By Lakshmi Sarah Kennedy
For a few years, Tara had been living in a house with immense windows overlooking the Andes mountains in Argentina. This place was more than an abode to her, she felt that she inhabited the open sky there. Each day passed with the changing beauty of the landscape, the calm of the natural rhythms and the sounds of the birds. Living there was a privilege.
It was the morning where her beautiful life would die in this place, and she was a few hours away from a radical change. Her heart saddened at this imminent revolution, meticulously planned by her past self or selves. That spring day, with the brisk breeze coming from antarctica and the newly born leaves dancing, she rushed out excited to greet the red sphere that rose on the horizon for the last time in this hallowed place. With the rising sun to the east and the snow-capped mountains and the Tupungato volcano to the west, she felt an eternal and exquisite moment.
Cycles on the spiritual path come exactly in the right time, if we have prepared for them. As the sage Aurobindo said “We need time to be an instrument, because for all things there are cycles of their action and a period of the sacred movement”.
Tara sensed that this moment was perfect for the eclipse of her life, despite the fact that there were aspects of her decision that were uncertain. She recalled the words of Brother David Steindl-Rast, when he stated that “fifty percent of existence was a mystery”. In fact, her adoration to the Mystery Beloved had been the force that guided her to investigate and deepen various cosmovisions.
A message from the Soul that came in the form of pearls, reaching the wild edges of her consciousness.
She longed passionately to live in more love and wisdom, to see beyond the cobwebs of her consciousness and intensely tend to the fires of her love affair with knowledge. To do so, she had decided to invoke a radical dissolution and dismemberment of her life.
She rose after an hour of meditation. Usually, this time was an oasis, but today her mind was agitated. She took her mate with delicious herbs and walked out into the garden. Induced dissolution had been the leitmotif of her life recently. Tara was in love with the beautiful upheaval that was occurring, because it made her feel so alive.
In the last few months, she had lived through experiences and conversations related to the necessity to transcend comfort and domestication. Undoubtedly, these were some of the seeds of her decision, but the deepest motivation for this radical change was what she named “the Calling”. A message from the Soul that came in the form of pearls, reaching the wild edges of her consciousness.
These jewels were clues about the direction to follow. They emerged and announced the necessary movements, even in the rusty immovable mechanisms of her mind. She had been through weeks of enormous tension, where a flooding of feelings appeared. Pain, confusion, sadness, strength and clarity all accompanied by a sense of opening to the sacred reality.
There were moments of disorientation and vulnerability of the waves of not knowing that washed up on the shores of her consciousness. She experienced grief about leaving the place, people and animals she loved. However, when a dear friend asked her, “But where does this decision come from?” Tara remembered the words by the poet David Whyte in his poem (Becoming):
There is a road always beckoning. When you see the both sides of it closing together, at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time, that’s how you know it’s the road to follow.
She felt in her bones that she had to leave, that time had come. Despite this, at this moment, she was still resisting. She wondered “Will I find such beautiful skies again? And my feathered companions will I see them again?”. She was looking out forlorn into the fields of olive trees. Then three handsome green parrots flew directly into sight, unusually close to her and perched in the willow tree she had lovingly tended for years. One fine fellow looked directly and kindly into her eyes as she held her breath, trying to make the moment last.
She saw the visit of these creatures as emissaries of Mother Nature saying goodbye to her. Her heart lightened and she gave herself over to her imagination, and she said to herself: “This love is eternal and will continue on. This sacred presence transcends even this place. I have received a visitation”. She closed her eyes, sat down and gently wept.
There was a little time left before she had to leave. She paused a moment longer to realize that the irrational decision at the beginning had turned out to be a relevant and eloquent decision. She was listening to a deep language from her Soul. Yes, Tara recognized that here was a decipherable enigma, a “Mythopoetic” dream, as the psychologist Bill Plotkin would say. Her inner archer had flexed her bow, aimed at the target, and the arrow of emerging creation was reaching its destination.
Tara began her departure to new lands. It was a new birth, one that required death in all of its shades, bloody, dirty and grim. There at this precipice of change, she sensed a vast fertility emerging with her, accompanied with so many questions. She knew she was preparing the soil so that fresh seeds could be sown inside of her. All she had to do was open herself to this path of impregnation.
She turned her gaze for the last time at the enormous olive tree that had gifted her life with shade. She had named the tree ‘Shantini’, and she observed the fresh leaves, the tiny olives in their inception, and at the same time, the tiny dead branches that coexisted along with the healthy ones. She could feel the sacred play of life and death flowing within her.
Photo: O. C. González, from Unsplash.
