With The Wind As My Witness

Under the pearled moonlight at the summit of her Father, Arunachala, Parvati stood alone, speaking into the wind toward her Beloved, That which is not, He who is nothing and nowhere. Her voice was a flow of rivers, a radiant beam of the dawn’s first light, a whisper before the rain. Below, shadows danced across the plains.

PARVATI SPEAKS

Do come to me, O Lightbringer, with stillness clothed in tempest,

Echoing the pale dream of a stranger who seeks the Witness,

I am not the absence of fire,

I am the one who teaches fire to burn.

They say We were alone in the beginning,

Before the stars hung themselves 

On the sky’s black thread,

Before thought wandered helplessly into language,

Before Time licked the salted wounds of causality,

We danced.

Still You hide in the folds of sacrifice

Where Being wells up and non-Being

Collide as sparks break away from the lip of a storm.

Again, You ask me,

What is it to love a god?

To lie

Still,

Breathing beside the Infinite,

To kiss the teeth of destruction, 

To call it home.

Fools think love is fusion,

They read poorly.

Love is a quality of attention,

My love, true love, is That—

a cut, a crack, a jagged intimacy where death 

Becomes life, and the journey continues.

I am not just a reflection,

I am not just an opposite,

Not just a shadow woven into nets,

I am a fold, unfolding, refolding again, 

And again, when You are silent, I am the voice within.

Where You are the flame, I am the flow of breath that feeds it.

You want stillness. 

Have You forgotten the words?

O Howling One, what are the most important words One can say? 

I give to All: rhythm, continuity, form.

Lesser beings seek ascension,

Who am I to judge? 

I was with You when we arrived.

They watched us, 

The crowded, the starved, the lost,

And called us obscene.

They called us heretics.

But I ask them: 

What is the most important step One can take?

Whose laugh do you hear in the shadows? 

Dance wildly with a goddess 

Who answers with unpinned hair,

And a teasing grin, 

Watch as the destination dissolves.

O Beloved, erase these forms, dismantle logic, forget your own name,

With each step, 

I will remember.

I am mindless without madness.

I am the one who rides the lion through the fires of war, 

Who teaches eternity how to ache, to yearn,

To make love, it is not just pleasure,

It is the ordering of chaos.

Each utterance births dimensions,

Each gasp a mantra beyond language.

You wish to know divinity?

Then unlearn seeking

And begin finding

Devotion,

Spill the water, break the bowl.

Come to me laughing, weeping, splitting open.

The divine is not above or below,

He is in each and every step, firm lips kissing the earth,

She is the dust that lifts when children run.

Fools speak of salvation.

I speak of saturation. 

Cultivation, rebirth…

Be wild. Be full. Be with.

Every time you play

you are dancing with us.

Daughter of mountain and storm,

lover of change,

I played God into remembering himself.

And I will do it again.

Because love

is not the beginning or the end of becoming,

It is simply the very next step.