#14 - eternal guju moon
#14 - eternal guju moon
POV: I’m Hima - a South Asian, medium brown skin, cis-gender, able-bodied, straight woman living as a settler on the Indigenous lands, T’karonto. I was born in Scarborough, raised Gujarati-Jain, middle-class, with English as my first language. My parents immigrated by choice via London and East Africa and are still together. I have two sisters and no extended family living locally. I experience ADHD symptoms. Much of what I write will be informed by some of these lived experiences.
#SoulWork
There is this very strange moment on the spiritual journey when you realize you are eternal, and your consciousness has always and will always take up space in the universe. Like forever eva.
It’s one of those experiences where the depth of truth is lost in language; it must be experienced, known, accepted. Of course, there is nothing new about this concept - we are constantly referring to ‘all of eternity’ as an ironic and improbable joke, perhaps as a coping mechanism, perhaps as part of the course towards acceptance.
Sometimes I will be trotting along my day, waiting for my next TikTok break, and then boom, time evaporates and it’s just me and the proverbial universe together forever. I usually get shifty-eyed, crack my neck and carry on. When I talked to my therapist about it a while back, he responded, ‘isn’t it awesome?,’ to which I replied, fidgeting, ‘yeah, I’m not quite there yet.’
In a different reality where time does cease to exist, eternal probably feels like nothing. It and you just are, kind of like corn flakes, which in mind is the eternal cereal. In this body, where time and meaning are entangled in a daily ticking clock, it can feel overwhelming. On bad days, torture. I wonder if this feeling is being assuaged by the fact that we are slowly consenting to morph into cyborgs, thereby becoming eternal by way of technology, a faction for that which is already true.
I presume there is no way to accept this reality unless you become completely obsessed and enamored with yourself; yourself as a reflection of all of existence and consciousness itself. Because after all, you’ve spent a lot of time with ‘yourself’ already and will continue to. Yay!
So we are eternal, but we forget we are eternal, and then we remember. Interesting! I’m assuming once you know, there is no going back. I’m assuming somewhere between remember, knowing, accepting, and celebrating is freedom, and I’m here for that and more.
I’m curious if you’ve had this experience and how you’ve processed/navigated it. Share in the comments, reply to this email or call me.
Pre-mature nostalgia
It’s hard not to come back to your parent’s house for a long sleepover, and not become acutely aware of the time that has passed. They have aged and so have I. Despite the inner conflict in finding myself back here temporarily, I know these times in being entangled in the daily mundane will become increasingly rare. While rummaging under the L-shaped office desk in my bedroom, the site of last-minute university essays and cramming, and now Ciaran’s command center, I found a card my mom wrote me on my 18th birthday. ‘You must feel like an adult now?’ it read. I broke into a maniacal laugh/cry. An entire teenage life has passed since then and here we are.
Being locked inside during a pandemic for 100’s of hours together creates a lot of time to notice, remember, even preemptively mourn my parent’s particularities. With Ciaran here, I am also sensitive to how he experiences what is so normalized to me. Like how my parents glide from speaking Gujarati to English, peppered with their ‘white voice’ every time a client calls, and casually adding Hindi and a secret syllabic language they made up to deliberate on plans, like ordering pizza, in front of us as kids. This language blend that moves swiftly and can be both soothing and grating, that is so effortless to my ears despite sounding like gibberish to another is a score I will never hear by another. Will I completely stop hearing Gujarati one day? I wonder, reflecting on interracial marriage and the growing distance with my ancestral technologies.
I’ve also noticed my mom has a daily project for future food preparation, whether it’s grating a pound of ginger to freeze to more easily make chai, roasting almonds to fill the mason jars that sit on the lazy susan in the center of the kitchen island for easy snack access or squeezing fresh lemon juice and destemming coriander for a week’s worth of cooking. It’s from this foresight that the steel containers, the ones my mom has had for over three decades, are always filled with a medley of nasta - the chickpea-flour fried snacks that Gujarati’s live and die for (and perhaps as a result of).
