Nuggets From Vijaya Nagarajan's Call
ServiceSpace
--Gayathri Ramachandran
27 minute read
May 25, 2021

 

Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting a truly incandescent and soul-strumming Awakin Call with Vijaya Nagarajan.

Vijaya Nagarajan is an environmental activist and professor who blends intellectual rigor with embodied ethics at the intersection of ecology and religion. She has written the first in-depth publication in English on the kolam. The Tamil word for beauty, kolam refers to the intricate rice flour designs created by women at dawn on the thresholds of millions of homes in South India. The title of her book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India, refers to the Hindu belief that householders have a karmic obligation to “feed a thousand souls.” By creating the kolam with rice flour, a woman provides food for birds, ants and other tiny life forms -- greeting each day with “a ritual of generosity.” Kolams are a deliberately transient form of art -- as each day's kolam disappears underfoot -- and are created anew by hand each dawn with skilled artistry, mathematical precision, and spontaneity.

Here are a summary of call nuggets that are still resonating for me, in body and heart. The conversation continued for a while beyond the prescribed 1.5 hours and a few excerpts from the continued conversation are posted at the end.

On beginning her book with a verse from AK Ramanujam’s poem and the notion of translating one’s past -- Even one’s own tradition is not one’s birthright; it has to be earned, repossessed. The old bards earned it by apprenticing themselves to the masters. One chooses and translates a part of one’s past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others. One comes face to face with it, sometimes in faraway places, as I did.”
Vijaya: For me, AK Ramanujam - I met him in 1985, at the Festival of India, at the same time at which the seed of kōlams was plated at the Smithsonian, at the Washington mall in Washington DC. He was always, has been and he continues to be a north star for me and my work. He had immigrated in the late 50s as an adult and when I discovered his work, it was like a beautiful room, a beautiful garden opened up -- he had planted so many seeds. So much of his extraordinary work in folklore, literature and Sangam poetry – I really recommend “The Interior Landscape” which was published many years ago. He opened up many, many doors for many of us. He was a beloved teacher, friend and mentor. There were so many quotes I could have used but that one I kept coming back to. I said – you know, that quote is emblematic of my own journey! He was someone who was way ahead of me in that path -- so it was like a trail he had carved, created, opened up…

On how AK Ramanujam could see her grief and what that opened up for her (an incident she describes in her book where she was talking to him in his office and he said to her -- “You are talking about the kōlam, but there is something deeply sad about you. What is it?”).
Vijaya: I thought I was hiding my grief very well. I was in his office, in the University of Chicago, with all his Tamil and Kannada books. It wasn’t the first time we had met; it was maybe the third or fourth time. We actually worked together as organizers for a different event/a nation-wide tour… I was in my mid-20s and I realized that there was a point in my life where I could track how many years I had been living in America and how many years I’d been living in India, and I was trying to press the wall of time against each other, so the time in India didn’t fade away, trying to hold on to the rope of memory, of the places I’d been and the stories I’d heard. There was a kind of a Janus-like feeling in me, of a war inside myself.

I came in 1966 when I was 5. We went back to India, and I came back as a formal immigrant in 1972. It’s hard to really share the utter loneliness of being the only Indian kid in a 3000-person high school, which probably still happens in some places in the USA but more rarely, you know? It was this utter loneliness and this tension between the rebellious American teenager self which was still with me – my parents had almost succeeded in arranging a marriage for me, so I was very resistant to that. But I also didn’t quite believe in a love marriage either! So it was being caught between options, where neither of them worked – you are, in a way, in a room of emptiness, and you have to find yourself in that emptiness, and I saw him as someone who had navigated that space before me…

I was trying to be professional and talk about my work. I was having that intentionality. I thought I was hiding my grief very well, and he just cut through. He was very gentle about it. I almost didn’t put that story in the book; many stories in the book came in at the last minute. I was talking to the Indian American youth of today and I realized that I was that Janus being in my 20s, but somehow, we are all like that. All of us are caught in the whirlpools of modernity in such a deep, profound way. It’s like a monopoly of attention –and it holds us firm in its grasp, you know? And it's very hard to see around that. It's like that has become the sky of our world metaphorically, and so I think that's why I threw it in there at the last minute, because I was like -- this is all of us now! And this idea -- that we can be both. That was what Raman (AK Ramanujam) said to me -- you can be both traditional and modern and that just blew me away! He was one of the people, other than Stella Kramrisch, who said to go back to India and to do this work, as a way of completing myself.

