What Blooms Again

“When the eternal and the temporal meet the result is what has been known in all traditional cultures as the cycle of time. The timeless and the temporal meet in the reality of rhythm and recurrence…” — Jacob Needleman

Almost exactly three years ago, Viral and I went for a walk in San Mateo, and were hijacked by scent. His counts had just begun their sobering plummet waking us out of a six year lull of sweet stability. But he was still so strong, so full of light. Our lives were circumscribed, but vibrant. It was hard not to feel invincible. Fear flicked its tail in the pit of my stomach but for the most part I tried to ignore it. We had come so far. This was just another corner to be turned. 

It was at a quiet corner that we were captured. Lassoed by a perfume so unearthly and potent, Viral did not believe at first that it was natural. Across the street from us a magnolia tree, lit with creamy, bird-like blossoms, set amongst leaves of emerald and green. We walked towards it, as if in a dream. As we got closer the haunting, heady fragrance grew stronger. And I forgot that any part of me was frightened about any part of the future. 

The following January, we returned in a bid to catch the blossoms again, but we didn’t time it quite right and missed the window. Viral’s counts continued to drop. Despite the increasing dependency on transfusions we still hoped for a turn in the tide. By the time the next January rolled around, I was at the start of cancer treatments, and Viral was looking at the inevitability of needing a bone marrow transplant. The bloom time of a particular magnolia tree was no longer on my radar. But life is cyclical (one of its many saving graces). Rhythms reassert themselves. That which bloomed yesterday, will one day bloom again. 

Today, we found the tree frothing with flowers. Their scent found us first. Reeled us in as readily as their ancestors had so many moons ago. As I breathed in that perfume that washes the spirit, mixing moonlight with pearls and pale green apples, I thought of the wheel that turns and turns. Ushering fortune into disaster, and disaster into grace, tears into laughter, gratitude into grief, loss into love. The ceaseless turning that blurs distinctions, punctures conclusions, and is hard of hearing. Deaf to all petitions. I have fallen so far and been lifted so high through this turning. I have been lost and found, broken and healed, chastened and dignified, devastated and steeled by it more times than bear telling. And the koan of it is that while cycles repeat they do not equal stagnation. They do not dabble in replication a la photocopies and clones and cookie cutters. Cycles, though they may seem like it, are never merely just more of the same. Though they wear the cloak of familiarity, they are freighted with mystery. They represent all that inexorably retreats from us, all that falls off the edge of this earth, plunging into silence, vanishing from sight…and all that is renewed and returned to us. A resurrection riddled with light born of the dark. Our eyes see the old, our depths sense the new. Perhaps evolution then, is just repetition— with a hidden and princely twist in the tale, the price of which is pain, and an inch by inch transmutation. 

Jan 22 2020

The prayer to wake with is a plea for a heart carved vaster, one that can hold immensities without overwhelm, a space that can channel the beyond without becoming bedazzled or needing to stop to exclaim over the view. I am, I sense, too easily taken. Distracted by splendor, my delight needs more rootedness. It is, in the grand scheme, not a bad problem to have. My heart knows what to do, it just needs to be consulted more often. When my attention flocks to it there is a twilight sensation of settling down, whatever it is that slows allows for an inner quiet to assert itself. The swirl finds stillness and the flow can proceed unchecked by the giddy ego. To be an instrument requires that one not be anything else. Personality has less place if any at all. And I am bursting with personality, loathe sometimes to leave it even when I see it is not serving. How fond I am of the jagged edges of my being that I’ve cut my fingers on, and caused harm with. I resist softening but can no longer defend my resistance. What a well-mannered battle wages below the surface. Sometimes I am unsure which side I am rooting for. The morning makes everything possible. Even redemption. No one can manufacture such newness. It is bestowed like a blessing from realms we sense but cannot see. The sun— that familiar stranger— the force we at once know and do not recognize. How to surrender my life to your fiery gaze? What would burn in me and what would remain? I start so many sentences with I. Is that a problem? How does a river persuade the Earth to move aside, how does it part the ground? I need that knowledge now. For there is a river waiting to pound its way through me to the ocean. On a morning like this a part of me thinks there is nothing to do. The river finds its way. The Earth collaborates. Their partnership does not demand my participation. If I can be a perfect witness perhaps that is enough.

If.

