08/22/2025
๐๐ญโ๐ฌ ๐๐จ๐ญ ๐๐ก๐๐ซ๐ ๐ ๐๐ข๐ฏ๐ ยท ๐๐จ. ๐
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โ๐ฌ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐โ โ ๐ฒ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฎ๐๐๐
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Our summer series keeps asking what heat revealsโand how it fuses internal fire with the weather outside. Hereโs the third feature.
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๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐ข๐ฌ ๐ฉ๐ข๐๐๐:
Set in the East Village of NYC in the 1970s, Gordonโs tongue-in-cheek story follows Hara Joe Shombo, a laughing yogi and translator of Kabir, as he wrestles with inner (tapas) and outer (apartment as oven) heat, lifelines to friends and deadlines to publishers, a fourth dimensional mystical experience and its meaning.
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๐๐ก๐๐ญ ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎโ๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ข๐ง๐ฌ๐ข๐๐:
๐นA twilight-city chronicle where spiritual practice meets emergency responseโand doubt.
๐ธKabirโs โburn your house downโ paradox, translated for an American ear.
๐นAn ethical tangle that tests the difference between enabling and compassion.
๐ธStreet-level musicโbrass bands, conga lines, Earth, Wind & Fireโturning trouble into communion.
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๐๐ฐ๐จ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ซ๐ซ๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ข๐ญ๐ก ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ:
โEverything combusts, only ash remains; welcome to our ash-ram.โ
โEverything is swinging: the sky and the earth and the Formless taking Form.โ
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Read the full piece below.
(excerpted from ๐๐ฆ๐ธ ๐ ๐ฐ๐ณ๐ฌ ๐ข๐ต ๐๐ธ๐ช๐ญ๐ช๐จ๐ฉ๐ต
๐๐ฉ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ก๐ข๐ช: https://tinyurl.com/4nr9a98h)
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โ
๐๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ ๐ก๐๐๐ญ ๐ฌ๐ญ๐จ๐ซ๐ฒ?
Weโre keeping the window open for community submissions. Share a short text, image, or audio/video piece about where your heat lives; selected works will run in the series with full credit. Details in the series launch post.
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๐ฅ ๐ฆ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐๐๐ฏ๐บ๐ถ๐๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ ๐๐ผ: [email protected]
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๐๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง
๐ธ๐๐๐๐ ๐ต๐๐๐ ๐ผ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ท๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ณ๐๐ข ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ด๐๐๐ ๐
๐๐๐๐๐๐, ๐ท๐ฟ๐ฝ๐ฝ
โ
Hara Joe Shombo wondered if the world was burning up.
Dark-haired and long-limbed, he stood at his fifth-floor window facing Tompkins Square Park and watched the children playing on the steel gray monkey bars and shiny swings. Though their singing remained strong, the bodies of the kids began to blur in the shimmering heat and then disappear into a watery mirage.
Life was freaky enough on the Lower East Side without disembodied voices, Hara Joe thought, and it was certainly hot enough. The bricks in his building at the corner of East Tenth Street and Avenue B had absorbed so much heat it made his apartment sauna-like. His skin was beaded in sweat, but his mind, instead of focusing on his translations of Kabir, the fifteenth-century South Asian poet, returned to an event that had occurred at noon.
He had been on his way home from the Shiva Loka class that he taught at Ball Field #8 in East River Park. Approaching the Houston Street overpass on the FDR Drive, he had seen a young woman hanging over the outer railing, intent on falling to her death. So he had sat out of view and had repeated a series of Sanskrit syllables his teacher Bom-Bom Bolenath had taught him which plugged Joe into Bom-Bomโs teacher who had been dead for three hundred years. When Joe had felt the mantra begin to weave a net of protection around the dangling woman, he had closed his eyes and stayed at it with intense concentration for a very long time. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, traffic on the FDR had slowed; a fireman had approached and talked himself into the womanโs confidence. When Joe had sensed that the work had been done, he had opened his eyes. At that instant the woman had jumped, but the fireman had grabbed both of her wrists in time.
Reliving the scene with the woman in the sure grip of the fireman, tears again ran down his face. Humbled by the memory, he wondered if his ending of the mantra was merely coincidental with her letting go. Had he made it all up out of a misplaced need to save a damsel in distress or had he in fact connected to a spiritual lineage that played an actual (if invisible) part for good in her story?
He considered that he might be crazy.
