Arriving, Re-embracing And Decorating With Love

Here comes the Guest Post from Kim Ridenour Raikes, poet-author, professor, pastor, painter and so much more. The theme is "abandonment/isolation/renewal/rebirth/arrival" - think of that word string as a circle and start anywhere. Here we start with arrival as Kim arrives to visit her beloved house that she sadly had to part from a few months ago. 

As a symbol of a journey, arrival, renewed energies, here are Vishnu's feet pictured in the wonderful altar Kim had in her home. May such energies awaken once more in all the abandoned homes within and without us.

This is such a viscerally felt and exquisitely written elegy to a house - it deserves to stand alone, unembellished  by my thoughts or emotions.

Over to Kim:

"Isolation" - an artwork by Debojyoti Das

                                      

I saw this just a couple of days after visiting our old house, which we visited a few days ago. We knew from our former neighbors that the new owners had stripped it of many things, like our gardens and children’s swings, which we had placed there over the years, and that they would be living in the sunny south half the year, starting last month. And they warned us that things had changed.

But to see our house looking so abandoned and shut down shocked us. We felt the pain and loneliness of our house, our home for 23 years, as if it were a living being. Of course it isn’t, yet surely all our dwellings absorb our spirit, and our house seemed to miss our presence, as we do its place.

The view from the deck of Kim's "abandoned and re-embraced" house in its heyday

So we brought decorations, as for a Christmas tree, to its neighboring trees, with the permission of our former neighbors. We placed wreaths and garlands of bird seeds and nuts to help them through the winter, and so cheer our house as well.

Thirty years ago when my mother died, we of course had to sell her house. It was empty for a year. I mourned to a friend, who happened to be a priest or pastor, that it felt empty each time we passed or tried to care for it to attract a potential new buyer. Our new friend said, “Perhaps her house just had to be quiet for a while."

Quiet, like Vishnu’s sleep, is a time of rebirth and creation. That spring, after my mother’s death, the wildflowers in her lawn burst into bloom like never before. Rebirth has a power of creation and hope that transforms emptiness and loneliness and doubt if we decorate it with our love. In darkness, light the lights!

Sleeping Vishnu in Mahishasuramardini Cave in Mamallapuram

This post should ideally have been hosted on Chakratirtha - Journeys Into Place, Mind, Spirit, being so close to the theme of that space, but it asked to be here. Thank you Kim for not leaving it unwritten.

About The Pictures:

1. How Kim's dear house might have been feeling - stripped, deserted, neglected and bereft of human company during the festive season - this is an artwork by Debojyoti Das that inspired a long conversation and these words from Kim. The image belongs to him, no sharing without permission. Heartfelt thanks Dee. 

2. How Kim's dear house looked at Christmas in her heyday which was not so long ago - this is the energy that Kim hopes she was able to breathe into her as she reassured the lonely house of her abiding love. Our missing defines our love after all - image belongs to her, no sharing without permission.

Don't miss the synchronicity of the blue - it's uncanny isn't it?
And I am excited to tell you, that just after publishing I realized that a myriad stars were decorating the sky above the lone house, showering it with love and these very stars were shining as Christmas decorations on the icy rail of Kim's deck.

Footnote for Kim:
Sometimes there are houses that a personal circumstance forces owners to leave in a hurry. and it agonizes them to do so. I know my own family went through it and I have friends here who did the same. There are also poignant stories that friends told me of the Partition - their ancestors walked out of their fully functional up-and-running houses, a mere bundle of essential possessions in hand. I recall how one family left the lamp burning at the altar. I cried. Neither the abandoned house in the artwork nor your beautiful house (it will always be yours) has a negative vibe. They have stories, they are lonely. Some lonely artist or writer will step inside one day long after your time (maybe when some owner down the line leaves it empty) and listen to the stories it's hiding in its folds. The children's laughter as they swing in your bee and butterfly garden will capture their inner ear and heart. And know your altar still dwells in the heart of your house, the lamp burns as an akhanda deepam and the ancestors definitely visit in September. When this owner sleeps those globes will magically light up to light their way.

