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I am learning, almost by the minute, how to disentangle the aspiration from all the
negative pulls, bents and tendencies, to free it from all that turns it into a self-
destructive thing… How to say? The same aspiration in its intensity, that can be a
desperate suffocation, a yearning haunted with a terrible sense of impossibility, of
hopelessness before a world that is basically unfit… can also be, and must be,
simply, a Flame… But it is difficult and it requires a lot of courage…
*24-9-1980, Auroville:
Noh runs in calling me. There is a freaked guy doing a number around the Camp,
going about nearly naked uprooting young trees; he has been seen earlier in the
beach area, probably drugged… No one at the Camp can figure what to do…
I go with her. And then, I have to follow it through!
I get upset at some of the reactions on display, though!
This is a confused fellow for sure, German or Austrian may be… He is crying now…
Oh! Where is that community of free and conscious beings whose mere presence
would be a help!? I have to insist to get food, and soap, and I have to wash him up
myself… Then it begins to rain; I end up taking the guy behind me on a bike,
gesticulating while hanging on to me, all the way to Jipmer Hospital… What else to
do? How ignorant, how separate we all are! What helpless distance there is
between these innumerable solitudes…! And what purification is yet needed before
one can become receptive, responsive…
… G.M was waiting for me here. Soon John H comes to ask us, more out of his own
personal need for our friendship than for practical reasons, to come and help place
the long arm of the crane on Matrimandir…
We go, climb up, and watch; the thing with Piero hasn’t budged an inch but,
somehow, G.M and I are different… It is not yet time for us to come back…
… I spend the evening working with the trees in “Dana”, in an upheaval of energy
as if fused, or melted with the living sap and the soil and the clouds and the damp
air and the moon-rise… It is energy; we are energy, there is no segregation of
“levels”, just energy, each being responsible only for the coherence of what one
must be and one’s faithfulness to it…
*25-9-1980, Auroville:
When I reach “Dana”, late evening after serving the dinner at the Kitchen, I find
that G.M, Marcia and Noh have been talking – playing with the idea – of G.M and
Marcia going off to live in Brazil, and wondering how I would take it, how I would
respond to G.M’s leaving… I burst at them! How could they “wonder”? Don’t they
know? Is that a social game?
In the silence that follows, I ponder my role in all this over the recent months, my
wanting for G.M to have his own place in Auroville, my giving of myself to it… Isn’t
this also an influence, even though it is “well-intentioned”, just like any other
influence? So, perhaps I ought to withdraw and let him work it out without
interfering, be it in the most loving way…
*27-9-1980, Auroville:
Tonight I find Noh waiting quietly for me. She tells me of the meeting with the SP
and with the new Collector, who is a woman, determined to help Auroville in
various ways, with cement permits, with land matters… Instructions have been
issued to freeze all Court cases and stop all harassment against us…