On dedicating the book to her mother and these women kōlam practitioners, as "an ode to hundreds of millions of women like my mother, who move in the worlds of orality, visuality, gestures, and ritual, but who, in the tidal waves of modernity, are misjudged as incompetent, illiterate, or ignorant." On weaving this narrative of concern and care, tracing back to her relationship with her mother.
Vijaya: (in tears) I’m very moved by what you are asking. I’m so glad you lifted that sentence because through that, I entered this potluck soup and I really want people to understand one of the motivations of this book. My mother is a very unusual woman – she just celebrated her 85th birthday a month ago, but in some ways, she is also very usual. She got transplanted, in a way, from one historical time to another. She was born in 1936 in a tiny village called Kunnam, near Sirkazhi. Her mother died when she was 2, and three other siblings passed away before they were 5. She was taken out of school a couple of times, first grade and fifth grade -- there was no one there to advocate for her. She thought at that time that there was no need to go to school because that was totally normative of that time, for her. She got married to my father at 17. They moved to Delhi and then Washington DC. When she came back in 1972, there were not that many Indians and Tamils here. I think there was a kind of lostness in her at that moment, like being dropped off a cliff — and I was also a part of that, in a way. I didn’t mean to but I became a feminist and environmentalist at the age of 12 or 13 and I didn’t have the patience for many people who weren’t that. She became deaf when I was 14.

I also judged her as a schooled person. This is typical of immigrant kids if a parent doesn’t speak English -- I was a translator for her and I judged her. I saw the enormous gulf between her and my father who was educated. I didn’t wake up to the brilliance of my mother, if not for the philosopher, Ivan Illich, who did a conference in 1984 in Maine for ten days, where I spoke about the cow dung and the commons. The conference was on orality, with a wonderful teacher named Majid Rahnema from Iran, who was a Minister of Education and he had worked in Mali as a UN Ambassador, and realized the brilliance of oral culture and ended up making libraries of tapes rather than books! In those 10 days of immersion, I came back to my mother in Maryland a changed person. It was like night and day. Before I had seen her inadequate, and now I saw this abundance of knowledge. I started listening to her, I was 23 then, and I realized I had missed something. It was like being on the dark side of the moon, from 11-23.

A part of the shroud of modernity is that it creates an arc of enormous disvalue – if you don’t succeed in school, then you are a failure. That shame that an individual soul has to carry, and to protect yourself from that shame… To be able to see her and though her, see so many others... I had also begun to work with Native American communities with my husband at the same time. I realized that they were struggling to hold onto their culture, in the face of modernity, recover their languages, and so much had been forcibly lost. And as Indians, we had voluntarily many times given up our cultural knowledge and ways. We had also been under the arc of disvalue of modernity. So while talking to these Native American elders, I began to see my mother…

I would also say that more than invisible intelligences (that those in the oral traditions possess) -- I would say it is invisible brilliances. It’s really invisible geniuses! I would really go to that extent -- that is what we are missing. That is what we don’t have on the plate, at the table, with us when we are making decisions about technology or a product. We are not having those people at the table. My dream is that any time there is an invention, the ones who are going to be impacted, all those people have to be on the table, mapping out how there is going to be an impact on us. Not that we can see everything, but at least be humble enough to know that you can’t see everything and that you need these geniuses to be at the same table with you.

On picking something like the kōlam that has so many dimensions to it, that crosses boundaries, and is a form of genius in itself. Did you know when you started, where all it would lead you? On the kōlam being embedded in the gift economy -- something that is abundant, ephemeral and communal in nature.
Vijaya: It came out of a conversation with Ivan Illich. He was working on a book called ‘H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness’ and it’s a history of the perceptions of water as sacred in the West and the history of sewage and waste as well. That was in 1985 and we had gone down to LA to be with him.

One evening at dinner, he asked me, “Vijaya, I am so excited. I want to talk to you. Do you know anything about the kōlam?” And I am so embarrassed about this, but I said to him, “Oh, the kōlam. Yeah. It’s nothing really. It is just something my mother does every morning. I can show you some designs tomorrow morning if you like, and you can ask me any questions you want” So the next morning, from 4:30 or 5 AM in the morning, we talked till 9 AM. We could not move. He asked so many unanswerable questions. To every question he asked, I said I don’t know. By asking so many unanswerable questions, it just made me wake up! The kōlam can bridge ritual space and time, the body, the world of water and sewage, and the world of perceptual ability…

That conversation seeded something. There were many seeds, watching my mother and grandmother making them, wondering why my mother got up at 4:30 in the morning in winter and snow, with her bare feet, scraping the snow off, and with her Baby Gerber bottle (or a half coconut shell) full of rice flour, making the kōlam, and waking up to those sounds and wondering what was compelling her to do this in the middle of this environment of foreignness -- to create that vocabulary of familiarity? All those were seeds. And this one stimulated a level of intellectual curiosity. It took me many, many years. I say I’m a slow worker. Like slow food. I’m slow work. And part of the reason is that I am paying attention and it is very hard to close the parentheses on something like the kōlam.