September 24th, 2020

Everything feels imbued with a sense of the sacred. I am being drawn into the center of the Earth here where I am planted lies the medicine I have been searching for. Each day brings me closer to where I already am. The trees have been so patient with me. Source is speaking through the many megaphones of manifestation. I feel an urgency that is paradoxically stilling. An impatience with old ways. My blindness and confusion, or perhaps more simply— my lack of ripeness led me to linger too long at wells that had run dry. I cannot be contained. There is something in me that bristles at any hint of a bridle— only because I have not fully understood the scope of my unassailable freedom. I should be able to take things more lightly. Should be able to extend a safe and loving presence to those who do not know or understand me. Instead at times I find myself turning steely inside- hostile towards that which is not intending to attack me— that which is simply freighted by a bundle of gifts and fallibilities that lock in friction producing ways with my own collection of strengths and vulnerabilities. If I were more curious I would be less reactive. I am learning that the road to learning will be the road to my salvation. If I am busy learning there is no time to build the ego’s defenses. I want to lose myself in intrigue. To marvel at the hidden machinery and its reliability….the way I marvel sometimes at water that gushes out from the taps, the way I marvel at airplane flight, and the wonders of the Internet. There is a hidden logic to these things that human minds have uncovered and deployed. I, who do not have the same grasp of the underlying principles, I who had nothing to do with paving the path for these possibilities— still have the opportunity to interact with, and enjoy them— unquestioned. It is a curious privilege…and a double edged sword. It is so easy to abuse privileges that we don’t understand. The intrinsic machinery of our minds is not our ultimate frontier. But unless we encounter it for what it is, and own its mechanical aspects, we cannot legitimately transcend it.

Dec 15th 2020

Margazhli is born anew. The month of Krishna. Dark skinned days. A paucity of light, rich with possibility. Gravity is a friend. Give to the earth and you shall receive. Everything is pregnant with the Divine. I have been waiting outside the door of my life hoping for a summons. Not realizing that I have never, not even for a fraction of a second, been left unsung to. When you are surrounded, without let up, by invitations, you mistake a colossal presence for an unfortunate absence. This is the comic tragedy of the human journey. We sit in the lap of the Goddess and yearn for the touch of Grace. To know hot we must know cold. To know in, must cognize out. But God cannot be learned or encountered through polarity’s portals. This truth on this diamond-sharp morning is enough to draw laughter, and tears.

May 16th, 2022

It is interesting to be alive. When I am bored I am not living. So much floods each moment. My feet are always wet, my hands always able to gather something more. Something different. Something true. Sitting here now, what is it? The silence of the morning is threaded with sound, if I concentrate I can hear underneath the clicketyclack of Viral’s keyboard, and the morning cars and the refrigerator’s hum, a steady quiet tone— so softly pitched as to be inconspicuous, and yet when I bring my attention properly to it, it grows slowly then suddenly louder. I can with focus bring it to the foreground, observe how the other sounds then dim and fade. What captures me is not always circumstantial but a matter of choice and disciplined response. What a trickster time this is. Am I toying or being toyed with? What is being asked of me? What do I want to do or be? The matter is not known. I feel not lost, not found. I want– but not clearly. I wish but not pointedly. I am trying without trying to find Grace. The lessons that were clear are now garbled. Indistinct. But I still love the road and my travel companion. My dearest love. I am waiting for his health to show itself restored in numbers. The redness of red poppies, so striking with their black centers, the geometry of their design, the delicacy of their petals, folded like tissue paper, crinkled, flimsy yet capable of vanquishing my heart. I stare and stare at the graceful swan-necked droop of their buds, the delicate fuzz of their stems, their slender height, their arresting presence, their dances with the cornflowers.

April 4th, 2023

How do I feel? A little shaky. Like custard. More solid than liquid but not by much. Wobbly like a stool with uneven legs. The uncertainty of it all. In some ways I’ve grown used to it. In other ways. I feel like I’m holding my breath. I’m trying to live each day. Without taking things for granted, but without quiet desperation either. I do not want to milk the moments. I just want to be here for them. V is so many different kinds of valiant. As I passed him this morning, as he sat in his easy chair in the living room, he held out his palm for me to take. Such beautiful​, strong, ​open hands he has. How was it given to me- the privilege to hold them? I am so aware of how golden he is. How I’ve already received a bounty. A thousand jackpots– no 100 times a million zillion thousand jackpots. He has no meanness in him. Has never looked at me with dis​gust. Always such a steady, warm full-hearted all embracing love. I drown in it daily and live to tell the tale of such ​wonder at. How am I? In love. And it is stronger than my fear. But last night I lay awake in the dark for a long while. And though I did not cry, There were tears nearby. 

