Pointlessness and pleasure in the pointer broom..

  

 Pointlessness

 "You got a ol' pointer broom' the man asks me 'me son build a concrete strip fuh me and ah need an ole broom fuh brush out the rainwater".  

I keep old pointer brooms to sweep the yard. Shorter, harder , they are good to swipe the mix of dust, dry leaves, hard seeds . And I keep the short one so I could bend at the waist and imagine I am doing forward fold yoga to heal the back rather than break it while bending and moving shoulder back and forth to move broom, changing hands when one hand might become tired.. 

And also watching as the dust pushes back the dust, and even when I think I am sweeping with the wind, there is a circling when like some game , the dust changes path. 

Sweeping is pointless activity, temporary pleasure in a clean place. And the whole thing about sweeping and meditation and the Buddhist views on an activity that sweeping mindlessly is a good time to clean the mind , and being one with the breeze blowing back thoughts and not being overwhelmed by the thoughts or in many cases, just leaving them there like the dust which would not go away.

Old pointer brooms remembering that lesson of how individual 'sticks' will break easily while in a bundle where everything is stronger together - I have never broken a whole pointer broom no matter how 'old'.

Pleasure

230am and I can't sleep back. Place is cold.

I turn on the device and tap the PDF for  Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion .  

Half asleep, reading with blurry eyes and then I wake up more and laugh at the bottom of Page 1 which is set at dawn

 "Hassanali probably imagined the sinners turning over irritably at being disturbed, and probably felt indignant and self-righteous satisfaction. When he finished calling, he swept the dust and the grit from the mosque steps with a feathery casuarina broom whose silent efficiency gave him deep pleasure."

Laughing and connecting at 230am with Hasanali sweeping steps of mosque at dawn .

I was supposed to buy a new broom for the house, waiting on the woman who pushes brooms in a pram to pass. The broom life cycle is the evolution on aging from the house -> kitchen/backstep ->, inside downstairs room with tile -> yard/scrubbing 'kaie' etc until some death when there are too many old brooms and it is okay to throw away but I don't throw away because they are still useful when old.

So like there are  7 brooms now in various stages of the and there is care in managing which broom in which stage of the life cycle , care and energy which probably should be invested in other more productive things but....

The morning after I read about Hasanali's pleasure , I hear the 'broom broom' from the woman who walks with the brooms in the pram rain and shine. 

She takes out two for me to choose one, shaking both to show me.

Shortish , pointers kind of thinnish. My cousin in Essequibo gets brooms made from coconut branches with long feathery blades. Long brooms which don't need back bending/forward folding and I had joked with her that I do the short brooms for the exercise. 

I don't know how profitable it is to make pointer brooms. As skills change, who gets the branches, who will sit and peel the blade from each stem over and over manually. Will pointer brooms survive the oil and gas bonanza in Guyana?

Hasanali's pleasure though.. the soft broom caressing dust out of wooden varnish/polish floor.. including dust left from the broom which had become too hard to caress dust from the varnish/polish floor.

 Pleasure and a bit of shame thinking shoots, that is old dust not new dust and wondering about the monks and meditation and old thoughts which should be swept out and so on. Vacuuming does not give the same thoughts.

 Pleasure too at writing this pointless blog on a day when I should be doing more important things like sweeping the yard after the wind from last night has left an opportunity for meditation and exercise.