Siva began walking to his wedding on the full moon of February 27. He started coming down, out of the mountains, out of the cold. The marriage of Ṣiva and Pavarti will happen March 11th, the night of Mahasivaratri or the great night of ṣiva. A day or two after that we’ll shift with the light, springing forward into something that feels like mud and fresh earth. The spring equinox happens on March 20th. Lent and Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all bunched up like gathering spring rain.
I’ve been sneezing a lot. The days feel smeary: opaque and piss colored, always a scrim and never blue, never gold. Every now and then, once in a while, the sun cuts through. The sun comes through like music, it’s like honey, people turn to it like plants but as they turn its gone. Things drip. There is a river running the alleyway where the banked snow is melting. Today I saw buds on a neighbor’s magnolia: tight and prim, like a flirtatious tongue. Nights, on the other hand, feel clear and electric. I taste mineral, everywhere, as if I stored pennies in my mouth. Everyone I know is pent, exhausted, waiting for something called new normal. The effort is showing. Fuses are short and quality is low. The exhaustion is obvious.
We’re just now learning which people we knew have died. Others are doing the grief work of packing up no longer necessary shit though the shit isn’t a persons, but a job, a community, or a relationship. Some of us are being pushed back into scenarios that don’t feel safe. The trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin. I clear my throat. I’ve been watching other people clearing their throats: we haven’t used them in the way we used to use them in so long. Our social clothes haven’t been touched in a year. Our faces are hollowed. Our bodies feel sour.
Vigil, I said to the Gita study. We’re in vigil.
I understand what happens to the earth in spring. The opposite - sour, flaccid, dirty - is how I feel.
Getty image - Sivaratri 2019 Varanasi
“But I’m going to say it again: when I hear spiritual-but-not-religious a little ping goes off in my brain; I suspect the person wants the flavor of spirituality without any of the responsibilities.”
I’ve been cocking my chin to follow the moon the last several nights, watching it catch and hide in the bared branches, wander the mid sky like she dropped something and is looking for it, then veer toward the horizon night by night by night. I’m waiting: vigilant, longing. Pavarti is earth, love and lovely, green and red, moist and libidanous. Without her, Ṣiva is pointless. Aloof.
Without love, practice is sterile. Worse: it’s alienating. Mindfulness - the most direct way I know to characterize Ṣivā - without hope is painful and cruel. It’s ascetic.
The complex relationship between Yoga and Hinduism have been much on my mind. The Gita class is talking about it. Faith. Doubt. Spirituality. Spiritual wounds. Prayer.
American culture is so vapid of meaning makers it’s prone to theft and frivolity; it conflates spin classes with ‘soul cycling’. Churches are empty, with a few old ones sitting in the pews. While distance running is a thing world wide, I don’t know of any culture other than our own that takes it to such obsessive, self-flaggelating extremes. Binge and purge. So many people own gym memberships and yoga pants that have never been used as intended, I mean. Others don’t know how to regulate stress without a few miles on the pavement. Some people collect things; some hoard. I’m not quite sure what, exactly, I’m trying to point at here, but I suspect boredom and distraction, our entertainments and purchases, are related to our anxiety and our grief. We tend not to know how to be anxious or grieve in any but in clumsy, mawkish ways. DIY projects and retail therapy. Lurches toward commitment. Repression with the occasional burp of nonsense.
We’ve become culturally sensitive in this last year. And this is good. This is better. This is honest, finally.
But in the wake, we’re lost. What now? What else? How? Most of the white folks I know are seriously engaged in realizing that they don’t actually have a culture, that ‘white’ isn’t a thing. Our family histories go back three or four generations and then disappear. They disappear in a mist of immigration and bootstraps that denies language, ceremony, and the communion of the year. We don’t know who we are.
Our nonsense - that which previously kept us spinning and aloof - doesn’t hold us up any longer. We’re left with a question of our repression.
I often talk about my yoga practice as having proved to me I have a soul.
The thing we’re facing now, though, isn’t merely a question of individual soul, although it is that too: this is a question about soul itself, everybody’s; the soul of a country, the values of a culture, the dying of a planet and the soul of democracy.
I have always been taught that Yoga isn’t Hindu. I wasn’t taught this in an off-hand way, but insistent ones. I’ve been told Yoga is practical, which can’t mean dogmatic. Yoga isn’t a religion, doesn’t belong to any people, the whole point is to question and hone your own meaning of these things. ‘If it works’ is basic yoga pedagogy. Yoga gives us psycho-somatic tools that do in fact work, regardless of who you are or what you believe. I’ve been told.
And I think that this is true.
But I also think that a white person talking about how non-sectarian Yoga is is troublesome. Its troublesome precisely because it downplays the fact that most of Yoga’s history emerges out of a Hindu context. To make the non-religious argument is to obscure - if not deny - things like white supremacy and colonialism and entitlement. White people in the west have done something to Yoga, much like they’ve done something to Buddhism, precisely in their desire to make it spiritual-but-not-religious.
I’ve said this before. Forgive me.
But I’m going to say it again: when I hear spiritual-but-not-religious a little ping goes off in my brain; I suspect the person wants the flavor of spirituality without any of the responsibilities. To tithe. To confess. To commune. Spiritual-but-not-religious avoids gratitude in any but a lip-service way, as though you were tipping the nice Vietnamese woman for your pedicure.
Spiritual-but-not-religious veers toward a fetishizing of other culture’s sacred things. It’s a smorgasbord approach that leads directly to - I’ve seen this, you’ve seen it too - using crystals, cacao-ceremony, tarot cards and sweat lodges like accessories. It allows us to call ourselves initiated or masters (Reiki drives me nuts, not because I doubt ancient Japanese understandings but because white folks call themselves level one two three masters after weekend courses and a home-printed certificate). (Yes, I do feel the same way about Registered Yoga Teachers).
