20 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
How do we stay open—open-minded, open-hearted, eyes open, bright with light? If you were to walk inside our home that you know so well, you might be surprised by the darkness we are courting in the height of summer. The doors are closed, the blinds are down and shuttered so no light can enter. Fans are whirling in each room, trying to move the hot air that is heavy and suffocating at 107 degrees outside and rising. We are in the midst of a “megadrought” as reported in the New York Times last week. In case you missed it, this paragraph struck me:
The Southwest has been mired in drought for most of the past two decades. The heat and dryness, made worse by climate change, have been so persistent that some researchers say the region is now caught up in a megadrought, like those that scientists who study past climate say occurred here occasionally over the past 1,200 years and lasted 40 years or longer.
Brooke and I have taken to filling up bowls with water and placing them on the edge of the porch for parched birds like mourning doves and brown thrashers not usually seen here. We have put out bird baths in the grove of cottonwoods for the smaller birds like the Say’s phoebes and black-throated sparrows. It’s grim, Fazal. For those who deny the heating up of our planet, I welcome them to come sit on our porch and see how long they will last before coming inside our makeshift cave.
The nights are our breathing space where the coolness of the Milky Way with its sweep of stars above brings a respite from the heavens. When I look at your portrait of Chandra Bhaga (“Half-moon” you write in parenthesis) with her eyes wide with wonder looking upward, I feel her companionship. The fullness of her face with an amused grin holds a sense of devotion bound to faith. At least this is how she is speaking to me at a time when our days within this pandemic are largely solitary. She reminds me to seek lightness and joy in the way kittens do as they try to grasp what is just beyond their reach.
You tell me Chandra Bhaga is another widow from the ashram at Vrindavan, the city of 10,000 widows who gather for solace and solidarity having been shunned by their families and are now outcasts to the place they once knew as home. I read that in the last few years, the widows who gather here no longer must consign themselves to wearing white saris as a sign of mourning. Many of the widows now are draping themselves in colors and are invited by the community to celebrate in the festivals where the colors of fuchsia and marigold paint their bodies.
We painted our bodies last night in Mary Jane Canyon with sand, terracotta orange, wet from a quick and violent downpour. We couldn’t help ourselves. We danced in the mud with our hands joyously raised over our heads welcoming the rain—oh the smell of that rain, Fazal, in a word: petrichor.
Perhaps this is how we stay open by being present wherever we are, even in drought, especially in drought in grief in exile. My grandmother’s last words before she died were three: “Dance, dance, dance.”
It takes faith to dance at the threshold of death. It takes faith for a widow to look upward at God and believe there is something for her beyond the sorrow of a shattered heart. Chandra Bhaga wears her faith loosely, intimately like the scarf draped over head and across her shoulder. The light in her eyes tells me all I need to know here in the baked and broken landscape, isolated and lonely.
Thank you, my friend,
Terry