What is the commons? And on teaching a course on it that is mandatory at USF for all environment studies students.
Vijaya: This book is a drop in the bucket. For me, it also emerged from the ‘Recovery of the Commons’ project, which Illich was a part of, and a source of. The knowledge of the kōlam is part of the gift economy and part of the commons -- that which we share.
Unless you understand the history, philosophy, languages and anthropology of the commons -- if you cannot see what is around you, you can’t protect it, you can’t even engage with it. Even the word resource, the immediate metaphor is mining – you have to mine resources, yes? To see the natural world as resources… One of the things Illich taught me was how do you tell the difference between resources and the commons? A part of it is that something becomes a resource when it goes through the needle of commodification, when it goes through the cash economy. But prior to the marketization, it has a different set of grammatical rules for operation. And the kolam is a part of that!

The commons is very critical for understanding the climate. Every language has its own way of perceiving the commons and we really have to put all this at the international table! And we need to compare notes and ask how do you see the commons in your language, and your culture? Rather than assuming an English-dominated notion of the commons which is what we walk around with. I wish someone could help me create a library of the commons, in a way, to recognize all the commons we have between us, that is still outside of our cash nexus. I’m actually working on two books on the commons.

What the kōlam and the commons embody is also -- in some ways, modernity has shaped us through rituals of selfishness, only seeing the boundary of the self as the skin, and how much we can amass in our individual bodies or the genealogy of our families. And we need to turn now… There is an abundance of commons around the commons. Each of us has to carve and find that path in our own life. How do you resist the commodification – it’s through shared gift, through non-reciprocal giving and giving to strangers. If every single being can think of feeding a thousand souls a day. like the kōlam does, in whatever form they can, I think it could shift the world and the effect of our actions…

How do we create cultures that resist the commodification of our self and help us be our generous self? Our current story is that it is good to be selfish. The more selfish we are, the more good will come into the common good. In a sense, we need to create another axis of value that we can circle around that is really about generosity. This is not creating a network. This is making a community.

Every kōlam maker — and I spoke to hundreds of them, everyone taught me something. This book is to share some of the knowledge that was generously given to me. And this is a drop of water…
The universe is filled with subjective objects. Anything you dive into, in the world, has the whole universe in it. Many people thought I was a fool, for many decades, including my parents. I was deeply inspired by this Bohemian community I was surrounded by, in the Bay Area that was lively in the 80s, in the middle of my double Janus view… I was embedded in this different layer of time and place. They were also my teachers and elders – Ivan Illich, Gary Snyder, Susan Griffin.

Nuggets from the commentary accompanying the slides on kōlams:

  • 20 million women do this in Tamil Nadu. 400 million Hindu women do this ritual at some point in their calendric year. One out of 16 people on the planet have this as part of their ritual practice. That’s mind-blowing to think about!
  • Her mother being on the front page of the Washington Post religious section -- being seen after being invisible for so long— she still thinks that it was the best moment of her life.
  • Meaning making of the kōlam: Pre1991, it was marking temporality, making them at dawn. After 1991, cable TV came to the villages and people were staying up all night and watching movies, so they could not get up at 4:30 in the morning.
  • One woman said to me that the reason we make the kōlam is to catch a piece of the cloth of infinity for a brief moment of time in the morning! Those words entered me and will never leave this body.
  • Each kolam is caught in a moment of time and space, but using your imagination, it can go on.
  • A part of the work on the kōlam was figuring out intellectual, social and emotional puzzles. It was not like the meaning came right away. It was like ‘thalichu kottarathu’ (Tamil phrase for seasoning food with hundreds of mustard and jeera/cumin and other spices) -- hundreds of mustard and jeera seeds -- I had to gather them from each women, and sit with it for many years and figure out how they fit each other; and they didn’t pop immediately! It took many years, 10-15 years. As I grew into myself, in my 30s, 40s and 50s, I understood more of what the women were telling me, in their 30s, 40s and 50s, that I didn’t understand in my 20s, when they were first telling me.
  • One of the titles I played with is drawing down desires: many women told me that you draw your desires and prayers in the kōlam.
On kōlam and mangalam (Tamil word that translates, albeit weakly, into auspiciousness in English).
Vijaya: There are many reasons women do the kōlam. One is to invite Goddess Lakshmi into the household, the goddess of health, wealth and goodness. And her sister is Mudevi, who is the goddess of sleep, rest, laziness and poverty. You do the kolam twice a day, once in the morning to invite the Goddess Lakshmi into the house and in the evening, to invite Mudevi into the house and the body, essentially to invite rest. But mangalam is an incredible word – it’s a field of goodness, a field of positive intentionalities that is braided into the kōlam. When women make the kōlam, they are putting their own desires into the kōlam, their own desires and their general desires for the goodness of the word. And when you walk by it or step on it, you pick up the women’s desires on your feet; you pick them up and carry them through the day. How does goodness happen? Goodness happens through expected and unexpected rituals of generosity.

