#40. Purple Rain.
In the middle of a forest, in the middle of my city, at the end of the monsoon "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" took me where the Karvi blooms and showed me my true colours.
Earth laughs in flowers, / to see her boastful boys / Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs… / “They called me theirs, / Who so controlled me; yet every one / Wished to stay, and is gone, / How am I theirs / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold them?”
~ Ralf Waldo Emerson, Hamatreya, 1846.
About a year ago, on the Worli-Bandra Sealink, my son (the one without the smartphone yet) pointed out of the window and said to his brother and I, “Look - dolphins”. A few kilometres off the coast of Mumbai, and there they were. Five or six of them, jumping into the air, splashing into the water as if all were well in the world. Twisting in my seat to get a better look as we whizzed past, I knew - this was a Sign.
I am not very interested in the ‘supernatural’, but I am interested in poetry, and I’ve come to realise that pursuing either can have a similar outcome in the human mind. We begin to see signs. We sense connections to something “too vast to comprehend”, something that protects us - while also swallowing us whole.
In my twenties, I saw Il Postino, a film about Pablo Neruda’s exile on an Italian island. In it, the Chilean poet said to the postman on a beach near a choppy sea, “Everything is a metaphor for itself”. Or maybe, “Everything is a metaphor for everything else”. Either way, this idea stuck: Everything, every pebble, stone, rock, person, leaf, intestine, eyelash - has ‘meaning’. Sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, but always there, waiting for me to let them know what it is.
There is such a thing as integrity. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real.
~ James Baldwin, The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, 1962.
Reality is bendy! We can wield it to our will. In other words, Reality is Illusion. If we can let go of how scary that is, we can find a momentary Means of Escape from the lies that make the human world go around. Lies, for example, like The Economy. Money is a made-up thing, but without it, we suffer. Money isn’t Real. It’s Real-adjacent. Real-ish. A ghost made flesh.
Human civilisation seems to me like a tea party children throw for their dolls - it requires a lot of air-sipping to make the party a success. If you don’t air-sip, you won’t be invited and you will have to sit outside all alone in the dark and the cold. Believing the lies is the price we pay to live in society and avail of its many benefits. Air-sipping is protection money. I do it too. We all do.
But it gets tiring. Too much tea partying and the abyss will beckon. We have to know where the Emergency Exit is. We have to follow The Signs! Why did I see dolphins that day? Because I needed to. I was upset about something in the Real-ish world, something that vapourised as soon as I turned my face up from my phone and towards the water. Me, swallowed by Sea. In a split-second, for a split-second, I was ‘one with everything’, and free to bask in the afterglow.
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily
~ Mary Oliver,Pub. Beacon Press, Thirst, p. 4, 2006. What have dolphins to do with Karvi? Well, everything.
A few weeks ago in September, at the end of the monsoon, I went on a nature trail in the forest middle of Mumbai city to witness The Bloom - a once-in-eight-year treat courtesy a shrub found all over the Western Ghats. It greens during every rainy season for seven years and in the eighth, it explodes into purple blossoms. It’s a site to behold. It’s a Sign. Which leads to an Emergency Exit.
To visit The Oracle, I woke up at 6 am on a Saturday and drove an hour through an urban hellscape - grey flyovers and greyer buildings, wet dogs and tired people - until I arrived at a rickety gate of the BNHS’s Centre for Conservation Education. It opened onto a forested path that led to The Butterfly Garden, where our guide was waiting.
It had been difficult getting here. My boys wanted to sleep in. The driver didn’t show. When he did, the car had no fuel. Google Maps led my father-navigator astray, we got into a quarrel with an auto rikshaw and when we reached the meeting point, our group had dwindled by half. Getting anywhere in this city is a nightmare. Having reached, I dreamed of home, of bed, and the afternoon ahead rewatching Ted Lasso with a slab of chocolate.
Within a few minutes of walking along the tree-lined road, observing this and that, stopping to take phone photos of each other, of leaves, of twigs, the clouds lifted, of course. My to-do list droned on, but less comprehensible now: Call the orthodontist. Order the vegetables. Send the email. Fix the tile. Pay the vendor. Send the invoice. Ommmmmmm. I felt markedly disencumbered, but it was hot, it was muggy. There was PMS. I prayed for rain. I prayed for menopause. And then we turned into what I can only describe as a Portal.
Off the road and scrambling now through a tunnel of green and purple, Karvi petals tickled our faces, its pollen rubbing off on our clothes and our bags, its rubbery white buds catching the light. We bent low, duck-walked, squatting to rest (it was impossible to stand, so thick was the thicket), until finally, we came out onto a velvety bank by a small lake made of rain that had collected in an abandoned quarry.
The scene was something out of Ovid or Homer. In the mirror-still water was the sky and its clouds, a bullfrog and a watersnake, and on a blade of of water grass a startlingly pink dragonfly. Shimmering all about us, orange tips and psyche butterflies and the glorious sunshine.
With no pharmaceutical intervention, whiskey cocktails or funny cigarettes, I had metamorphosed. (Ctrl+Alt+Del) / Reboot. Any homo sapien can do this because it’s pretty obvious that what our civilisation is hurting from is the mother of all mother wounds. We ran as far away as we possibly could from home and hearth and now we won’t - can’t - go back. But we miss our mom. We need her. Luckily for us, like most mothers, Nature is forgiving. If you bother to visit - even if it’s just once in eight years during the rainy season - she will take you into her embrace, tell you what’s Real and bring you flowers.
Let her.
aaaaaawesome. i know just what you mean. and could definitely use the escape button right about now. 💚