As he rummaged for an explanation he could accept, he recalled Kabirโs remark on the spiritual life: โIโve burned my own house down, and Iโll burn down the house of anyone who wants to follow me.โ Joe imagined his own body spontaneously combusting into flame. He remembered Bom-Bomโs first words to him when they had met ten years ago: โEverything combusts, only ash remains; welcome to our ash-ram.โ
Walking to the kitchen, Joe drew a large X across the calendar box that read July 13, 1977, and counted five boxes to his deadline. He drank cold water from the tap, filled up the deep industrial sink and then put his head under. He needed to chillโand not just from the heat. Translating a critic of religion revered as a saint by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs required more finesse than he could muster.
Joe considered the Kabir lyric, โI was on fire but now I have found the water of the Lordโs name.โ It looked all right on the surface, but it exemplified his struggles with samdhyabhasa, Indiaโs twilight language. In a sub-continent ruled by invaders over many centuries, spiritual texts had been intentionally obscured with misdirection or coded with esoteric connections that required a teacherโs instruction to decipher.
Hara Joe felt Kabirโs use of the phrase โthe Lordโs nameโ was more than misleading, especially to a Western audience, because the Lord had nothing to do with it! That implied an I/Thou setup with an Ishvara, a God-outside-you manifested in a savior-avatar Form. However, Joe felt convinced that Kabir meant the unmanifested god-within-you, the Formless, โthe breath inside the breath,โ the mystery at the center of oneโs beingโundying, unborn, consciousness beyond comprehension. Joeโs challenge was to say all that in a single vernacular American phrase.
He toweled off, put on a fresh ochre tee shirt, re-tied his long hair into a rishi knot at the top of his head and re-drew three vibhuti lines of white ash on his forehead in the Shiva Loka tradition. Returning to his desk, surrounded by dictionaries in Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu as well as the Siri Guru Granth Sahib and Nanak Shahโs Japji Sahib, he spent the next hours translating the irreverent poet. Though he included a footnote for each of the various names of Allah and Vishnu that Kabir referenced, Hara Joe suspected he was making the same mistake so many who loved Kabir madeโexplaining the poet instead of burning their own house down first. If, as Kabir insinuated, the names of God were mantras and not God, Joe decided to take all the names of God out of the poem.
Bent over his first-ever electric typewriter, searching the desk drawers, he wondered if his perspiration could create a short circuit and blow out a fuse. The machine was a birthday gift from Leka, his new downstairs neighbor, who had kidded him earlier about his antique Smith-Corona typewriter and his electricity phobia. With a mischievous smile, she had asked him not to raze the building.
He finally found a bottle of White Out and walked to the window. The sun was setting and the children in the park were gone. Rummaging around the trash cans at the curb, gray-haired Rosie in a yellow housedress and blue slippers looked up at him. In accordance with Indiaโs tradition of atithi devo bhava (the guest is akin to God), he asked, โHow can I help you, Rosieji?โ
โLaughinโ Yogi, donโt be an old fogey. Iโm prayinโ to ya madly: help an old bitch gone in the teeth, laddie. If ya love an old c**ksucker like your daddy taught ya, toss down a dollar for a mug of firewater. Iโm fire-quenched when liquor loves me: sip sip sip, my lips take nips; then glug glug glug, Iโm snug as a bug in a rug. How ya like me now, sucker: in the beginning I licked her butt, but now liquor licks me and Iโm sick without her so throw me down a buck, mothaf**ker.โ
Hara Joe put a dollar and enough change in an envelope so it would drop straight down, sealed it and watched it fall onto the sidewalk next to her. She picked it up without a word and walked away. Back at his desk, he wondered about Rosieโs timing. Her singing for her supper with spontaneous rhymes had amused and shocked him, just like Kabir had done. Was it coincidence that both used images of fire and water and a style direct and profane? They both sought relief from a consuming thirst, but Hara Joe considered that one was drunk on a cosmic love ocean and one was drunk on Ripple.
Pulling the typed page of verse from the roller, Joe opened the bottle of White Out and gently brushed the liquid across the names of the divine while leaving the rest of the text intact. He laughed as the black letters slowly melted and then disappeared into the white of the page. Just like Kabirโs poetry, White Out had erased the separation between the names of God (Form) and the namelessness of God (Formless).
Hara Joe thought: Iโm making it either/or, but together these opposites tell the fuller story. Kabir burns his house down, goes full immersion, dissolves borders and discovers wholes; Iโm a half-stepper making divisions. I dismiss Rosie as drunk and celebrate Kabir as mystic while these poets and their traditions are holding hands under the table.
