India for me has offered glimpses of complexity and diversity that invite my mind to expand and reorganise to take in. From witnessing the seemingly simple life of villagers in the Himalayan foothills, embedded in landscape, growing food, tending livestock, building mud brick structures, weaving, walking, directing waterways … to descending on a plane into the haze of a city of 33 milliion inhabitants moving rapidly in a high tech world amidst very poor air quality. From sari wearing women embedded in arranged marriages and expectations to queer non-binary folks navigating a culture that expresses itself in gendered language. From street chai vendors to Dominos pizza parlours. From caste limitations to class climbers. From seeming chaos on the roads to recognition of subtle embedded rules of engagement. Limitation and freedom all mixed up, like my reorienting brain, heart, gut, and body.
The spiritual woven through life, temples in the midst of rice fields, images of Goddesses in shop fronts, rituals of welcome sweets and blessing bindis and mantra, all remind me of the abiding and the universal in and as each of us. Like the ‘still point of the turning world’ from T. S. Eliiot or the steady gaze of Shiva at the centre of the image of the icon depicting Shiva’s wild dance in five acts (creation, sustaining, dissolving, concealing, and revealing), being in India is another remembering that at our essence it is all oneness in a crazy, beautiful, terrible, peaceful, chaotic world.
Somehow the coming together, of this expansiveness of diverse complexity and the centring of the devotional, work for me in a way that I come home feeling returned to a wider experience of myself.
How this plays out will be revealed in the dances yet to come. What I do know for sure is that I am grateful, greatly-full that is, and blessed to be stronger in body, expanded in mind, and tenderised in the heart from the spanda (contraction and expansion) of it all.
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