Era 666

 

A day just ended, a year began. And the year ushers in an era. Read the post shared with friends at midnight on 18-19th November, and celebrate an impending birth.

Farewell to 66 years of navigating this lifetime. I do believe each of these years, even the most troubled ones, was worth something significant. I will remember each one with unique and special emotions that I'll be writing or speaking about.

Welcome to another Tabula Rasa as I open the first page of Era 666.

Wish me luck so when I hit the vertical flip of 66 I'll look back and say yeah, this one was the game changer, so flip me again now

The first words I write on the fresh page of course are Project Hearthfire. The hearthfire is essentially a heart-fire. Hearts come together to light it so hands can warm themselves on it, and their owners find nourishment from it. So here's the emblem for today - my warmest of warm hearts. Emerging through the fog. May all hearts fill with peace, may all hearts be healed as they heal.

Today a new baby is conceived and announced - Project Hearthfire's Healing Hub. It will take a village, indeed a city to bring it into the world. Details coming soon!

Happy Birthday to me and Happy Birth to this little wonder that I pray will grow into a beautiful and powerful place and space of nurture. I am sharing a few words from my creative partner, film maker Ritwik Goswami, that offer context and background information on the wounds that have kindled this major step towards healing, on how the seed for the Healing Hub, just came to be sown without a warning. That seed had been forming wordlessly through the stress of the battle he describes and then at this liminal zone in space-time, announced its existence. "Project Hearthfire : From Ritwik Goswami

Mayalakshmi Rao resides in the beating heart of the City of Joy; her residence a testament to a hundred year history of the evolution of the city all around.

Marked by stately high ceilings, robust walls and formidable beams, the apartment spells regal - much the same way as Mayalakshmi’s Royal being, her towering stature, astute words, her time-agnostic mane, and her kind eyes do.

And just like her apartment, that has stood its ground in what is now one of the most expensive areas of the city; against greedy promoters, or local goons; thereby asserting itself as a significant marker of the last century, in the rapidly evolving skyline and timeline of the city;

Mayalakshmi too has had to, and is still strongly fighting an ever-more vicious, perilous fight against her vile, diabolical neighbours, who have found the devices to keep challenging her very existence inside her own house, that she was born to, that she’s spent all her life in.

Maya’s life is a microcosmic allegory of the macrocosm represented by the house she resides in. And Project Hearthfire will be an aid to enable both to keep fighting with dignity."

#ProjectHearthfire #livethedream

Also don't forget to watch this

Creative Claptrap

 

Healing through creative resources? 
Hell, yes. One of the many slogans of SpiritSpiral Healing. 

That's been bothering me for quite a while, especially from the perspective of WordWise - one of the very early offerings from our healing toolkit. 

Our toolkit? Who else is there? There's me and there are all these resources. Oh and there's you. Ok - easy there. I'll tell you more.

Creative resources I imagine are resources that create. Like you know a paintbox and brushes. Noooo - they don't create a thing. They are your tools, you do the creating using them. They are at your service. So who is the creative resource? Me with all my talents? Perhaps. That still sounds a little Word-Unwise, don't you think?
Where do you think I'm headed with this? Of course I'm telling  you that I'm canceling that slogan and replacing it with another one. Healing Creatively. Does one heal destructively? Yes, perhaps one does. 
Enter creative destruction that I've said so much about in earlier posts. 
You can't create something unless you destroy something - you know physics and all that. 
Unless you're God - and most of you reading this illogical outpouring are ungodly. 
Just kidding. 
In the beginning there was nothing. Remember? Then God turned up from somewhere - no He turned up from nowhere because there was nothing. So what was destroyed then? Nothing! 
Nothing also being a thing you can destroy. 
You may ask me why such a post? It sounds like nonsense but that's a kind of sense too. 
Us lesser beings are already resource rich - we arrive with something - and when we creatively destroy we alchemize. We change something into something else, even trash can generate energy.
As for me I don't need to trash anything. I am already inundated by trash. Trash is the most common by-product of acute and prolonged stress. When you feel gloomy, exhausted, you sink into apathy and that's when resources trash themselves, including sometimes your own talents. And an army of bikriwalas in additions to shrinks/therapists/counsellors/healers, has to be summoned. 

