the needle’s never blinking eye
august 15, 2025Well I got quite bored of words and their constant failure to capture what they attempt to catch no matter how intricate you weave the net, and perhaps upset at the way they have jumbled into this terrible knot I struggle to untie. Currently I’m writing on the black granite staircase leading to the top floor of one of Sri Ramana Ashram’s many guest houses in Tiruvannamalai, a smaller city in southeast India. For the past three months I’ve been backpacking through Europe and India with my love Aditya. We’ve done nothing we planned (we intended to be in France at this point along our journey). I can’t say I’ve had much faith in plans for some years now, though. I am a thread desperately holding onto the needle’s never-blinking eye, pulled by something which sees what I cannot.
The first month began in Greece and from there it was a hectic tour of the Balkans consisting of many bus rides across borders, bureks, and mostly unsuccessful hitchhike attempts. I quickly realized my dependency upon the scaffolding of a familiar environment to build a coherent reality, and how difficult it can be to do so in lands littered with languages I don’t understand. It didn’t take more than a week and a half til I was exhausted from moving to a new city every day and a new country every other.
A flight from Dubrovnik to Milan commenced the second month which was spread across three Italian farms thanks to the wonderful program called WWOOFing. One week we rose at dawn to milk a small herd of sheep and make cheese each morning, the next two comprised of random tasks associated with running an agritourismo vineyard, and the final week (which we’d “planned” to be at least two) we dedicated to the kitchen of a farm to table restaurant. On a whim one of those hot days we booked a flight to Bangalore and two spots for a month-long residential yoga teacher training just outside of Mysore in India. Since completion of the course we’ve been staying here in Tiruvannamalai (with a quick three day stay in Auroville where we’d planned to stay for a week but as I’ve mentioned before we’ve had some trouble sticking to plans), a city centered around the majestical Arunachala hill which is supposedly the opposite pole of a spiritual axis aligned with Macchupicchu. I don’t dare to tell you our plans for the two remaining weeks of our trip.
I wouldn’t call our time abroad a vacation, it’s been nowhere near synonymous to that idea. An excavation is perhaps more suitable, or a microscopic inspection of the self under endless trials playing with every possible variable. Money, time, desire, distance, physical limitations, food, location, a bed to sleep in, cellular data, etc etc. My intellect melted into a useless goo, my body confused by the frequent changes of time, space, and consumables. For a long time I couldn’t accept the seeming decline of coherency in my brain but I’ve come to understand that the things happening inside of me function through different faculties of the soul that don’t require use of the mind. I’m melting off my bones and even they are dissolving into a formless cocoon. My spine pops in different places when I twist now which may be the surest sign of change in a human.
My mind was clouded by strong internal winds knocking the pen out of my hands and giving me nothing to say. I don’t typically experience anger or its adjacent forms at home but traveling, especially with another person, produced many circumstances that bathed me in some mixture of anger and anxiety. It’s a phenomenon that completely blocks one from clear understanding and those blockages frustrated me further. When these experiences first came upon me regularly, I’d play the blame game of guilt and power, finding reasons to raise myself on the superiority scale by putting weights on the side of the other (usually Aditya). But these days when feelings of anger or irritation arise, I’m able to immediately see right through them and recognize how the mind spins little lies to distort the truth in a way which validates the feeling. Even though I am no longer deceived and drowning in the feeling due to the tricks of my mind, the feeling still sits obstructively within me.
I also now understand in greater depth the travesty of giving into the feeling and mind during these situations. This morning I was excited because I felt that portal between my soul and the external world opening, ready to fall into the flow of a writing trance, something I’ve not been able to feel in a long time. Then things happened and resentment came to me and instantly closed the channel I’d waited so long to be clear. So now, my next step is to learn how to digest and excrete the feelings at an appropriate speed, ideally as quickly as possible. At some point I hope it will be no more than a mere glimmer atop my mind’s limited awareness.
I doubt that I would’ve come across these troubled parts of myself, let alone be able to transcend them had I been traveling alone. My dearest Aditya pokes and prods me in uncomfortable ways like a dentist scraping off the plaque with their sharp tools. It’s been a deep clean and I’ve bled a lot. There’s a truth in me and Aditya’s connection which I can neither deny nor describe. The love sustains itself deep beneath our torrent surface storms that sweep down our prideful sand castles. Rains of emotions flood the topsoil and by the time they sink down into the core they’ve been transformed into a sweet nourishing nectar that helps the love grow.