PS - do visit all the links. It's well worth your time.

“You’re a teaser, you turn ‘em on Leave ‘em burning and then you’re gone”

Yup - that is ABBA, the phenomenon! 

ABBA <--then and now-->

Today is a special occasion. First we have a new month with new hopes and opportunities. I made a resolution that I would write till my hands fell off this month. But first, here is a guest post. Because guests have right of way and hence today's "write of way"

Introducing Ashesh Mitra - many of you are familiar with his blog and his channel where he is Storyteller Extraordinaire.  Do visit these links and show love - you won't be disappointed and you will be loved back for sure. That's one thing he is really good at.

Ashesh this is apart from everything, a congratulatory post wishing you all the best in your new assignment. Full Power! This is also a thank you post because I have come thus far in my recovery from the nasty illness that grabbed me like the hunchback grabbed Sinbad, thanks to your unstinted support.

Okay on with the show. 
Many of us have sweet memories of ABBA - I had more than a crushette on Anni-Frid Lyngstad (heck she is now 76) 

Over to Ashesh:

“You’re a teaser, you turn ‘em on

Leave ‘em burning and then you’re gone”

~Dancing Queen, ABBA

A living room with a sofa and a TV and an ancient music system is where this story started. The system had a tape player and a child was inserting a tape into it. Closing the tape receptacle, he pressed play.

That child was me. The band was ABBA.

It is 2021 and ABBA are back with a new album called Voyage which I heard on Spotify recently. I then saw a small clip showing Bjorn talk about how they approached the album and decided they would ignore the modern music and bring back what they recorded before in the ‘70s. The result is an album that awoke the child in me again and I listened to it and took a trip down memory lane. The memories are what I am going to talk about today.

I was a young warthog when I first heard ABBA and I think the song Eagle was the one that I could understand back then. It seemed steeped in fantasy. How could eagles know everything? How far away did they come from?

I also remember watching a cover of Dancing Queen on MTV back in the day. Those songs were our anthem.Ilived in a world populated by ABBA, The Beatles and fairy tales.

It was easy to associate ABBA with dragon slaying. Songs like I Have a Dream told me to be brave. Songs like Mamma Mia made me dance because I just could not sit still when that song came on, even though it would be much later, post an actual breakup that Mamma Mia would hit very differently. But let us not get ahead of ourselves and tell this tale properly.

ABBA took me to a different world. I was too young then to appreciate the depth of songs the likes of which Queen had brought out. I was in fact too young to appreciate the depth of ABBA’s own music. The depth of the lyrics was lost on me. It was just the tune and Agnetha Fältskog’s voice that I grooved to.

Then slowly I started to grow older and ABBA started to grow with me. Suddenly I found a song like The Winner Takes It All chaperoning me through a bad exam result. I think what made me wake up to what ABBA was really capable of was the movie Mamma Mia, which had Pierce Brosnan sing SOS about Meryl Streep and Meryl Streep sing The Winner Takes It All.

For me, this meant a total ABBA revisit. I started from the first and ended at the last. I believe kids these days have an abusive word for what happened to my mental capacities upon rediscovering ABBA as an adolescent. A part of me also started delving into rock like anything and seeing as I had grown a little, I stared falling in love with the music of the ‘70s. But, try as I may, I couldn’t stop putting on ABBA and grooving from time to time.

And now it is 2021 and ABBA’s Voyage is a return to the early 2000’s and a music system with a tape player and a boy going on a trip to a war torn land while Fernando plays. In a world dominated by EDM, it’s nice to know that ABBA are back. In a world where cartoons and comics have taken on dark undertones and the world’s many problems are bogging us down, I feel good because a band from Sweden have brought out a new album and reminded me that black clouds have silver linings.

It would be perfect if I still had that tape though!

Back to me - Folks do comment here and share your own thoughts on ABBA and their reunion and anything else you'd like to from that era. We really, really need your voice here. Don't leave it unwritten!

