes, their dance over prairies and forests and into my heart but often times fail to understand how they’ve come to be.

So that’s my hope for the new rivers I meet along the way and those I hope to revisit-- to wade in and examine their history and rhythm, their cascades and confluence, eddies and effluence. And I imagine if I think long enough and practice matching my rhythm to the cadence of the water that fish might rise and with it a little more understanding about this place and where it came from and the path it had to take to get here.

"I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

~Langston Hughes

Love, Understanding & Knowledge

One thing that always resonated with me in "A River Runs Through It" is the idea of completely loving someone without completely understanding. There's no doubt, it's immensely difficult to understand choices the people I love the most make or even understand the how's and whys of their life. Near the end of A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean's father is scraping for more answers about his son's death and ways to understand and know his son better. For me, of course I feel this way about many, many, many of my friends and family but none more than my father.

For the random person who stumbles upon this blog some 7.5 years ago my father passed in something that shook me deep, how couldn't it? Everyone will go through this shaking at some point in their life-- death is an inevitable fact of life and it is a way to reassess and sometimes completely reorder your life. That certainly happened to me and I have no doubt that I could write 1000 pages on that alone. Life is short, beautiful and fleeting. There is still no doubt in my mind that I'd give every single thing I own, EVERY POSSESSION, EVERYTHING, for one day, one hour, one fleeting moment to be with my father again. That's not hyperbole, and I hope for those who might read this that they think long and hard about those most important to them and hold them tight tonight and express a little bit of their love for them as we make our brief revolutions around the sun.

That said, this is going to be short, and quick since I need to get up real early tomorrow. I just want to start becoming more disciplined about writing in this damned blog. When someone you care about so deeply is gone you look, scrape and scrounge for anything and everything to know them better, or at least I have. And so, while I was scraping to put together my taxes for this year I found some old family albums and a small letter from a childhood friend of my father's... My father went to a boys college in Sri Lanka and spoke about it just about every damned day. He'd always tell me about his college's motto, "Disce Aut Discede" Learn or Depart and sing the old class song when he had one too many glasses of wine and felt especially nostaglic. So, I'll transcribe this letter and in a later post write about it. Maybe one day you'll stumble upon one of your parents love letters to each other or letters to a friend... I have those too, but, things so personal and lovely deserve to be preserved and cherished for those folks who loved each other so deeply. I'll say it's reassuring that my parents dealt with the same sort of wonderful, trivial problems as anyone else and that they also shared a romance and love for each other that you'd hope for yourself when you're in the fits of love and courtship... Ok Here's the letter, written on a typewriter on some nice paper from Sri Lanka:

Date: 29th February, 1988

Dear Chandi old chap,


Where the hell have you been all these years ever since we left college? Not a bloody beep from you for over 20 years. Heard a lot abotu you form our "Class of 56" bulletin - including your by-pass heart operation. I hope you have recovered completely and are back to near normal by now. Take care of yourself 'putha' because as far s I can remember you have been having these "heart problems" even when you were college.

How on earth did you end up in the States? The last we heard was that you were somewhere in the Middle East. Anyway Chandi, please do drop a line anytime you find the time as I would very much life to know how you are doing both health and carer wise and also details about your love life, family and kids. As you will notice from this letter head, I am still with the family business. Yusuf is doing his own business (construction) and Shiraz is also with the family business (Estates). I am married to Fawziya (Fish's sister) do you remember Fish? We have three children, eldest son will be 18 in April daughter who will be 8 in April and smallest son who is 6 years old. The latest model will be out in August - that number 4 on the list. Can you or have you beaten that? Yusuf has two sons - twins born in U.K.

Sourjah is here from Brisbane. Incidentally his father expired today. There is absolutely no change in him after all these years.

Well, Chandi as I said before, do drop a line and lets keep in tuch if possible. Also look after yourself and like Dudley used to say (refering to college motto) do'nt depart too soon.

With kind regards and rememberances,

Your buddy,

Moiz

MOIZ SETHWALA


(with that folks... remember to hold onto those people you love as tight as you can, take a mental image and remember how beautiful they are.)

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

~Yeats

Picture: I'm the chubby kid in the red overalls my Dad is holding onto, my Sister looks absolutely terrified if you can see the picture. This is actually the rare photo of me >1 (yes, I am THAT big as a 1 year old) that I am smiling... the only other time they caught a photo of it... I was wearing a baptismal dress... I don't know if it's because I enjoyed cross dressing or because I was cleansed of my SIN! That said, about 15 minutes before this picture I was sobbing my eyes out in this parade and clawing at my Dad and the elephant to get down.

Word

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Months after I had graduated college I felt like a failure. I had dreams big and small, and I had hardly realized any of them. It stunk. To top off my feelings of failure, my long-time girlfriend and I had broken up and during one of those "Why?" discussions during our breakup she laid out all the reasons why our relationship was unsustainable. I'll save you the details-- most of it had to do with me not having enough ambition, little follow through, and too small of dreams, like being a stay-at-home dad or some other quaint and simple hopes. It was brutal but ended up being one of the best things to ever happen to me.

It started me on a path towards making big and small dreams and working really, really, really hard towards them. And so in the winter of 04' I set out to accomplish a dream that I had had for most of my college life-- to catch a trout. My college roommate and I watched "A River Runs Through It" countless times. We could quote the entire movie and we always talked about how cool it would be to fly fish.



(A warning from the author: If all you want to do is catch a fish. I wouldn't recommend fly fishing.)

Norman MacLean wrote:

"If you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess. The four and a half ounce thing in silk wrapping that trembles with the underskin motions of the flesh become a stick without brains, refusing anything simple that is wanted of it. All that a rod has to do is lift the life, the leader, and the fly off the water, give them a good toss over the head, and then shoot them forward so they will land in the water without a splash in the following order: fly, transparent leader, and then the life-- otherwise the fish will see the fly is a fake and be gone..."