 Wait, I said healers. I am here for me.  And for you. We are healing creatively. We are never not healing (that slogan remains). As nothing exists without its opposite, we are healing destructively too. 

If you wonder where we are headed with this post, we are headed to the Healing Hub. In fact we are addressing you from the Healing Hub that we are already parked in. We always have, it's just that the name found itself a few hours ago. A concept finds recognition when a name finds it. And that magic happened. 

We are surrounded by resources - we have inherited these resources, tangible and intangible and we are now tapping into them creatively. We are healing through heritage even as the heritage cries to be restored (remember healing = restoring to health?) 

Wordplay much? Oh yes. In the beginning was The Word. And all the rest till this moment of writing has been play - The Divine Leela. 

PS - there's nothing a good cup of coffee (or even an entire pot) can't do. At least for this priestess-healer-motivator. Don't believe the coffee-bashing naysayers. They're speaking for them, not for me. You can help fuel/refuel the Healing Hub with a cup of coffee - and a lot else if you are able to. How you can help will be announced soon. Be part of this, be part of us!

Footnote: I am looking at all the heritage writings of SSH, where a venture, a healing facilitation service created itself and evolved in full view of the audience. Some of them seem vague, others self contradictory. Do I trash them all, do I rewrite the original, editor-fashion? Don't watch this space, I canceled that slogan - get in touch, stay in touch!

Love from Project HearthFire - The Healing Hub. Powered by SpiritSpiral Healing and - surprise - Chakratirtha, Journeys Into Place, Mind, Spirit. 

Footnote: All images are of coffee brewing in my little steel filter which is as old as this home I live in. Different phases and moods as the bubbles catch the light and the water slowly finds its way through the bed of "sand" to emerge in an underground pool.

Kali's Silence Revisits Me

Translate if you like

"A moment's silence for the silences that are lost in translation."

As  I struggle to break out of a looping headache that comes back to grip a part of my head every time I try to go back to sleep, these words keep replaying in my mind. The first few words that emerge as I realized I have missed something that possibly wasn't there. I have missed the entire Kali Puja ritual that visits me as a soundscape each year from the neighborhbood pandals. 

The ritual itself is an unpredictable mix of the ludicrous and the profound. The ugliest of Bollywood hits competing with an unlikely recording of dhaak or even a rare real one. The intermittent conch and bell. And the loud, brash, half drunk voices exploding at one another disruptively. I marvel at the way the dhaakis are being dispensed with even as the lights get more garish. These lights hurt my damaged eyes and I shield them with my camera screen that magically filters out the glare and presents to me the version I want to see. Indeed it's good to lose in translation sometimes. 
When the worship commences there are these profound silences. If there's a priest uttering mantras, those are not reaching my ears. 

There are also my closed glass panes this time. No it's not the sulphur fumes from crackers that are overwhelming. There have been hardly any fireworks this year - for that matter in most recent years with a few exceptions when an authority backpedaled on Green Bench norms and the demons unleashed themselves. 
It's the traveling Northern Indian fog belt that's come visiting Kolkata right in time. 

The festival series is late this year in the course of this little back and forth dance  that the sun and moon enact to synchronize with each other, so an autumn festival actually remains in the autumn! For those not familiar, the festival schedule  rolls back  by eleven/twelve days each year till it hits the border of a solar month when it pushes itself forward again by three weeks.  

And now, the north winds have sadly borne, instead of clear cold air, this filthy blanket of fog that's reached Kolkata just in time to spike our AQI!  
 Returning to silence methinks the closed room walled me off from the sound of that silence. I fell asleep right when I had meant for the silence to jerk me awake. Whither the insistent sounds of distant dhaak building to a frenzy - not so distant considering it's in the next street - that would make my heart leap in anticipation of that sudden silence at the end of it? I missed it. Because it simply wasn't there. And I'll now need to wait till 31st October 2024. Don't wait for anything, I remind myself. Allow it to find you if it will. 

Kali never lets me down. And she did not this year either. I believe these words that came to me which I kept repeating in my half awake state in a bid to not forget them, are the gift she's given. I walk - rather stumble my way - through a strange path on this most unusual (and sometimes seemingly pointless) journey that my life has been. 