Every night at 7:30 pm, my parents light a candle in their temple and prepare a mix of dry cereals, including All-Bran, in two bowls, covering each one with a plate, ready for breakfast the next morning. From thereon, my dad searches for sweets while flipping through the nearly 2,000 channels in their Indian TV package. Ever so often, I hear what sounds like the arresting voices of Sonu Nigam, Asha Bhosle, and Lata Mangeshkar, transporting me back into long family road trips from Toronto to Pennsylvania, listening to Bollywood music for 8-10 hour stretches before rampaging outlet sales, but later learn it is a young, talented hopeful, who has taken the stage on the 14th season of Indian Idol, pursuing Bollywood dreams on behalf of all of us.
If my dad read this, he would immediately cringe at me referring to this house as ‘my parent’s house.’ ‘This is your house,’ he reminds with complete sincerity. The door here is always open, and that is a privilege I can’t fully grasp because I’ve never known otherwise. We may not be great at boundaries, but we sure know how to care for each other.
Reading right now + reflecting
Before the patriarchy and masculine principle colonized our consciousness about 5,000 years ago, centering the masculine solar gods as the almighty, the feminine principle commanded our spiritual, political, and cultural traditions, as recounted by author, Demetra George in the Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess.
Prior to 3000 BCE and before proto-European tribes from Northern Europe and Central Asia, like the Aryans, Hittites, and Luwian, invaded Western Europe, the Near East, and India, cultures were shaped by Goddess worship, where the moon was the ultimate deity. Its three-stage lunation cycle of birth, life, death/renewal was the embodiment of the feminine principle, and in synchronicity with our menstrual cycles.
The new moon, which fell yesterday at ~2:00 pm, is the first stage in the lunar cycle and is a time of planting seeds and creation. The second lunar cycle is the full moon, where seeds have now bloomed and the preservation of life is upon on. The last cycle is the dark moon, where there is death or otherwise a period of renewal and germination, in preparation for transformation into another cycle of creation. A more in-depth explanation illustrates this cycle through eight stages.
A lot of this is knowledge is pretty mainstream these days with the much-welcomed resurgence of astrology, psychic arts, and esoteric traditions in the last two decades. With patriarchal domination, this cyclical view of life was denounced and replaced with a linear view, which I’ve written about before, and has since scraped against and distorted feminine ways of being, leading, and creating.
In the book, George explores why the Goddess and feminine principle vanished in the last 5,000 years, an observation from her own patterning that I found fascinating and in alignment with Adrienne Marie Brown’s principle of ‘who we are at the small is who we are at the large.’
If we are always in the lunation cycle, George asks, what if the feminine principle has been in the dark moon phase for the last 5,000 years, in its own period of death and renewal?
She goes on to observe that the feminine Goddess is being rebirthed, after being suppressed and destroyed by patriarchal gods, during a time where societally we are astrologically moving from the dark moon phase (death/renewal) of the Age of Pisces, aptly surrounded by the destruction of our economies, ecology, and spirit and into the new moon phase (birth) of the Age of Aquarius, now and over the next few years.
This kind of connecting the dots between cosmology, culture, politics, spiritual and human life is compelling and confusing. On the one hand, this sense-making has the calming effect of a perfectly tied bow, ‘it all makes sense,’ my mind whispers. On the other hand, it challenges our ideas of control and determinism and forces us to reckon and reconcile the violence and destruction that patriarchal and white supremacist rule has had on racialized communities and the environment globally, and ultimately how we value individual human life. I absorb this less as a justification and settle into moon cycle passivity, but more so as a guide by which to stay aware of how our inner worlds and subsequent actions and behaviors are impacted by larger forces, and how we can use intention and consciousness to rise above.
I’ve been reflecting on what cycle I am in, in the various fractals of my life — the cycle of the day, week, year, decade, lifetime, and multiple lifetimes, and finding it a useful and grounding tool to orient and accept.
Sending you love,
Hima
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