On kōlam being the acknowledgment of the woven tapestry of light and dark, fortune and misfortune in our lives. This book was a long difficult, arduous experience. You say that ‘you needed to be active at desiring auspiciousness to even have a chance at it. The kōlam is about desiring life as a force in itself.’
Vijaya: (in tears) I can’t really speak… You know, I think growing up, partly in America, there was an expectation of normality. You know when you grow up in India, that anything that approaches ‘normalcy’ is an incredible achievement. You are aware of the punctuated-ness of suffering and joy. And part of the shield of modernity is to hide that fact away from you. I am not against modernity. But how do we live with the modern, in a contemporary, critical way, so we don’t eat it hook, line and sinker, uncritically, which is what the purveyors of modernity want us to do?

When I had those 15 years of bad luck, it was like a shock. It was impossible. Each one was an impossible mountain to climb; it took everything I had. Every obstacle was such a Himalayan one. And it is still happening. There was a two-year break and now it’s happening again. So I think there is really a way in which you have to honour and appreciate life, when things are going well.

I think that is what the kōlam marks. You are saying that your house is in a good shape right now and you have the capacity to be generous to strangers. What a great way to signal that to the world, so you can have a beggar come and you can feed them. You have the capacity to give. And there are times when there is death, or illness and you don’t have that capacity. And you have to be a receiving self, a receiving household, and a receiving body. And that is OK too.

That is extraordinary cultural genius — having a symbol that displays well-being of the household!

On how the fact that many women don’t do the kōlam at sunset every day nowadays, by paying homage to Mudevi (the goddess of sloth, languor), as they used to in the past, has connections to our cultural and generational relationship to darkness, waste, shadow and climate change.
Vijaya: One of the things that helped me finish the book was Chapter 11. So many women would say to me — these are all the reasons we're doing the kōlam, but the real reason we're doing the kōlam is to feed a 1000 souls. And then I was like okay, that's beautiful but is there something more to that? So I had to search and I found this third century BC footnote (my world has been shaped by footnotes I think!). And it's the idea that when you build a house, as a Hindu, it is one of the greatest sins that you can do in the world. And you can never make up for that sin, as long as you are alive, even if you live a life of extreme goodness, you can never make up for the sin of building a house and needing a house. And the reason being is that when you're building a house, there are already creatures that have lived there that have made their homes in that space. And you are making all those creatures homeless, when you build your own house, so you are building on the sin of creating homelessness in all these other beings.

And, in some ways, there's a Dharmic and moral requirement that every day, both at sunrise and sunset, there is a moral quality in feeding the non-humans that live around your house. The least you can do is to feed the animals that you've displaced twice a day -- what they call the day-walking beings and the night-walking beings and there are terms in Sanskrit for those. And so there is a way in which the morning kōlam is done for the day-walking beings that come alive during the day, and then the evening kōlam is to feed a 1000 souls of the night-walking beings that you've displaced when building your house. And I think that just really was extraordinary for me. It took me a couple of summers to put those pieces together, you know? And I guess in terms of like climate, I think that I just found, when I read that, I was like that is again an extraordinary sensitivity to place. I’d never read anything like that.