April 5th, 2023 ​

What do I want? I want to be held in totality not curated. I want to be connoisseured. I want everyone I love to be ​happy, healthy, whole, heal​ed, blessed, ​free. I want to be fully me. I do not want other people’s ideas of success and virtue, worthiness and belonging to usurp ​my native inborn understanding of my life and all life. I want to be open to receive and learn from other people without being hijacked. I do not want responsibilities to be assumed of me. I want to be able to ride bareback on the wind like a dandelion seed. But w​ith slightly more say in the matter, as to where I land. I want to give without keeping accounts. I want to assume the best in people without being Poll​yanna about it. I want to be able to be bad tempered, fitful, wavering and full of contradict​ions without fear of what other people will think of me. I want to be able to keep holding ​out my hand​ (this is hard for me) ​when others withdraw theirs. I want to know in every cell of my body, what my heart knows through and through- that Viral’s love is my superpower, a cloak I wear and never am without. It isn’t so much a shield as a shock absorber​, a lightning rod that grounds everything I perceive ​as harmful, hurtful, unhelpful. But I must remember I am wearing it. There’s the catch. I often forget. I’m taken by old habits of identity​, of needing to be seen for who I am.

When you are seen by the sun. Does it matter if the street lamp doesn’t shine on you? No, it doesn’t. And if it does you are-I am- forgetful of my place in the universe. I am the center of the sun’s world. This is the cosmology of ​The ​Beloved. In my deepest core I know I need nothing, want ​for nothing, I am the queen whose ​palace is furnished by love. I only want to know it again and again and again​. To see how eternity squanders itself on me, f​illing my bowl with gold coins, showering me with rose petals, bringing garlands of ​jasmine and ​trays laden with melt in your mouth​ delicacies. ​Filling the moonlit nights with rare music​, filling ​the blueness of the sky with promises that keep themselves. I have never, not once, been betrayed. And yet I often play the part of one who has been wronged. What do I want in my deepest core​? ​This life. This life.This life. It brought me you. On wings of silver and with the tenderness of ​twilight.

Dec 31st, 2023

What can there possibly be to say about a year that has showered so much beauty and brutality upon the world? In this small corner I have been more unwell than I can ever remember, at a time when Viral’s health is more compromised than it has ever been. And then I discover I have cancer. Darkness falls quickly and these short December days are rain dazzled, and filled with uncertainty. Spring seems distant. I have not been able to dance for almost two months. And then on New Year’s eve it finds me again. And I dance and am danced by light and shadow, fear and love, the ineffable and the impermanent hold hands in this time. Edges blur. Reflections shimmer and fade. What could possibly be more beautiful than this life I am living? I am an amateur dancer. Amateur. From the Latin Amatoreum, which means lover or friend. I am not a skilled dancer, but a lover of dance. And an aspiring friend of all that dances. Which is all that is.

Jan 1st, 2024 

It is here. This new year. What are you bringing for me that I am unaware of at this moment watching you approach with eyes that cannot conceal their fear. What must I remember as I walk through the square boxes of your days? What must I hold fast to and what must I release? Are you going to whirl me through the far reaches of the darkest depths of my mind? Are you going to reveal to me the diamond point of light that lives at the heart of all things? I must face my demons and ask them their names. I must take them into myself and find a better way forward. I have made so many mistakes and now am being asked – not to pay for them, but to learn from them. There is a difference, though within the sting of experience it can sometimes feel like the same thing. I am going to be hurt and helped and hurt and helped and hurt and helped and there will be more help than hurt there, there will be more kindness than brutality. There will be more hope than despair. There will be more good to come even though it feels like the best is over, that the golden era has ended , that the bright light that you carried has been snuffed out and there is no lighting the lamp again. But the light that you carry cannot be dimmed. It is only your eyes that are closed. Only your heart that has forgotten. Turn around and you will find yourself. Open your eyes and your heart and your little mind and you will know what has never been forgotten . You have been watching yourself from the very beginning. You have been watching and waiting and waiting for this. Now live it. And try if you can, to eventually love it. 

Jan 5th, 2024

“Are you brave or chicken?” the acupuncturist asked. “Chicken,” I said, without hesitation. But the bigger truth is, I am both. And I will not come back to this person or his flawed questions again. 