Joe walked to the window. As darkness fell, pinpricks of starlight appeared in the sky and a constellation of streetlamps slowly brightened over the park. Light emerging from the dark was the reverse effect of black letters disappearing into a white page. Seeing it both ways for the first time, Hara Joe laughed. He finally understood the Sufiโs ecstatic lines, โEverything is swinging: the sky and the earth and the Formless taking Form, the sight of which has made Kabir its everlasting servant.โ
Joe realized that the stars, dead by the time their light reached him, had been shining all day long. It recalled Kabirโs outlook, โIf youโre looking for me, Iโm sitting next to you; my shoulder is against yours.โ Hadnโt Bom-Bomโs dead teacher โsaidโ as much as well? As he wondered how coincidental were these events, the street lamps died and the sounds of ACs, TVs and radios stopped; likewise, his selectric typewriter, fan and electric clock with the fluorescent hands stopped at 9:34 p.m.
He sat in the dark and put his head in his hands. The world had burned up.
He wondered if the heat and humidity had driven him crazy.
Sometime later, Leka Emmanuelโshort, nimble, fine-featured and dressed in a black kaftan with her salt-and-pepper hair pulled backโpointed her flashlight at his window.
โHey, Hara Joe, your self-fulfilling prophecy has arrived.โ
He opened his window and stepped out onto the fire escape.
โWith your new electric typewriter, youโve blown out the lights in the building and you may have shut down the whole town,โ she said and put her hand on her hip.
He laughed. โI couldnโt have done it without you and your birthday gift. And youโre just the person I want to see in a black out. You have a plan, donโt you?โ
โFind the ice cream store,โ Leka said.
Meeting on the first-floor landing, Hara Joe opened the door to the vestibule where an unconscious Rosie lay in a puddle of her own urine. Leka bent down, checked for a pulse and told Joe that Rosieโs presence was sending the wrong message to her clients and his.
โShe hustles blow jobs for booze from our own landlordโs liquor store,โ Leka added.
โToday itโs on me. I supplied the scratch. Rosie was jonesinโ for the juice.โ
โGiving her money to buy the thing thatโs killing her is not really in her best interests. Weโre enabling her addiction,โ Leka said.
โI hadnโt thought about it in those terms. What should we do?โ he said.
After a brief exchange, they decided that if the lights came back on tonight, they would take her to Bellevueโs ER; if not, tomorrow morning. Relieved and resolved, they walked up St. Markโs Place with their flashlights, stopping often to chat with their candle-carrying neighbors. Everyone, it seemed to Leka, knew the laughing yogi.
Entering the new Baskin and Robbins franchise on Second Avenue, Joe and Leka kibitzed with the two high school employees, chose a range of melting flavors scooped into extra-large cups and sat at a sidewalk table.
โSo what was the neighborhood like when you got here?โ she asked him.
While they exchanged spoonfuls of their favorite flavors, he told her of his arrival in 1965 fresh out of high school. Too impoverished for a Baskin and Robbins, the neighborhood was rich with squatters, anarchists, teen runaways, Eastern European exiles, Black and Puerto Rican families, draft dodgers, jazz lofts, communes, avant-garde musicians, poets, painters and pioneers. There was a war on poverty so rent control and pro-tenant courts ruled.
When she asked him how he had gotten into Shiva Loka, Hara Joe told her that he had taken a class from Bom-Bom and that was it; he moved that day into the ashram which occupied the whole building back then. Class was held in the storefront and each of the twelve American teacher trainees had a small apartment. Bom-Bom had created an educational non-profit and each trainee had a serviceโlike accountant, cook, securityโto perform. Joeโs gig was communications director and Bom-Bomโs translator.
Joe told Leka that his parents were immigrants and he grew up speaking German and Russian with his motherโs side of the family, Italian and Greek with his fatherโs side. Bom-Bom taught him Bengali while he taught Bom-Bom English. When they got stuck, they took lunch on Sixth Street along Calcutta Row. The Bengalis all knew them and helped them figure it out.
โIt sounds like a great way to get to know the teacher you admire,โ Leka said.
Hara Joe told her how Bom-Bom and his yoga lineageโlike fellow Bengalis Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Tagore of the Hindu Renaissanceโhad returned to Vedic roots to heal the scars of colonialism. Bom-Bom often spoke of how the British raj and the uptight Victorian Age had impacted the generation of Gandhi and Nehru and those opening spiritual centers in WASP-y USA.
โI saw that sanitized version of India up close,โ Joe said, โbecause my second function was to experience the different kinds of yoga offered in Gotham and report to the group.โ
โAnd what did you find?โ she asked.