It also leads directly to feeling we get to choose which facts we want to be true. If we’re ‘spiritual’, we can argue that news - or rape culture, or racism - is fake, or at the very least exaggerated. Spiritual-but-not-religious leads directly to bulldozing cultural realities and then claiming white men have it hard.
Spirituality makes me uncomfortable.
This is all true. It’s always been true.
But I have a thing for Ṣivā.
I love his ruthlessness. His ferocity. His teeth full of ash. I don’t ‘believe’ in Ṣivā any more than I ‘believe’ in Jesus, but it feels like I’m in a relationship with him I can’t deny. He haunts me. He seems to understand the relationship between howling and poetry, and in the end this seems a relationship I myself have to grapple with.
In ways that aren’t quite rational, Ṣivā has been a part of my yoga practice from the very beginning, has shown up over and over again like a swollen chorus, and at this point seems eminent.
He stood like a demon at the start, skulls and asceticism, threatening, demanding. He was there even though I didn’t want him to be. Despite my refusal to be ‘spiritual’, the practical and cognitive work of my early practice dealt with final things: death, grieving, surrender, and finding rest. Breath and bones as holy spittle. By the time I’d gotten through, survived, I knew the ṢivA chants by heart in spite of the fact I’d refused to ever sing them. I’d just memorized them through association, osmosis, or affiliation. They were just there, coming up in my sleep and on the tip of my tongue whenever my mind began to wander.
Once I knew they were there, I needed to attend them. It was clear that these songs weren’t just music, that they had actually played a role in the re-wiring of my brain and the way my tongue worked now. They burned, like spells. And as this seemed both uncanny in a huh, that’s interesting kind of way and dangerous in a what is happening to my mind one, I needed to attend to them. By attend I mean turn to, admit. I mean study but I also mean incorporate. By incorporate I mean lay into my hours and knit to my breath and hold in my hand. So ṢivA became a bridge, a pilgrimage I had to take to understand how wrestling with my own bones made any philosophical or rational or cultural sense.
Sivaratri in Allabhad, 2016 by Tahiat Mahboob
He continued to show up. Eat this, too, he’d holler. His hollering is never vocal, always existential. He hits my chest like a freight train. Bow. And oh you stupid, stupid girl.
And the thing is, whenever I’d hear, whenever I’d bow, miracles happened. Things I couldn’t claim responsibility for. Grace I couldn’t deny. I think of him as mangey, feral, hard. But I also know - from experience - that what they say of him in the texts and stories is true: he is quick, so quick to love. He responds to any little attention. You think you can’t go on and then you go on. You think you can’t handle it and then it’s handled. You think this much, no further, this is insane and then the bottom drops out and you fall, under the petty and into something more quiet.
At this point, I trust him. I trust it, maybe. I can’t explain and wouldn’t dare proselytize and I can’t really say I ‘believe’. But I do trust.
I couldn’t get out of this if I tried.
I don’t think religion is the answer to the spiritual-but-not-religious Problem.
Religion has caused more problems in human history than any other thing I can think of, including plagues and viruses. Religion tends to absorb abuse of power, mutate it a bit, and spin it out as acceptable and normative. Religion upholds tradition to the point of suppression. It deflects concern with group think. While I am uncomfortable with the way yoga and wellness have alternately ignored and fetishized Eastern religions, I am not trying to suggest we convert.
But I do feel we’re on an important question: what do we value? what can we trust and where should we lay our hands? how do we tend to things like love and grief?
Suddenly, questions that have been hidden under the rug are worth people’s time. Suddenly, folks who practice yoga are either buckling down into the physical, macerating their bodies in an attempt to cope, or they’re opening up like flowers to the more poetic, gentling, artistic aspects of the practice. I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Yoga programming is more likely to involve philosophy and meditation than anything you’d find a year ago. Debates about what we should and shouldn’t do and what does it all mean have boiled to the surface. Individual students talk of the exhaustion and resistance to getting on a mat, and lay on the floor trying to breathe.
After a year of hell, the problems we’re facing are spiritual ones.
I’m not trying to make an argument for god. I’m saying our culture has lost its soul.
And this is interesting: if we see the soulless nature of something, it must be soul that made seeing possible. Confusion and bewilderment prove soul, rather than disparage it.
Mystery, Consolation, and Faith
Maybe this is the difficulty, the mystery: we assume things like soul and faith and religion are the opposite of tender, antithetical to openness, and absent doubt. To my understanding, faith is defined by these very things.
What I know is this: we can face loss and find love in it. Consolation and wonder are not separate from difficulty, precisely because hope is not separate from truth.
Ṣivā is the overcoming of ignorance and, right here right now as spring springs, a turning toward the light. Traditionally, Mahasivaratri is celebrated by a day and night of fasting, fire burning, carnival like dancing in the streets. I’m not suggesting you do any of that; I would question it if taken out of context. But I am suggesting you notice what happens the first time you get a nose full of green. Notice the biochemistry, the madness of love and renewal, the shock of hope. Tell me your feet don’t want to be in the grass, and your blood isn’t musky with the accumulation of winter starting to unclog. Listen to what birdsong is doing. Go with it.
We’ve been taught so many things that are now proving to be irrelevant, if not harmful. We’ve been taught that love is fragile and life is hard. But I’d argue at this point we can see, we have to see, that everything’s been upside down. Life is infinitely more fragile than we’ve been told; and love is all that lasts.