Feb 15th, 2024 

It is the day after Valentine’s Day and my heart is breaking. The old life is outside my window but I can no longer open the sliding doors and slip into it with laughter on my lips and a song in my heart. I am ravaged and pillaged and plundered and torn. I am burnt orchard, poisoned well and my thoughts reek of desperation. Everything I thought I was has vanished, and what is left is abject helplessness. a sense of being kicked to the curb, turned out of the mansion, stripped of all benefits, turned out and left for dead by one whom I believed cherished and favored me. It has been shocking but also not surprising to discover how little substance there is beneath my style. How immediately I go to pieces without attempting to be strong. I feel spineless and gutted. I do not have any faith to lean on. In its place is a void so large it swallows me everytime. There never was anyone looking out for me was there? All just happy accidents until the tragic ones. Is this punishment? Whatever it is, it hurts. So much love around me. It surrounds my miserable island life like an ocean and I feel untouched by all of it. Unable to receive or rejoice in it. I do not want this wretched existence. I cannot fathom the loss of my old life. The one where everything was lilted and lovely, and even my fears were blessed. I made the mistake of feeling protected. Now I am utterly exposed with nowhere to hide. I grow piteous and weak. I have no pride, no shame, nothing to hold my grief in check. I would howl like a dog if I had the energy. 

March 2nd, 2024 

And who are you meeting here in this dreary time? No outside visitors allowed. The company you keep is bleak. Bleaker still, the future as you see it, through hopeless eyes. How funny you are, waiting still, like a child, to be picked up and held. Even in this desolation you suspect there is someone looking out for you. You depend on this. It makes you behave weakly. If you were truly undefended or thought you were, perhaps you would put up more of a fight. I have very little regard for myself in this time. I thought I had come to the point of truly liking myself, of seeing my gifts and flaws with quiet, love-warmed eyes. But who was that self I saw? Where is she now? Gone. Dead. Or did she ever really live? How badly I am writing out my state. What is it that I would like to say? I would like to say that existence and its different dimensions and exigencies disturb me now, where they used to delight. The things I gave my heart to (save Viral) feel grotesque. Insidious. Beauty, a sticky trap. The world, a carnivorous flower and all of us insects, just a moment or two away from being devoured. How hard it is to look back and see myself as I was. Richly happy, playful, thrilled to be alive, to be me. What can I learn from this looking? I don’t know yet. And perhaps I don’t want to know. Even in my moments of abject weakness I can feel something in me that is neither up nor down, neither fearful nor trusting, neither rageful nor calm. I must hold out my hand to that placeless place. And in its disinterested utter engagement, find my peace. 

March 19th, 2024 

Glistening with sadness and a particular pain of what once was and is no more. Every backward glance brings back an awareness of breathtaking beauty and shattering loss. Old photographs make me feel like lamb to the slaughter. I look at the light in my eyes and think- “Oh- she does not know. She does not know what’s coming.” The hardest thing has been coming face to face with my lack of reason to be. I am empty, not just of purpose (which I’d come to view as somewhat suspect even before this) but of the capacity for peaceful pleasure. Nothing speaks to me, let alone sings. And I had designed a life around listening to the hidden music all around. So what is left now? Deafening silence or worse- tinny tunes. Even the most magnificent melodies feel wretched to me now. What did I think life was? A guarantee? A perfect promise? A wish come true,? Did I not know that things can and do go horribly wrong? Of course I did. I just never imagined it possible that I would be tormented, evicted, punished and dismembered in this way. Even as I write this, I am aware of the privilege in my condition. How protected I am in so many ways. Even in the midst of this grinding pain. I must learn to be more grateful, but it has not been easy. My heart turns more easily to the sources of bitterness than to the flow of blessing. I do not have it in me just yet to check this wayward impulse. Where have I gone? In whose arms am I being held while I wait here vacantly? What is this time for? Does it profit anyone- and do I care what good comes of it if I do not come back to health? Will I ever feel myself again? I cannot even begin to write my fears for what’s ahead with my beloved. He is stronger than I can ever dream of being. How true and tender he is. How long his patience, how kind his gaze, how loving his regard of me. Always finding a way to absolve me of my deepest sins. How god- like and human he is. And I think more people are beginning to see it. I’m glad for this. This is a good thing. I do not feel I did enough in a well body to shine light on his light. In my descent into darkness then, let his deep luster be known. He deserves the admiration he has never chased. A finer heart and mind and soul there is not. He is on a work call as I write this. His voice sunlit. How much he holds. With such grace.