And I thought that sensitivity, in that kind of Hindu cosmological perception, if we can understand the full impact of what that means in terms of our everyday actions — I think it's precisely the loss of understanding of that that's created the climate problem. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Amitav Ghosh, who is also an old friend and one of the things he said on stage that was extraordinary was — the problem of climate is the problem of waste; until we understand that we need to be in a world like the natural world, where there is no waste, which is literally zero waste. And so, everything we do, we need to go toward the zero-waste paradigm. Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize for the commons in 2009, she talks about polycentricity, and polycentric scales of being. So we all, as individuals exist at these multiple scales of being, from the micro to the macro. And if we can become as aware as we're able and capable, in our individual selves and our collective selves to the creation of waste, the production of waste in our very acts of being, and we're all enmeshed in this, nobody can escape it… And so, if we can become more and more conscious and reduce the waste and turn the waste into food for another creature -- that I see as our only or one of our hopes. I shouldn't say only, but I think in dealing with waste and creation of waste, we cannot be creating waste with a half-life of 10,000 years. Like somewhere, there has to be prohibitions! We don't know how to be responsible for 10,000-year-old waste and we have to recognize that, and we have to know that, and we have to abstain from that.

Illich calls this a kind of an ‘abstention of being’, but a joyful abstention of being. It's not a deprivation. Often in the environmental discourse, we talk about limits and I think that the language of limits is very negative in a way, like who wants to be on a diet, right? We all go off a diet as soon as we get on one, right? But, really, it's not a diet. We could think about carbon diets — it's one way of looking at it and it might work. We need to try everything, but I think that really it's about joyful living in what is the most important thing to us — the friendship, community and non-commoditized life, where you minimize the need for money and the cash nexus, to the extent possible.

And I think it's very, very challenging, very difficult; it's very hard to live in the gift economy because it's very uncertain and it's inconsistent. And so I think, the more we can each of us learn to feed 1000 souls, as often as possible, in as many ways as possible, then the gift economy gets more and more strengthened. And then we can we can more and more live in the gift economy, as well as the commoditized economy.

On the fine-line and tension between asking of women that they move towards zero-waste households and create less waste and be reverent of the Earth and how this adds to the invisible labour they are often already engaged in; on the tension between feminism and seeing women’s work as valuable and how sometimes, the commodity market brings that sense of value/respect versus living in the gift.
Vijaya: It is a beautiful question and it's a powerful question and it's a lifetime question, and really something I’ve struggled with. And I always say, I don't think I put this in the book maybe, but in my talks I say that I’m not against modernity. I’m for critical modernity and I’m for critical tradition. We can't take tradition wholesale either. I mean there are patriarchal and other terrible structures within tradition. Taking tradition wholesale without being critical of it is a problematic endeavor, and taking modernity wholesale without being critical of it is also a problematic endeavor.

There's a beautiful book called ‘More work for mother’ which was done about a few decades ago, but it really shifted me because there was a history of technology, where there was collective technological development. Up through the 1920s, there were actually — like Georgia O’Keefe lived in an apartment in New York City where there was a there was a big kitchen for everybody to cook in. It's not the individualized kitchen. That technology is feasible! It’s just that 100 years ago, there was a direction because of the commodity power of commoditized markets and the corporations — it was chosen for us -- this path of individual kitchens, individual refrigerators, individual stoves.

I think what we have to do very quickly is to recall those more collective ways of being, without patriarchy. Not that everybody can live in a co-op. But we need to think of the anti-commons, which is not sharing what you have. In a sense, anti commons is when people have three or four houses, and there are things that are lying waste, with unused capacity. If you're living in a house where you share it with seven people, eight people, you can have a pretty big house. But because it's shared by 8 or 10 of you -- it's actually, per person, it's a much lesser ecological footprint.

Modernity has given me an identity as a woman and a capacity to do these things that I couldn't have done 50 years ago or my mother's generation couldn't have done. So I think this is a very tremulous path we are on and there are no answers and I don't have any answers, as much as anyone, but I can describe a certain kind of sensitivity that we need in order to step into the next day. This is a daily battle for me. It's not like something that I’ve arrived at, you know. And so, somehow, I think we need to fall into despair and we need to work through our grief of this moment that we're in. You know, it's deep grief and deep tears, that we need to shed. And then we move, towards a resolution at an individual and shared level, at all these polycentric valences, from the household the neighborhood to the planet.

Women's ways of being and ways of living, I think, has to enter into the worldliness, the world that surrounds us, and the ritual and the non ritual learning’s that come from running a household is incredibly essential for what we're facing right now. So it's the genius of the householders, both male and female, that we need to bring into full awareness right now. It's not any more mysterious than running a household!

