On The Threshold Of A Dream

Time Travel Alert
This post/Page happily switches between 2016 and 2018 as well as merges them

Pages #42 6-11-16

I decided that Pages had already sown the seeds for a book in its own right and witnessed the emergence of healthy saplings. What happens though, is that these saplings even in their infancy, tend to put out adventitious roots. Unlike the root bridges of Meghalaya, these are hasty little bridges a little too eager to get across, a little too tiny to make meaningful use of areca stems for support. 

13-11-18

If I have thanked Charlie the Sun Man for being the hero of my book set in Maine – hell, I need to get back there – then I have to thank dear Joe for leading me to the roots themselves and the stories they tell. I realize nothing I wrote in answer to anyone’s questions over the past 10 years, has been in vain. Charlie, an undergrad student in Maine, was one of the 33 mariners-in-the-making who had to ask me a question each on India with a specific focus on Hinduism, as part of their humanities project. In reality, I was inundated by "compound" questions from most of these kids and the answers took the shape of 33 veritable essays that came to seed A Night's Tale. The conversations on the sun - specifically the sun on the threshold of rise and set and the green flash - created the core of the book as it morphed into the tale of a charmed night between the thresholds around a hearthfire. Joe came into my life the following year with his questions on living root bridges, giving structure and form to the story that was asking to be told.

I tuck back a tiny errant root and continue #42. 

The cyclone fled to Bangladesh. Yesterday was my day of anxiety that melted in a moment, into peace. Physical comfort has been a long time coming though. As a precursor to the melting, the elusive eye drops (yes, there was a supply crisis) arrived. Quite the surprise of the day! Followed immediately by the sighting amid the grey and damp, of a special golden bird - a harbinger of recovery and renewal dating back to 1963 when mom was in her lowest possible spirits due a health threat.

Synchronicity 

Today (6/11/16 and 13/11/18) is the glorious worship of Surya and Chhathi Maiya. While we think of her as the sun’s consort she goes ahead of him at dawn and behind him at dusk in a reversal of East-West protocols (I leave you to unravel that loaded sentence). Yes the Usha-Pratyusha twins! In a flash of insight that reminds me of Charlie’s green flash and our conversation around it - the deciding factor for the choice of book to write - it struck me that a rainbow was that creation of the union between tattvas – Surya and Varuna aka the sun and rain god. Likewise Usha the dawn goddess stood poised to emerge at the threshold of night and day. As also at the threshold of earth and sky. 

                                Usha                                                          Pratyusha

And heaven sent me all the signs last evening at sundown that I had rightly understood the spirit of Chhath Puja. I was actually standing in the water – yes the leak had spewed water all over the floor and the moisture was clinging to the breeze almost like a spray – and gazing at a dawning light in the western horizon. A violet flash if not a green one. A hello at the moment of goodbye and a lingering farewell that held all the joy of a welcome. And this little drama was staged for me and by me, a whole 24 hours before vast numbers of people enact it in numerous water-bodies this evening and tomorrow at dawn all over again.

I have no idea on which dream’s threshold I stood as I started this post yesterday. It is indeed a stream of dreams as part of a larger network of dreams and. The bigger dream is the same each time. The bigger dream is always at the intersection of past, present and future, even as the dreams within are never still and flow continuously into other dreams. It’s complicated – far more than anything Facebook ever meant to convey with that blanket term – but it is so utterly simple when you know the biggest of the dreams is unchanging. It is your still point, your unchanging threshold that stays like the center of the sphere or the ever constant Pole star. 

Usha the dawn and Pratyusha her other face the dusk, are twins. Are they forerunners that open the portals or are they the rush of energy that follow the sun wherever he goes? I have always noticed a special radiance both before and after a rise or set of the sun. Usha somewhere is Pratyusha elsewhere. As I write one book, another is being formed somewhere in my mind or in someone’s mind. We are all in a state of readiness and a state of transition, at all times.

Footnote

There are references galore. Do check out the links to fully enjoy the post

PS all water references are to 2016. Come the sunset I will either stroll down to a water body or have a bowl of water handy for the tattvas to conjoin.