Excerpt: The semantic fields

She is young but not wild. She is free but she is restrained. She exists, as we watch, with her naked body contorted in the shapes that usher her along the road to enlightenment, her mind swallowing in the darkness that her closed eyes provoke. She is practicing bhakti yoga, the least arduous route to moksha, or the liberation from what Tibetens call khor wa – the cycle of birth and reincarnation in which Hindus beleive, although she is unaware of any of this. She reads her movements from illustrations and photographs in a book called ‘yoga made easy’ in which the only spiritual references made regarding this spiritual practice, are simplistic and occasionally inaccurate. But she is a romanticist and facts matter little to her. Even as her eyes open to uncover another movement, her mind gasps in the languages of light, colour, shade and vision, before she shuts them out and, separate from the languages of the world in her silent, odourless apartment, she struggles at her vague concepts of meditation before her shoulders relax and she stands, closing the book. When she closes the book, she opens another one and begins to write in her long, loose script. She writes slowly, enjoying the flow of the dark ink onto the paper, the soft feel of the nib over the pale surface leaving behind its vivid bloodline, the gentle arcs she creates with the letters as she goes. If she has had previous lives, then she was once a great calligrapher carving out the words of Allah with her angled nib in ancient Persia. Sometimes she dreams she was a Persian princess, silk veils masking her beauty, her voice soft like the wind through the long tapestries that hung on the palace walls, her skin a golden chocolate like the sun setting over the desert mixed with the gentle shade of the mosque. These are the things she writes, things that may have been, things that she wishes had been, and occasionally, things that she hopes will one day come to be. For there is a certain kind of romance in her that makes her put down on paper things which never were. Things that once existed as blossoms in her heart but which never bloomed and which cannot be seen as anything but turgid undergrowth and pathetic weed by anyone who may chance upon it.
She has begun a new text. It is sacred to her, a part of her before she even begins, a part of her life and a part of the world around her. It is her rebellion unto herself for it is the truth. It is her life as she has lived it and it is without hyperbolic extravagance, without exaggeration or desire, it is simply what is.