Your mind is the limit

I heard the story of Aisling Satya Endës during a brief holiday in India. Escaping the throes of an Australian summer, it was at a tea estate in Darjeeling that I came across the name that would consume my thoughts and writings for months to come.

Speaking with a balding, rotund man over the rhythmic hiss of tea cultivation, he mentioned a person, whose story – he swore to me on the grave of his thrice removed second great aunt (he thought it sacrilegious to swear on the grave of a relation he personally knew) – was not the progeny of a broth of imagination and boredom. And so, in time, I walked down the muddy road.

An odd isolated wall or a thatched roof greets the lost traveller, but mostly there grows tall, sprawling trees over a thicket of vines and bushes. A while saw me doubting my rusty internal compass, but a while more opened to a small lane, at the end of which rose a small, stone-walled abode.

The house itself tells a story. Old, it speaks of a century of lassitude. The stones of the walls are pitted like an inversed braille. Once a part of an almost affluent society, the house remains as one of the few remnants of a village lost in time – the death of fathers to the displacement of widows; sons and daughters drawn to the cities cloaked in the smog of factories. Generations had slowly either died out or moved away, leaving behind the carcasses of a way of life.

The door opens and I am greeted by a crooked smile. A gap between the front two teeth heralds two lines spreading back into the hollow of a mouth. The broken line is by no means ugly, nor a beacon for the necessity of an imminent visit to the dentist. Grey eyes droop at the ends, giving a look of melancholy to an unconventionally beautiful face.


In the one hundred cups of tea that followed, thousands upon thousands of words were spoken and written. Ink became words, and words drew pictures extraordinary. Allow your mind to expand and be opened to possibilities that you may have never humoured before. Adhere to an accepting pragmatism as your lackluster dogmatism is cast aside. Suspend all your judgments about the way things are in favour of an expanded order of reality as you read ahead. Faith, for we all know of things, stories, people that seem to completely disregard reality, yet we look upon these in wonder and awe and swear by them. This, friends, is very much the same.