I will leave you with my favorite Abba song

Speaks Your Healer-Mom

 Happy Mother Language Day

The language our mothers spoke to us and sang us to sleep in, the language of love and protection.

We have several mothers;
our fathers who sing us awake while our mothers lie exhausted because we've sung them awake all through the night with our gurgles and screams;
our father sun, first among them.

Then we have the languages of the earth that nourish us with their sighs and whispers, and unsettle us with their groans and screams. The languages drawn from her womb that calm us through the rustle of leaves.

And we too are mothers as we nurture and sustain both ourselves and others. And we speak and sing, creating through sounded words that have drawn their energy from all that was sung and heard down the ages. 

Tell me what your heart sings, this mother language day? 

to be contd ...

Cheerio!

Personal Post Alert! 

Bawls and Scowls and their antidote

When I was a tiny child, little more than a baby, I would bawl in protest at jokes and teasing I didn't enjoy. To boot, I was a curmudgeon who didn't enjoy surprises - I still don't react very well to then. Dad found a trick to stop the bawling and make me smile by standing before me and mimicking me. Each time I puckered up my face he'd chant "boo-bu-bu-waaaaah!"  and in time it became a game that turned me into a cheerful kid. Till the end of his days he'd tease me about this and thereafter mom continued to tease me. 

When I graduated from babyhood and became what was deemed a sensible being, I retained some of my silliness. Here's how Dad (himself a scowler and a frowner at times - I got the frown from him)  thought he'd fix this this by starting to  sing a song "You've Got To Smile When You Say Goodbye" to me whenever I broke in sobs on parting from loved ones, typically after a vacation together.
Dad pursued law in London from 1934-39 and traveled through Europe during some tense times in the build up to WW2. While his experience changed him in deep and lasting ways, the lighter side of life didn't miss him and he got himself a gramophone(stolen in 1971 by a lumpen thief who broke into our house, leaving him heartbroken) while he was there and a whole lot of western music records(78 rpm played with steel needles that came in little tin boxes with pictures of Nipper, the HMV dog). It was his first exposure and he got hooked to the popular music of the day as well as to Opera :) - maybe that was popular music too, who knows?

I'm guessing he lifted the word "Cheerio" from this song because that was his signature when he left the house to go to work or anywhere for that matter and we all picked it up from him. He also had his special knock (ok I'll record me doing that one day on the self same 95 year front door of my home and share here) 

No parting is final

Why am I rambling on about my dad and tears and frowns and goodbyes? Because today it's all of 27 years since he crossed over - quietly at 5:30 in the morning; not at home but in an ICU he had to be in overnight where he was surrounded by familiar friendly people who cared for him. I think he preferred it that way and so did we. 

His last word to me, said with a wistful smile after he was admitted and put on oxygen was "Sorry". He was trying to make light of it, but I understood.  He was smiling but I looked into his blue eyes (yes his eyes were blue) and their color seemed to have taken a green  tinge. I understood, he understood. I touched him one last time and reassured him "don't say sorry, say goodnight" and he answered "goodnight". I smiled, I did not cry.

A day and half later, when he left the house for the last time, borne aloft lovingly by four relative "strangers", and one a friend who had grown up in this house, I didn't cry. I held my mom's hand and we both held fast on to our smiles. We followed him down. My heart twisted just a tiny bit as they set him down on the pavement for reasons I never figured out. He was light but maybe their arms felt momentarily weary? Maybe the earth that had rung out to his eager footsteps as he had trodden that very path for the first time in 1948 to enter this house and make a new life for himself, wanted to embrace him and bless him on his journey forth into another adventure? In moments he was a vision melting into the distance as the vehicle slowly rolled away. "Bye, Cheerio" I whispered, clutching mom's hand. She was still holding on to her smile and the song slowly played in my head. 

