Love and Mixed Metaphors

 

Guru Nitya's influence on my mother was so profound that I grew up with him in my psychic DNA; a steady flame, no matter how much my own perception has flickered. Just now, moved by this thought, my mind formed the image of a budding plant being carefully watered with a modest vessel containing the clearest of waters. Back then though, I was simply growing, as little plants do.

 

Fifty years later, it is difficult to see Guru in a coherent way. Do I offer cute anecdotes from childhood and young adulthood? No. I must leave that and more considered tributes to other people. I offer some irreverent reverence instead.

 

As a child in Guru’s orbit, I became very suspicious of a certain “too niceness.” I thought of it as false and grew to mistrust it heartily. However, I am becoming more porous in some way and now think of it as, “trying very hard.” All around me, adults were trying very hard to be good, wise, clever and present, whilst also trying to recapture “the wonder of a child;” all qualities that were Guru’s natural state. 

 

Oh, the endless photographs of flowers! As if an image printed onto plastic-coated paper could ever bloom, pollinate, feed a bee, then gracefully fade, to nourish the worms and its own progeny. 

 

In the midst of all this effortful niceness, Guru was personifying the steady light to which all those flickering flames were drawn. For years, I took that steadiness for granted, but it did help me recognise some of the false teachers and misleading Will-o’the wisps inside and outside my own mind. 

 

All these years later, I find myself flickering too. I stand in the sunlight or at the kitchen sink and try (whilst trying not to try), to be truly present for at least a moment. I have been hoping that by exercising this atrophied muscle, I might gradually become aware of a string of such moments, and that my flame might stop flickering and become steady, as was Guru's flame. 

 

For over three years, I have been studying the Atmopadesa Satakam with Nancy. What a unexpected gift this has been. The book had been hiding in plain sight for so many years, yet until recently, I could never have borne a page of it. Suddenly it fell open for me and my eye was caught, as if by a discrete gesture from my first guru, my mother Edda, pointing towards Nancy and Guru Nitya, who in turn point towards Nataraja and Narayana Gurus. They all point towards That to which I am now opening. 

 

Most of these dear ones have shed their mortal confines, yet they still offer guidance to a shambling seeker, like a trail of pebbles shining in the moonlight. What is this wonder? 

 

I have been wondering, to whom are we offering our praise and remembrance? Is it to Guru Nitya who put down his little trowel and lay down amongst the flowers he'd tended, dissolving into the soil, into the whole? Or is it to the wondrous crash of particles and entirety that we all swirl around in? 

 

Love to all,

Kathryn