November 24th, 2024 

The lit Christmas tree enchants the night. The little girl whose heart ached, yearned and rejoiced at the beauty and mysteriousness of Christmas time in Michigan, blinks open her eyes within my heart and is dumbstruck with delight. Darkness and light. Deathly cold temperatures, a world blanketed in soundless white snow, its austereness. It’s foreboding austerness, softened by the twinkle and promise of Christmas lights. The contrast quickens the heart, allows it to receive with keenness, the miracle of love, of hope, of forgiveness and gratitude, of kinship and closeness with all that is. I am awake to the splendor of this season and my suffering. Viral and I are still whirling in our worlds of pain. The shock and newness of our amputations– physical and metaphorical, continue to stun, sober, and stab us. We stand up on wobbly feet, holding on to each other and are invariably slammed to the ground. Again. My rage and my tenderness take turns. Fear birthing anger, love, yielding gentleness. The latter is slowly winning out. But I am also bewildered and opinionated. I am full of contradictions. Never have I been so weak. Never have I been so strong. 

November 25th, 2024 

A rainswept morning. I wandered outside with blue cornflower seeds to sprinkle on the damp Earth. Last year I missed the chance to broadcast beauty in this way. Fall and winter passed in a dizzying haze of illness, desperation and despair. I was so strong, so hopeful, so sure there was a way through, until I was not. And rasa drained out of the world as surely as if someone had wrung it dry. There was still beauty around me, but I was inert. I only have so many seasons left. I cannot afford to let another Autumn pass me by. How I love this time of year. It’s moodiness, it’s slick streets, the first greening of the ground. The quiet light. 

*

Who is this anxious one inside me? 

Who says things I blush to hear, 

Who does things I would be ashamed to do

How like a frightened animal she is— 

All claws and desperation, 

Hurting the one who is helping her, 

Helpless to rein herself in. 

And yet love holds her close, 

Lets its chest be rendered by her cuts, 

Lets itself be beaten by her words

Love’s eyes fill with tears of compassion, 

And still she cannot stop. 

“Don’t go,” she pleads. 

Love smiles sadly, strokes her hair. 

“Do you not know me?” 

He whispers softly, 

“I would never.”

Dec 28th, 2024

My love for the old life guards the jeweled castle of my inheritance. I know what it wants: My head on a silver platter, in exchange for my diamond crown.

New Year’s Day 2025

Slept in after a tossy/turny night. Woke up ten minutes past the time for an appointment. Dashed awake and went out to feed the birds. Found a mangled little one on the bridge deck. Sobering to see its beautiful outstretched wing, its partially decomposed and wounded body. Lifted it gently on an orchid leaf. Placed it underneath the weeping bottlebrush away from the home and hidden from view. I should have buried it but didn’t have the shoulder strength for that. And I didn’t want Viral anywhere near it.

January 22nd, 2025

Last night as Viral returns from the restroom I tell him that I’ve switched places, and moved to his side of the bed. “It’s all your side of the bed Maharani,” he says. Sometimes, (oh the sweetness of those sometimes!) he feels unchanged, the husband I’ve known and cherished since the beginning. These days when we are sleeping I feel the need to be held close, I tuck his arm around me, his warm hand resting on my shoulder. I feel like there is an infant self in me that needs to feel the confines of care. Everything else is so unbounded and unknown. Before we were married, in those short months between our first conversation about our connection, and our wedding— I would often have this image of my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. For well over the first decade of our marriage if you asked me where my deepest sense of home was I would have told you it was literally in Viral’s arms. No matter how anxious, turbulent or unmoored I felt, I always found in his embrace, a bone-deep relaxation, a breathing space, a peacefulness that pierced every cell. I can’t remember when exactly this shifted. But a few years after his diagnosis in 2015, I recall noticing that often as we were drifting to sleep, I could no longer crisply distinguish my body from his. And then not long after that I remember realizing that every time he put his arms around me before sleep, I would experience a distinct prickling sensation at the back of my eyes, and an energy in my throat. As soon as I became conscious this was happening, I recognized these sensations as the sensations that preface tears. And though I didn’t actually tear up, I was very quietly brought to that verge every time. This preceded the drop in his counts in the fall of 2021, and continued through the next couple of years when we tried one approach after another with no success, culminating finally in the transplant and and all the complications that followed. Somewhere in this period, I stopped feeling the deep sense of peacefulness and homecoming. I became attuned instead to the rapidness of Viral’s heartbeat. How hard his body was working, how much he was enduring. I could feel certain forces acting on him, I could feel his courage, his lack of complaint, his commitment to not resisting anything life brought to his doorstep. But I could no longer find within that embrace the instantaneous relaxation, the safety of a deep homecoming…until now. Now I feel it again, and yet…

It is different from before. I feel the warmth, the comfort, the deep recognition of his love, the power of it, and our connection. But I also feel my separateness, my own sovereignty. It is at once a loss, and gain.