And as it is with any dream worthy of serious undertaking, one will find that even something as simple as lifting a rod and heaving some feathers and a hook onto water isn't so simple. So I began my own training, read, read and read more books on fly fishing than I have even read for my Master's thesis. It's funny that going to college, finishing a degree, traveling the world etc, were never dreams in a proper sense. They were just wishes or whims. Fly fishing and catching a trout was a real dream. And so I began the labor of realizing a dream. Oddly, at no time in my life had I ever really done that and I have to say folks, it's an amazing feeling even if they are just small dreams.

I still remember the day that I went to the Southern Minnesota in anticipation of completing a dream. The wintertime was spent reading, thinking and visualization the actual act of casting. I would hold a pencil and imagine what casting would be like, pretend to rip line from the pencil/rod in my off-hand and pretend to catch a fish in my bedroom. If some disembodied fisher of old was in the room-- I'm sure he or she would have had a good laugh at my pencil casting.

And when the winter ceded into spring, I was finally able to go to a park and practice throwing the line. I still think its funny to think about a Sri Lankan, fly fishing. It seems antithetical for someone born on a tropical island, to wade, waist deep in icy cold water, dabbling in a sport born in Scotland. But some Sunday in May my Step-father and I would make the 2.5 hour drive to talk about our lives and our shared family, and that's another story in and of itself. But with each mile I grew more excited and my first steps in the river had my heart beating like crazy.

The first half of the day really summarized my life at the time... The line, like my life was a mess. I would see fish, they would see me, smirk and then disappear. I'd managed to hook my hand, and spend more time untangling line out of trees and bushes more than having an actual fly on the water... at one point I thought I'd just give it up, pick some berries in the shade and watercress in the stream. But honestly, that conversation haunted me, and so I couldn't give up lest I become who my ex-gf said I was. I suppose that is the nature of chasing a dream, you can't be deterred when you get a snag, or a knot or a break-- you improvise and persevere.

And then something happened while I was tying another fly...the wind switched directions, the sun hid beneath the clouds, the barometer dipped, and I saw a splash in the water.

If you've never been to a trout stream and don't know a whole lot about fish-- you'd probably think someone threw a rock near you or some branch dropped while you were looking away. And then it happened again and this time a little brown trout flew through the air and another one, and another one.

And if you've never been on a trout stream during a May Fly hatch, well, you've never experienced one of the world's great miracles. Just make sure to wear a hat, I didn't and had May Fly conditioner for about a week. May Flys themselves are interesting creatures. They live 99% of their lives under water as ugly little bugs, that is, until it's time to mate. That's when they rise from their under-rock homes and make the fast transformation into one of nature's more beautiful insects. They are all wing, tail and gossamer. And I'm not sure I should feel bad for them, or envy them. At this point in their lives May Flys stop eating anything and their life once out of the water will last 30 minutes to 24 hours maximum-- their whole existence from that point forward is to procreate and die.



You have to hope it's good-- one of my favorite writers, wrote that he imagined after they had their moment of fun and lay sprawled out on the water, they probably have a funny grin on their face. I like to think that too. And if you're in the midst of this orgy, well, as a fly fisher, it is one of the most rare and beautiful scenes in nature.

Trout as creatures are incredibly timid and the ultimate goal for a fly fisher, on any day is to get a trout to rise on a dry fly. It's fly fishing at its purist-- and most difficult.

At this point, I decided to tie on a size 16 caddis dry fly pattern. It matched the wheatish color of the may flies coming off well and it worked. It was an odd day in so many ways and I doubt I'll see another hatch like this in all my life. The sun came back out from under the clouds, my guess is so he could see me make a fool of myself while casting to the trout. But in spite of coming out from the clouds, the hatch continued and the trout kept rising. It was carnage on the water.

And in that moment, the universe and time compressed into a heart beat, full of song, splashing water, trout, fly and fisherman. And I caught one, two, three, four fish, and I let one, two, three, four go. And I missed a few and I caught more. And many years after I caught my first fish, and now, reflecting on it weeks before the spring, with a few more grey hairs, wrinkles and scars, I know what it means to have a dream and make it real. There aren't words to articulate the realizing of a dream other than the feelings that come afterward. It's Beautiful, with a capital "B"-- I can say that.

Fly fishing was a good way of training for my other dreams. Before I started, the act of casting between 10 & 2 and the thought of catching a fish seemed completely out of reach. I felt like I would be scrutinized by other fly fishers for my poor casting, my cheap gear, let alone just being a strange young kid on the water. Instead, it was a great bonding experience. I met a lot of men, and some women on the water. And they gave me great tips, and a lot of free flies. And now that I know how to tie my own flies, I give them freely to anyone who wants them. They're my little piece of artistry-- little impressionistic pieces of a bug I saw on the river-- and I'll take little fibers from a friends carpet, a feather I find on the side of the road, and some copper wiring and create some mythical bug, and trout appreciate that.

Three years from thirty, I have bigger dreams now. I dream of having a wife, kids and a house. Maybe even BEING that stay-at-home Dad, but on my terms and the terms that me and my wife decide on. I have other dreams too, and I work on checking them off, day by day, hour by hour, some are small, memorize a poem or two, run a mile or two, some are large, write a book about something true for no other reason than because it is a dream, and then I'll let my friends read it and see a little glimpse of who I am. Until then, I'll let that "why?" conversation haunt me and with every success and failed dream I'll revisit that time in my life and whisper to that young man, that life, like fly fishing is full of knots, broken line and missed fish, but with some extra line, a hook, feathers and some determination, a trout is really just a hatch and rise away.