I saw this painted on a wall in Ketchum, ID over the weekend. I’ve been pondering it’s meaning all week and today meaning arrived in a poem:
xo,
If your nodding your head at the computer screen, then welcome, because like me, you may be spending a lot of your time living in The Land of Later.
I was kayaking on the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park with my husband. Evening was falling. The sun was descending towards the horizon and beginning to paint the mountains as giant silhouettes, casting them in deep purples and blues smattered by the lightness of leftover snow. We paddled around a bend of the river to a scene gushing with a moving, flowing beauty and yet still, in it’s calm command of itself.
Here the river slowed and widened. An Audubon’s worth of birds were hanging out on an island of earth and grass: Cormorants with their wings spread wide to dry. Geese, singing and squawking. Ducks meandering mud and padding through the ripples. On the other side of the island, four Trumpeter Swans glided side by side through the water. As we slid our kayaks quietly past, the swans startled and in a symphony of great white wings, the four birds lifted into the air, framed by the mountains and touched by the dying, golden light.
I was in deep awe, as if a single, high and moving musical note had echoed through my body, quieting the whole of me. The Land of Later (and it’s corresponding chorus of thoughts) dissolved and my skin tingled. I felt light, content and inspired.
For this slight shadow of time, I’d emerged from The Land of Later and it came to me that
working at it every minute of every day,
I really like stability. I like knowing what’s going on and having a good idea of where I’m going and what I’m doing. And while I love adventure and learning new things, there is always that undeniable pull to the routine, the regular and the resistance to change.
However, life it seems, doesn’t always like to cooperate with this modality of familiarity. It doesn’t always let you rest and sleep with the lights on, does it? No, sometimes life is messy. It’s unpredictable, untamed and wild.
There is a Tantric deity called Kali that represents this kind of energy and I have been finding myself thinking a lot about her lately. Kali is the goddess of transformation by fire because she has a way of throwing us into the flames of the Unknown, that raw unpredictable place where fear and doubt reside. But in my experience, there is something about that terrifying place that actually has the power to totally transform me. It can make us braver, stronger, and maybe softer too (in a good way). We come out the other side, better for the burning.
Kali comes from the sanskrit word, “kala” which means time or death. Kali devours time, she eats it up on us by pressing us through the cycles of creation and destruction. It’s like the process of baking bread (not that I’m much of a baker, but I’ve already used my painting analogy in the video below…oh yes, I forgot to mention..I made a video!) But I digress…when you make bread, you throw the ingredients together and then through the process of baking, it’s transformed from wet ingredients into yummy baked goodness, a lovely process of creation. Then you eat the bread (perhaps with some delicious spread) and it’s dissolved back into the darkness of not being bread anymore. Look for these cycles in your life, watch as you go through them again and again.
With this time munching, fire inducing Goddess of transformation Kali on my mind, I was inspired to dedicate a painting to her and incorporated her yantra as a way of embracing her raw and wild energy in my life.
And speaking of terrifying, I made a video talking a little bit more about Kali and the inspiration behind the painting. Check it out and I’d love to know what you think. (Would you be interested in seeing more videos? And if yes, about anything in particular?)
With lots of Love and Rahhhhhhhhhr,
Resources for the post: The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee | Tantra by Georg Feurstien | Tools for Tantra by Harish Johari