โThe yoga center was a conundrum. It helped build-a better-you using a results-oriented, step-by-step work ethic best expressed as keep-showing-up. But once you know the basic asanas, bandhas, kriyas, breath and how to meditate, thereโs no need to show up at the center. You can do yoga at home at any time by yourself. Youโre going inward; you donโt need people around for that,โ he said and smiled.
โBut pay a fee and belong,โ she said, โand the congregation congratulates you for buying their program with ego boosts to help you become egoless. Is that what you mean?โ
Hara Joe laughed. โI would say people were building their own versions of spiritual community. The yoga center was a safe place, whether you were looking for enlightenment or a mate or just a better way to relax. You did not have to be a believer to get the medicine.โ
โThat makes sense,โ Leka said. โTraditional religions in America have failed their moral crises with civil rights, g**s and women. So religion and its priests-rules-beliefs-hypocrisies cannot be trusted. Yoga replaces religion with health-beauty-celebrity-self-improvement as the come-on. And thatโs different from what you do?โ
โYoga means to unite, in this case, the individual self with the universal. Shiva Loka suggests weโre already united with the universal but weโre blocking the flow. The class is designed to rip off your disguise and burn your house down. Warm ups and stretches lead to aerobic energetic breathing jumping shouting laughing. Thirty minutes later, exhausted, we lay flat on our backs with our hands at our sides in co**se pose and follow the breath for twenty minutes. Unlike yoga class, thereโs no self to improve and thereโs nothing to get better at except letting go. The best expression of Shiva Loka, the abode of creative destruction, is laughter.โ
โSo thatโs how your group got nicknamed the laughing yogis?โ
โThat nickname stuck, which pleased me since my job included creating good public relations in the neighborhood. We chanted in the cemeteries under the full moon, worked the East Village Hotline as volunteers, held benefits in our storefront and discovered many local artists doing a version of Shiva Lokaโbreaking things up, turning them upside down, inside out. We fit into this amazing local scene that was like a university of the streets. Three years later, in 1970, our training was over and Bom-Bom was back in Calcutta,โ he said.
โSo youโre the only laughing yogi left?โ she asked.
โThe others teach in their city of choice. We stay in touch. This is my choice, Shiva City.โ
โMine, too,โ she said, โand Iโm probably twice as old as you are. I know Baskin and Robbins is a bad sign, but this is the last neighborhood left in Manhattan. I started out here and Iโve lived in all the others. I bet the rest of New York is getting plundered or burned down tonight.โ
A bright light came on, cranked by a generator. A drum circle began to form on the corner. People with flashlights and candles were milling around the percussionists who were playing congas, djembes, bongos, timbales and tambourines. As that multi-rhythmic beat got rolling, the circle around the players widened and more folks started dancing in the street.
The Avenue B Brass Band paraded down Second Avenue, playing Weather Reportโs โBirdland,โ the summerโs big hit. They stopped in front of the drum circle and the percussionists slid right into the groove. Out came more people, some with guitars, mandolins and saxes. A conga line formed. The mood grew merry.
Hara Joe told Leka about the suicidal woman hanging on the railing above the FDR, his use of the mantra and the intercession of a being in his yoga lineage. Then he hesitated.
โWhat is it?โ she asked.
โBom-Bomโs teacher has been dead for a very long time,โ he said.
โYeah, I got that part,โ she assured him.
โAs a therapist, what is your professional opinion regarding my sanity?โ he asked.
โYou have had what could be called a twilight experience, something so liminal, obscure, non-rational and dream-like you canโt be sure it really happened. So your concern for your sanity makes sense,โ she told him.
โYou make it sound less scary and easier to deal with,โ he said.
โIt takes some getting used to. Iโll share with you what happened with my first book, which is based on my familyโs surviving the siege of Leningrad during World War Two. I was too young to remember much, but I would make a little progress in the writing during the afternoons. Then, at night, I would dream this incredibly vivid materialโthings I could not have known about, like the massacre of a trainload of Russian children by the Soviet army in a snowy field west of the city. After the dreamโor shall I call it a visitation?โI wrote down what the deadโor shall I call them the guests?โrevealed. At first I worried a lot about my sanity, but as their stories grew more alive and drove the narrative, my rational mind wore out and took a back seat. Crazy, huh? Weโre so sure of ourselves, but we see so little of the whole extraordinary event.โ
โYou think these forces are around us all the time?โ he asked.
โJust because we canโt see them doesnโt mean they arenโt there,โ she said and smiled.
Hara Joe laughed. The band shifted into Earth, Wind & Fireโs โShining Star.โ
They joined the conga line.