The kōlam is a vessel to hold a kind of capacity for listening to the sky and listening to the birds and listening to the world, you know at 4:30 in the morning, before sunrise. I mean it's an incredible time right? And I think again in the in the gaze of modernity, it doesn't look like it has any value because it's not commodifiable right? But I think, certainly in that quietness of the pre dawn, and especially, without electricity, I think there's a way in which that awareness of light coming into the world and coming into your body is an incredible -- it creates a seed of awareness in yourself that, hopefully, you can carry throughout the day.

On moving from intermittent sacrality to integrated sacrality.
Vijaya: That’s the work of everybody on the planet right now. We are all on a journey to figure this out. There are no easy answers… We are all embodying each of our truths. One of the things we need to invent right now is ways of sharing our truths that also tie and create a bigger truth, that also converses back and forth – the little truth and the big truth. And learning to be at the level of subsistence! Illich would say there is a war against subsistence in modern society. You have to be ay a level of excess to be successful and everything is markers of excess. How do we honour people who are choosing live at the edge of economic comfort and at subsistence? And those with excess and too much economic capital, they have to find their own level of subsistence as well. What and how much is enough? If you define enough-ness with the friends you have, the seeds you are planting, the relationships, asking what is of value – it’s a lifelong quest to figure that out… We need a slow time movement, like the slow food movement, so we can pay attention!

On paying it forward and serving her work in the world.
Vijaya: Supporting the work of their little back-pack institute -- The Institute of Natural and Cultural Resources; and if everyone could practice rituals of generosity in their life at the different scales of being that they are part of.

Beyond that, it’s a real important time for people with resources to be really generous to those institutions that have suffered so much with covid-19, including the one I’m embedded in -- the University of San Francisco. These small, liberal arts colleges and universities are really walking on a tightrope right now, and I think they are one of the foundational legs of democratic work, democratic governance and community governance. And so, I think I would ask people to share their wealth with the colleges and universities around them.

I think, in terms of climate work, really think of specific, task-oriented university work on climate crisis. I think enormous intellectual and material flow has to happen into those areas of concern – so find people in your neighbourhood and area who are doing that work and support them. What I find most disturbing about the funding world is there is a kind of monopolization by the big people who are known and funding them. Prior to the superstars of the environmental movement or the literary movement, there was a tendency to fund 10,000 people. Instead of giving a million dollars to someone who doesn’t need it, give ten thousand $10,000 grants to community groups and individuals who can make a difference! Then you raise the whole field of action across the web, right?

On the timing of this call not being accidental, given what is happening in India with the second wave of covid-19. So many of the themes that we have touched on, in this call today, are apropos and resonant to what is alive in India today.
Vijaya: Absolutely. It’s so heart breaking and I am trying to tease out the connection between the corona virus and the commons, triangulating that in a piece I’m working on currently. I think there is a way in which the appearance of the coronavirus at this time is an indication of the commons. What we have been forced to experience with the coronavirus – the sharing -- precisely overlaps with that which we share, with the commons. Hopefully, it’s the tilted side, like the other side of the moon.

I’m hoping, wishing and praying for -- that the grief, the sadness, the utter unpredictability, and the dangers – that this teaches us so much as a collective whole, that it can be translated into the world of climate and ecology. That somehow, each one of us, at all of our polycentric levels of being, that we take this, and after we have grieved (we will always be grieving, but when we have done some of it), we consider how we can bring those lessons, those paadams (Tamil word meaning lessons) to life, to action. You are exactly right, Pavi, that this is what we needed and we can’t go back to life as normal. And I know everybody is desperate to go back to that, including me – I want to see my students, I want to see people, you know! But it’s like how can we slow this down so we can absorb what we are learning and then shift the world we are coming back into, so it’s not precisely the same. It HAS to be different!

When you saw the fires in Australia or even in California last year, it was unimaginable. How do you bring the unimaginable into your consciousness? There is such a resistance. It would require a huge amount of grief to process, to go through it…. The droughts have started in California, several counties have been declared drought-stricken and this is early May! I don’t think it has hit the consciousness of people that we need to be careful with water. I remember in Delhi, in Netaji Nagar, we would wash the dishes and take that water and put it in another bowl so it could be re-used. So it’s like how do we prescribe ourselves this new thing in California – that we reuse water…

**Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!**
 

Posted by Gayathri Ramachandran on May 25, 2021


1 Past Reflections