Life often feels like the making of a sand mandala. The monks spend days bending over grains of coloured sand, placing each one with devotional precision, only to undo the entire mandala in a single, deliberate gesture. It is a practice of wisdom that the work is sacred precisely because it will be undone. What matters is the devotion with which we participate before we let it go.
Dear Friends,
I have been spending my days amid the foggy haze of midwinter in Kolkata. It is that time of the year when Earth’s surplus transforms each boulevard of the city. Street sellers gather in their makeshift tarpaulin shacks to display their golden, date-jaggery–filled containers. The winter mist causes the date tree bark to ooze in relentless retaliation for being wounded. The sap is collected in buckets and transported regularly to city vendors in wooden carts from countryside farms.
A technicolor array of winter yield—sapotas, water apples, kohlrabi, Chinese cabbage, fenugreek greens—stands displayed, inherently representing a kind of wealth that cannot be accumulated, only harvested and shared within the community. Date jaggery, this fresh winter abundance, is a symbol of the impermanence of Earth’s bounty. It is a lesson in humility, the ethics of sharing, and the necessity of proactiveness amid constant shifts in nature’s cycles. If not processed and shared within a short duration, it spoils. It is the kind of wealth that makes everyone rich by flowing equally in all directions, all at once.
Date jaggery is traditionally used in making Sankrānti sweets. Here too, it is shared generously among beloved ones—friends and family alike. A yearly milestone to celebrate interdependence and the collective nature of human societies.
In northern India, the end of the winter harvest is celebrated as Lohri, a festival of fire sacrifice to the gods. People of the neighbourhood gather around a community bonfire and burn natural offerings, symbols of what they are ready to let go of. It reminds us that whatever is born of this world and passes through a life cycle is a holy sacrifice to the divine. That whatever emerges from the soil and returns to fire1 remains in service to life on Earth.
This decade of my life is advancing in haste, as if time itself is warping around these significant years. Swaying between schedules and priorities, meeting some expectations and failing others, has become the texture of these days. In the deserted inner-scapes of hope, suspended in the liminality of this dreaming world, I have begun to question my relationship with the world and its countless inhabitants.
I find myself wondering about my resting place in the movement of time. I am trying to find a language to communicate with nature. I have not found the key yet, but there are hints—in the songs of wind, light, water, and living beings. I suspect it does not reside in one thing alone; it is interspersed through all that the cosmos has created. It is not an easy path, to form a new language and its grammar, but it is my personal burden. My journey entails these tasks.
We are at a pivotal point in our planetary crisis. The oceans are warming beyond normal thresholds. The toxicity of soil and water tables is perilous. Forest fires are becoming more frequent, and we stand at the crux of fossil fuel extinction. To live another forty years will mean to live in a world more fragmented, more violently at war over resources, because we built it upon extractive and transactional relationships with the planet.
The language essential to sustaining a reciprocal relationship with existence is fast devolving. Our techno-extremities are disconnecting us from the life that flows through everything. The eternal whirl of matter and space that manifests life demands more than attention. It demands to be held in silent understanding—in the forgoing of ego, in the abandonment of self-profit. Unless we arrive there, the sharp edges of broken existence will be held against the proverbial throat of humanity, threatening to bleed us dry.
I do not have all the answers, but my life is wilfully designed to seek a few of them and to live within those widening frames. My heart aches for the suffering we have invited upon ourselves because we refuse to see the truth, even when it blazes before us like the sun at summer’s noon. Avoiding it is like drinking water from a poisoned pool. It will slowly lead us into spiritual morbidity. It will corrupt our self-inquiry, blur our moral lens, break our innate compass to empathise with the pain of our own species, let alone that of the rest of the living world.
The truth is simple and difficult: we are always in relationship with one another. We are made of earth and water; solidity and flow coexist within us. At different moments, we are called toward one or the other, and all we can do is respond with acceptance.
We are made of each other. You and I are shaped from the same source, poured into different forms because life is too abundant to be held by one vessel alone. In essence, we are the same. This knowing is no longer rare. It should be enough to end our wars, to stop the hoarding of resources, to choose compassion over violence. Harm inflicted on another body is harm returned to the self.
There is a knowing in me as clear as an unperturbed lake and as encompassing as our shared sky. I know that I am a daughter of this planet, a sister to its beings, a steward of what exists. I am as much born of this world, of the Earth, as I am of my mother and father, of my ancestors, who remain in constant conversation with our great green mother, even those who have transcended the physical realm.
Divine is my destiny to serve this planet, and great is my burden to behold its brokenness. It reflects my own being—mired in the pain of truth-telling and fractured by the sight of cruelty eroding what is tender and necessary in us. Yet, held by the love I have received from this world and from beyond it, I have chosen to revolt against despair. To be broken without surrendering to hopelessness. To love without doubting the worth of what stands before me.
I embrace our broken world until the last exhale of light. It is the only way I know how to carry—and to carry well—this temporary burden of being alive.
alluding to the last rite of cremation — a safe passage to the dead, from the realm of living, through the purifying flames of Agni or fire
Thank you, an excellent lament and a brave stand wrapped up in poetry. 🙏🏼