I'm holding on to this idea of silence. I will not attempt to translate it. Like my heritage home project that I recommit to every waking moment, I will put it out there. You can read and interpret and maybe come back for a conversation?
I hope, I dream on. 

I am off now on a jaunt to go catch up with the goddess - time for some visual communication - and have a few pow-wows with her. 

Happy Kali Puja! May Kali's Silence find you in whichever manner is meaningful for you.

Footnote: Follow the links to enjoy the post fully. Post your thoughts on the image above.

I Write, Therefore I Am

 

The writer's identity

Cheers readers! I am back to continue what I started here - yes I had asked you to stop and run your 'script by me. Now what if there is no script yet? You are struggling to put one together. You are wading in an ocean of ideas, with links and references strewn around for good measure. Or maybe none of these but you have some emotions wanting to pour themselves out and they are stuck in your throat?
Here's where I come in again. 
There are many stages of evolution that an article - or a story or a book - goes through before you have a script that an editor can actually read.  And you just might like somebody with you to run your ideas by. Or somebody who can help  put some of them into words. Yes that's one more of my roles. I am your writing buddy. The finest of us writers, the ones whose ink invariably flows smoothly, occasionally crave for a buddy, a companion to sit and brainstorm with. Most of us need one a lot of the time. Here I come, again. Trust me this will be great for both of us. I love to write. Even more, I love that you write and I love to read what you write. 

There's a buddy at hand

There are several stages of birthing and you will be glad to have an empathetic midwife who can help you come out with your best offering. 

All I can say is Get In Touch!
I can even do a piece of writing for you, if  you think you have a writers block you are convinced won't go away in a hurry and you need to put that post or article out there soon. Or if you think you have zero writing skills (those can be built up and fine-honed but I will save that for the next post) and have something you really need to share with the world. I am there.

Now folks have asked me to put my charges out there. What I charge depends on the width and depth of what you need and your own existing skill set. The same goes for the editing work I take up - you see that's the penultimate stage of the birthing of the document? And the work I need to do depends so much on the work you may have already done or the stage at which you are stuck for guidance. 
I personally edit the life into my own writing, being the perfectionist that I am. What's vital is that you convey your thought process to me and I will do the same for you. Those pesky grammar and syntax glitches, the clingy verbiage that's waiting to pull you in circles - they'll all be ironed out while retaining the framework and flavor as authentically yours.

Coming together beautifully

Whichever stage you are I can help you out. You write, therefore you are, and I'll support you. As I said earlier, get in touch.

Email me at spiritspiralhealing@gmail.com
or contact me over FB messenger https://www.facebook.com/ChakraIncognita666777

Stop! Run That 'Script By Me ...

What's cooking Chakra Incognita?

Something is cooking and it's called Brand Chakra.
This is the one stop shop for a number of services I offer.

Many of you are familiar with the work I do. 
My latest bio reads: 

"Listener-Understander-Writer-Editor-Teacher-Healer

Owner, Brand Chakra, SpiritSpiral Healing"

Editor is the latest role I've decided to formally play. And just like that I've ended up launching Brand Chakra.

Let's talk a little more about the latest offering. Being a writer and a teacher - my English classes which were a vital part of a past life, will soon be formally presented on this space - and being a listener and understander, you can see I have the magic ingredients that enable me to be a good friend to your manuscript. It could be a page or two, it could be a book-in-the-making. I enjoy working with creative outpourings as much as I do with prosaic articles. 

I quote my good friend Sridevi Datta, who in her Facebook post introduces my new service.
"Folks if you need an editor to fine tune your work, here is one. Mayalakshmi Rao (that's me, Chakra Incognita) brings care, love and integrity to all that she does. If you are struggling to breathe life into your manuscript, believe me she would be your co-conspirator and facilitator all rolled into one."

I truly love words, I love to work with them as much as to play with them. And to nurture them and unlock their potential. Your words are your spirit and your heart and your mind, all trying to find their way out to reach an audience, and I really care for those words and the work they could do for you.

Get in touch. Straightaway. The email is spiritspiralhealing@gmail.com or you can message me on FB messenger https://www.facebook.com/ChakraIncognita666777 to know the details.

Onward with Brand Chakra!