from India: part 3

one year later: film photographs and words from my trip to India, February 2024

february 22nd, 2024

i started my period this morning
i give thanks to the mountains, "suprabhat" [good morning in Sanskrit]
for greeting me with their majesty
my body is sore from the trek yesterday and my womb aches
i am glad today offers slowness
i dreamt again of needing to move out of my house, feeling anxious and sad.  Pluto has entered Aquarius, squaring my 4th and 10th houses - squaring my natal Pluto in my 4th house of home and hearth. feeling this hard friction with my desire to build a home, to nest, to homestead.  it feels like the soil beneath me is being dug up and i cannot see where i am to be replanted. and to go through this while i am in India - one of my most prominent places of ancestry - i know is no coincidence.  where am i being redirected to? 
the lesson here is trust. but my fixed ways want to hold. slowly, though i do feel my muscles loosen, my grip slackening.
i watch the birds and i envy their perceived freedom
no baggage, no belongings
with the mountains thick with green placed before them
they fly as a group and perch on a wintered-tree
the wind helping to carry them to the next
their chirps adding to the collage of landscape
and for now, i let myself ground into the green
i let the warm sun melt my edges
i let the wind carry it away
i let the cold water hit my face and sink into my skin
i let my skin change color and my hair grow longer
i let myself be nourished by the people here
i consume food made on this land - made with love
i eat the landscape with my hands
a bird flies into the building where i write and eat and drink warm tea
we open the windows but it has not yet found the way out
finally, it flies out and soars once again over the curves of the Himalayas
and i feel it like a current within me - that feeling of release followed by unknown
limb by limb, it is a reconstruction
and i must trust the words, "what comes is better than what came before"
as my ancestors did when they had to leave their home in India to start anew
and so, i will move my body and move through this
i will find the open window

                                                                  i receive
                                                                  i release

---

something i loved learning about in Diana L. Eck’s book on India was how all of India’s geography is sacred. there is divinity found in each landscape, with the earth itself a goddess. the rivers and streams and rocks are sacred. throughout India, there are forest goddesses with many different names who live amongst the groves of trees. there is an earth goddess in Bengal who is said to have a yearly menstrual cycle right before farmers plant their seeds when plowing is forbidden to allow the earth time to rest. there are village gods and goddesses. there is Shiva, a prominent god of the mountains and villages who resides over many peaks of the Himalayas as well as the plains in between.

not only is there sacredness in the destination, but also here on the ground in which you stand. for the wisdom of the cosmos is not just reserved for the shrines high up at the top of the mountain peak, it is universally present in the simple and mundane for we are it. tapping into this divinity means opening our eyes to landscape and truly witnessing. in India not only was i enamored by the rolling hills and the snowy peaks and the ancient rivers, but also by the birds and the moss growing on the pines and the rhododendron flowers.

magic in the mundane - this is not new to me. for i have grown up whispering amongst the fairies beneath the cloak of rosemary whenever i felt alone. i have frequented a small boulder that held me many times while i was crying and writing and confiding. and to remember all of the ancestors who came before me who also had this intimate connection with landscape was a thread that came to me in India to remind me that in those moments of solitude, i was never truly alone. for in those intimate moments with landscape, i was also connected to them with their soft hands upon my back.