Ascension

 

I had poured this out of my system the year I lost my brother. Today it's three years to the day and I need to share this snapshot of raw emotion before I transcend what remains of it. This was one of the notes FB devoured during its anti-notes pogrom after making fake promises to safeguard our published notes. Luckily I archived my account when FB threatened to ban me as the contents are a treasure chest of shared experience over eight years, experience through an identity Chakra Incognita that I had created for myself and which meant something vital to me. An identity that amused a few and delighted many, an identity that FB stripped me of at the risk of losing my account. An identity that FB helpfully redefined for me as a brand :) Regardless, we lose nothing when we are close to our inner selves. Likewise we never really lose those nearest and dearest to us - we only change the way we connect with them. Sadly I lost the beautiful words of comfort that were posted in the comments as FB forgot to archive those. The good news is that those who commented are even closer as friends now. 

 

And I share again the words I wrote back in 2018 on his birthday coming 12 days after his passing, trying to make peace with this transformation of a living person into one more mysterious, mythical entity in another dimension.

 I don’t know either why I chose the Epiphany scene to illustrate the ascension. Don’t miss the stairway to heaven on the right. There even seems to be a chair for the next one in the queue to wait their turn. I feel like I have been acting as a channel for the past three months and often think I have lost agency in what I do. Clearly they have been the strangest ever three months, riddled by inexplicable physical ills and the lowest mood or energy levels I have known in ages. Perhaps no one can guess the monumental effort that went into hauling myself out on those trails(click the link for photos of the tribute trail for my brother a year later), the acute loneliness and sense of desertion I felt during those times. It was just I in a world entirely peopled by strangers. Considering that frame of mind, the pictures(scroll for more) show many joyful and colorful facets and I am surprised by it! I have had this overpowering urge to write, yet in my predicament of grief I feel judged. Today is my dear brother’s birthday. Coincidentally it is the day of “ascension” when Hindus are released from the period of mourning. The original Epiphany was a day of recognizing by the Wise, acknowledging and celebrating a birth with gifts. And the gift of ascension seems to be today’s offering. This comes a day after the soul is considered to have joined the ancestors wherever they are(I have no clue where they are, only know that I have access to one or other of them at all times). While I have never taken any of these time-frames literally(a quick glance at Manusmriti will tell you the discriminatory rules that are applied) and always sensed it was a structure created to restore “order” and proceed with business as usual, this time I feel a set of uncanny coincidences. The day he left behind a body that no longer served him, to fly free into an alterverse where he could continue to live as he needed and wanted to, happened to be the day of his birth star. To get ones head around this concept, read this: “If you draw a line from where you were born, at the time you were born, to the moon, the Janma Nakshatra is the star constellation that the line would pass through.” On 3rd January apparently the line did just that :) This probably makes more sense to him considering his interest in astronomy than it does to me. With my psychic propensities and my uncanny quest for mystical connections, it struck me like a sign of birth. Of birth as the person he was meant to be, whatever that might mean. And in a way that was reassuring. There seems to have been perfect divine timing behind his exit from this dimension. And while it has been most agonizing for his nearest and dearest who witnessed this process with a mixture of trepidation and hope, swinging wildly at times between the two, it seems like it was an easy walkover for him. I have spent night after shivery winter night pondering the nature of our subtle bodies and their connection with the gross, how and when that disconnection between the two takes place, where and what part of the “soul” carries its imprint, where our memories go and whether they have multiple copies. My IT head periodically powers itself on and starts to analyse these elements in terms of contemporary tech. My left and right brain come together in a collaboration to crack open these mysteries. The motivation for it all is to know the means to stay connected with loved ones and to be sure not to lose the connection ever. Nothing higher or more exalted than that. Today I woke to a shivery dawn and it is a foggy morning. Thick fog that doesn’t seem too dirty but is chilling me to the bone, the last thing I plan to go walking in. Ergo my day’s plans have been flipped on their head. I await a proper sunrise. And a new awakening.

PS: 3/1/2021 - I am happy to say that 2020 has brought a flood of new friends into my life in my own city and a strengthening of bonds with old friends the world over. "It was just I in a world entirely peopled by strangers" - feelings such as  this are part of a history that will not repeat itself. I close on that note of faith, hope and love