Kali's Silence

Writing A Night’s Tale  

- Of sea turtles and still points on lake beds and brilliant skies that are India -

Ideally night is when I should throw myself into the book-zone and actually go forward with the action. I have a feeling action that unfolds in the course of a night and is written in present tense, would be best written at night when all the world is asleep (does that ever happen at once?)

This brings me to the moments of Kali’s silence and their being the pivotal point in the narrative. We talk about stillness, the still point in Lake Michigan that Kim experienced and we arrive at the silence of Kali which is a nano second on the night of Kali Puja when there is actual silence. Everything is silent, even ones breathing stops. And that nano second stretches forever depending on ones own faith or meditative power or whatever it is that governs such psychic experience. I don’t know who else has felt this silence. I haven’t always been lucky enough. There have been times when the imagination did connect me to that place of stillness. But there was that one year when my mother and I held hands in bed and actually experienced it in oneness. The moment was profound and it continued for close to forever. We might even have thought we had died but for the presence of each other’s hands in tender affirming clasp. Yes we had both witnessed this and it was powerful. We could tell others about it and I do believe through the telling, people did find themselves opening their own portal to the private experience of this silence.

In the book (I was working on that part of A Night's Tale when I was diverted to write this as a Night Page) the silence is explained in a few words to the assemblage but does it actually happen? The book’s own spirit will have to guide us to whether it does or not. As I write this everything fades and I find myself in that room in Maine by the fireplace. Only the gentle dancing shadows from the gently dancing firelight. The warmth of the rug beneath me, drawing us all together in oneness, the gentle mewing of Tully kitty and the murmur of the ocean which you can hear only when you step out and walk a little towards the curving shoreline. It’s like this is the heart of the story and the story keeps fanning out in concentric circles around it, ever widening till its rim reaches the fringe of guardian birches and beeches that protect our sentinel elm which is the totem tree and guardian spirit watching over the unfolding of A Night’s Tale.

When Kim heard my story of Kali’s silence she was wonderstruck. It found immediate resonance in her own memories and she recalled,
 “Your moment of holding hands with your mom was my moment of holding hands with my daughter Mary as we swam in tandem with the sea turtle off Maui. It was instinctive and forever. So were my moments under the deep waters of Lake Michigan when I touched the bed of sand and saw the sun dance in the clear waters above me. This is the moment without time, and it's the moment whose arms gathers up all who witness it.

‘At the still point of the turning world...I can only say, there we have been; But I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time...’ T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets"

I instantly recalled both that she had shared both those magical experiences years ago as as well as her dream in which she beheld incredibly brilliant skies that Mary told her were India.

As she would say, yes, that is the moment of Revelation. When the skies open up and we see the Otherworld and understand it's running right alongside this one, then we know that there are no limitations--time, place, and purpose are just a construct and are blasted away in an instant.