Man And The Moment

I met a man at the Auroville bakery,

I know nothing of him,

His mind,

His body's remembering,

The constellations of his relations,

Or the shadows of his past

and the outlines of his future.

In the dying hours of the morning,

He greeted me in a hurried smile.

Eyes wide, weary, veined with a gentle tone.

His words stitched clear and held gently in their passing.

I did not know if he woke well-rested,

I did not know if he lingered at the sight of his family before stepping out,

I did not know if he kneaded the bread dough with the same fulfilment

Same as the first time his hands found dough.

But what is knowledge in the face of a lived moment?

A shimmer,

A firing of neurons across the dark,

The body struck awake,

A cognisance rising?

No.

Knowledge grew shy before the first gaze of the moment.

The moment turned impervious to my questions.

It turned sinister.

Took what was,

To create what the man had been

And what would be.

This is the paradox of a moment.

Ugly and beautiful.

To conjure what never existed.

To turn the human mind upon itself.

To make us at once, oblivious and awake.

This is the real magic trick.

I left the bakery knowing no more of him than when I entered.

Yet for an instance,

Our ways of thinking,

Our not-knowing and our knowing,

Caught up in this moment.

The moment did not reveal its impermanence,

Until it slipped into memory.

Just as the man did not reveal his story,

Until I chose presence and a pen to set it down in words.

I got no vegan bread I came for that morning,

But I left with a hunger fed,

A story to carry,

Warm as fresh bread in the hand.

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Cover photo by Ales Dusa on Unsplash