There’s a sublime quality to the time in the hour before dawn-break. If there’s a slight breeze during that time, it has the capacity to transport you to a different realm. I tried to keep up with my routine of getting up before dawn, but have slipped back into a post dawn schedule. Autumn is right around the corner, and the nights are getting longer. Soon dawn and my waking up time will coincide once again.
Mornings have become a packed time for me, a time which is solely for me and my care. A time for noticing new growths in my balcony garden and working on soil and compost with my hands, feeding the birds and squirrels on the terrace and refilling their water bowls, doing my rounds of walks around the terrace bare feet, lying down on a mat, sometimes in the sun, to just look up at the vast blue skies and clouds as they pass by at their own pace, slipping into a deeply meditative space, doing yoga, meditation, going for weekly morning walks, and making breakfast.
Who is my body? What role do I play as a female of the human species? As a unique person like all else, what can I offer to the world? In what ways do I connect deeper with Earth and nature within a restricted environment? These are the questions arising in me since the time of the lockdown. The world is in turmoil which has now gone beyond the pandemic, and people are suffering deeply, especially the poor. But nothing changes without a crisis. You do not transform into your best selves until you go through a test of fire, a personal or collective ‘dark night of the soul’. Each one of us has contributed in some ways to the situation we are in today, and each of us has to do our bit to steer all of us out of it in future. Like many indigenous tribes say, either we look at a crisis with joy and as an opportunity, or we get bogged down and entangled in a web of fear and mayhem.
My life right now is limited to my terrace and within one kilometer radius of my neighborhood. But then it gives me a chance to observe nature that much closely. It gives me time to observe over 30 species of birds and many more that I can hear but not yet identify, numerous dragon and damsel flies, bugs, spiders, house flies, bees, and butterflies. It gives me time to watch the male koel distract the crow while the female lays her egg in the crow’s nest and over months watch the juvenile koel hop around in the sesham tree as the mother crow shrieks her head off protectively if I even glance in her ‘baby’s’ direction. It gives me time to watch butterflies and bees flock the flowering sesham and mast trees and the arrival of bats as fruits begin to appear. It gives me the time to befriend a few crows and mynahs who sit very close to me when I put food out for them, catalog the never-similar sunsets and cloudscapes as spring turned to summer and subsequently the arrival and departure of monsoon clouds, and experience intimately the joys of sudden thunderstorms, lightning strikes, light breeze, intense heat, numerous rainbows and double rainbows, heavy rain, and brilliant full moons. And it also gives me the time to learn about wild plants that grow in my pots, parks, and sidewalks and include them in my diet and life with a lot of gratitude.
 |
Cloudscape from my terrace
|
All my scattered energies are finally coming back into my body, helping me tune in to its own wisdom and deep-diving into its healing with food. I am trying to understand what I did to my body and spirit all this while by not accepting my periods as something intimate and wonderful but rather viewing it as a roadblock to my freedom and adventure.
Time seems to have slowed down considerably, yet time is zipping away at a rate that seems faster than usual. While I live somewhere between these two spaces, I continue to enjoy my time with my work, books, art, long conversations with friends, and deep contemplation. For, when I finally step out into the ‘new’ world, it will be from a space of ‘I’, that is my spirit. For, there is no going back to the ways of an old fear-based world.