Anyhow, the journey is still underway and I admit my consciousness has yet to return to the clarity it’s held before. Our days now are filled with pranayama and meditation upon hard granite floors of the ashram, eating lunch off banana leaves, drinking sweet chai in the afternoons, listening to timeless wisdom chanted by the young schoolboys living here, bothering the local tailor to alter our clothing, and continuing to communicate gently through all of our challenges regardless of their size. These experiences I cherish and release, grateful and patiently untying the big ole knot my belief blankie unraveled into. And now, some excerpts my journal received during glimpses of clarity over the past few months.
JUNE 4: Trebinje, Srpska (Bosnia & Herzegovina)
Once a novel idea now takes form as an agonizing reality. Beauty cannot exist without terror. Here now, in a sea of tongues which drown out mine, I see with painful clarity the hazy dichotomy of the reality existing outside the realm of ideas. Ideas often take and forget to give. They become heavy and dull eating up too many stale words in the attempt to feel whole and thus growing immobile.
JUNE 23: while volunteering at a vineyard in Pian di Venola, Italy
The sun strikes our souls as we set vines in straight lines stretching up towards an empty sky. Hands of youth pick premature plums, restless in the heat of summer, restlessly working in the Italian countryside, restlessly waiting for the afternoon to finish fermenting in our stomachs.
JULY 2: still in Pian di Venola, working in the restaurant kitchen
The heat of an oven cooking for forty people has a way of stringing beads of sweat into a pattern that constructs communication to frantic orders devoid of formalities. The desires disguised as full bellies still impatiently clutching forks beside empty plates is relayed from guest to server to kitchen in an energy escalating exponentially across each carrier. Here you can understand every cause of suffering in the universe through the silent words muttered in everyone’s minds. Eight hands attempting to keep eighty full and free from responsibility, eighty eyes and ears blind to the sweat and deaf to the shouts.
AUGUST 7: Ramanashram in Tiruvannamalai, India
Everything is appearing in its two-dimensional form as if I cannot interact with anything except on its most surface level. I am questioning everything, seeing paths I do not want to follow. Unbearable resistance that asks me why I’m fighting, what am I fighting?
AUGUST 9: day after the monthly pilgrimage around Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai
Barefoot along the asphalt circling 14 kilometers around the mountain, walking without halting as the full moon peeks out of thunder clouds precipitating over thousands of pilgrims. Artificial light illuminates endless merchants crammed along the sidelines calling for people to come eat, come buy, come have a distraction. Kali Yuga. The light of the moon seems invisible to the tide of people it pulls in circles around Arunachala. Lightning rages silently at the ignorance degenerating once-transformative rituals into mere parades pulling at our desires. The temples are there, the sadhus and shrines are there, the fires are there but some essential energy is lost by a frenetic scattering of attention unto unnecessary objects. Motorbikes and cars move slowly through the dense river of humans gushing over dirty streets, honking without a care. In the heavens a sign reads “Avoid Plastic” and on the earth I carefully step over the immortal scraps of plastic displayed in many forms like the thousands of deities carved along ancient temples that knew a time when this pilgrimage followed a dirt path visible by the gentle light of a full moon. All that is preserved is just proof of loss. I’m talking of how it is, not how it was. I walked and did not stop for 9 miles, the varied textures of paved and broken pavement cracked my heels and strained the bones of my feet. My mind felt dirtied by the polluted environment trying to sell me something. Arunachala, can you hold it all? Our ignorance shines bright through the lights we’ve engineered to lead us towards temporary pleasures, so bright that we cannot see the moon on the mountain. “Om Namah Shivaye” spills from speakers overhead into the terrible symphony of sounds characterizing chaos infused with mysterious excitement and confusion. The cows in the street are blessed by many hands and sometimes fed green leaves of a plant I don’t recognize. In the span of a minute it smells of rotting feces, incense, chai, spiced food, jasmine, sweat and compost. Everyone is walking for some reason yet many don’t know it. I am one of those. Everyone feels the stabbing on their feet and ache in their legs yet the pain is not shown. Everyone keeps walking, looking to the artificial lights, doing it to be done.