“Bacchanalia!”. Doesn’t it convey urgency or affliction – something that demands attention, right away? It demands attention, all right – just like flowers and human afflictions demand attention.
It is a celebration of desire. A desire felt for the present and expressed with joy in an awakening that makes its own excess and urgency known! It would be easy to say how we suffer from the disability to constantly live in the present but chances are, that would just be its own desireless prison of sufficiency. But to be present with desire and then experience the present – that would truly be awakening.
There are two places where you can experience awakenings. One is where the earth reaches up to meet the sky and the other is where the sea meets with earth. Both unions spark a fire but the kind of awakening you experience is decided by the air that makes this union happen – one where you renounce everything or you claim everything. We experience the fire, sparking both dissolution and desire, as an awakening. What we choose to follow, there is no right or wrong, must not-be-done in opposition or the awakening will give birth to its own perversion.
Bacchanalia would be the expression of desire when you claim everything in your awakening. So, find your mountain! So, find your beach!
The hippies, much like the roman bacchanals, had their own celebrations. When they arrived in India in the 70s, they staked their claim on mountains and the beaches. What little survives of their accounts mostly come from the awakening granted by the mountains but it was the beaches that made them express their bacchanalia and little survives of those expressions.
But even today, there are some beaches on the Arabian sea, that if you visit, you can feel instincts rise above logic and reasoning, so violently into your consciousness that it seems you can split atoms with your desire. You remember the concept of consequence to action but the will to enforce it goes missing! You stop, take a deep breath, hoping to find it, then another but with each deep breath it seems, all you find is more desire and a deep frenzy to seek out that desire. Colors, smells, sounds – everything is sharper. You can feel the friction of the blood against your veins. The crescendo of crashing waves silencing every thought. The smell of the saline foam reminding your own. The waves themselves painting a thousand pictures in the sand around your feet and just as easily repainting them. You feel an intense attraction; how the waves seek you. Oh, it rises, then falls, then rises again, till you can’t contain it anymore. Whatever opposition you had left is now dissolved. Oh, it needs to express, but first it must feast; with eyes that must not blink, with breaths that fan the soul, with ears that eavesdrop on whispers and secrets and a mouth that devours the present.
It’s a feast, alright! An aromatic bacchanalia from the dry leaf to the empty cup and everything in between. Think hippie thoughts and imagine intoxicated cake bakers and spice pirates dancing, twirling like dervishes to the sweet tune of peppers, cardamoms and toffee on coconut tree lined beaches, celebrating a ripe fruity summer cornucopia. The flavor, if I must say – just on the right side of sweet excess.
It’s one thing to find what you desire, quite another to find desire itself. We’re pretty sure this is the latter, in a cup.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.