Sumangali.org: In The Spirit Of Serendipity

One great-auntie resides in my memory for several reasons, but there is one special reason I give her lodging there. It is not so much that she always kept my birthday in her own memory, and always retrieved that date so punctually and generously. It is not her fine cardigans, over matching box-pleated woollen skirts, over hardy stockings and adamantine shoes. It is not that she seemed to have only one formidable measurement around her person, whether tape would be taken around shoulders or skirt hem, or anywhere betwixt (not that I ever tried of course). It is not that she pretended not to understand, or even hear me, if my grammar was slovenly.

It is that she (seemingly) brought God to me.

Nobody ever talked about God; it was just an unwritten rule in my family - almost a matter of courtesy - not to bring Him into anything. Yes, I believed in Him, right from as early as I can remember, and it is comforting to know that the affinity came of its own volition - not through coercion, or even prompting. This conscious skirting around the seemingly nebulous Progenitor of All was certainly due to the nobility of my parents, as they did not want to influence me in such a personal aspect of life. Certainly it may also have owed to their own mixed certainty about the Matter. So I restricted “when”s and “where”s to fairly routine areas, such as the predicted date of my being big enough to wear the jaunty yellow macintosh that Natalie’s sister had just outgrown, or the precise location of a sparrow’s ears.

Then God (seemingly) came, outwardly and boldly, courtesy of Auntie, in a miniature box set of Biblical quotations. He was (symbolically perhaps) in three parts, each with a pale satiny sheen. Nothing was said about them, or Him of course. I am not sure whether Auntie even believed in God, or whether she simply thought it proper for a young lady to keep such publications in her library. I remember choosing one prayer and reciting it about the house with jubilant abandon, driving my poor mother fraught and ragged.

The sacred books were in danger of confiscation, and with them God, or so it seemed, and that did serve as temperance to some extent. Their endangerment was not due to their content, but due to their roles as accomplices in my misuse of liberty. It was simply my style of repetition that oftentimes became unbearable. The books were heading the same way as the one particular Bach Two-Part Invention (or the one particular Joplin Rag if I was feeling roguish), played until the piano itself seemed vexed with boredom. As with the Invention though (and the Rag), the contents of the pages were greedily devoured by memory and could be recalled at will. It was not intentional obstinance on my part, but gleeous exuberance, although obstinance was admittedly the product most apparent to adults.

I read them quietly and covertly thereafter. The pages formed a sort of tryst, for a while at least. I could not help thinking, however, that while Auntie might be delighted with the three-part God in satin jackets, and so might proper young ladies who kept seemly libraries, I just honestly did not have eyes for Him there, not yet anyway. I sadly considered it my own failing, but accepted it nonetheless. The box set decorated a shelf, untouched, until it reached the table of a school fete or some such, and finally left my charge.

* * *

It was at a craft fair that He came again, unexpectedly but more convincingly to my simple eye. My mother had taken me exploring. Such exploratory was some means of establishing a friendship with an American city, newly crowned as our home. I acquired a splendid miniature wooden horse there. It was only a two-dimensional cutout, painted in glossy primary colours, with bright wool for a mane, but it was perfection to me and absorbed me almost completely. Almost, because I saw my mother crouch to collect a brighter prize from others scattered on the ground.

It was a leaf.

The horse was history. A new perfection glanced at me from a truer source than paint and wood and wool. It was yet more audaciously painted than the horse though, or so it seemed. The colours were ludicrous, and not even neatly finished. In my childly eye the blots and brush strokes were more real, carousing in crimson on lavish daubs of heavenly green and gold - not stooping to vermillion, or ochre, or anything so rude or bland. I held it to the light aghast; I was sure a human hand had tampered with it, but each drop and line bore Nature’s sterling hallmark. What’s more, the ground was strewn with myriad miniature canvases.

“There You are,” I thought to myself in my fond recognition. It was as if I had received some remote sly wink from the Divine - fleeting, yet wholly confirmatory.

* * *

Autumn is splendid.

It’s as if the leaves say, “Alright then, if we have to go, we’ll go about it magnificently. Don’t mourn; we’ll sing our own lament. In fact let us make it a thousand-part requiem, and while singing smother ourselves in all the most expensive paints. Or no! We’ll cast us all in purest bronze!”

My mother once suggested we grow some gourds. It was one of many scientifically creative things we would do together. “What are they for?” I asked, “Can we eat them?” I must confess to my deepening respect for the things when I was told that they served no discernible purpose other than being gourds. “There You are!” I would think to myself as I looked at their outrageous autumnal brightness and curious lack of purpose (except just to be wild and gnarled and puckered and pimpled). They seemed themselves to constitute one more sly wink from the Divine.

Nature must realise autumn has to be magnificent. I always found it a bother putting on a school tie again after lounging and frolicking all summer. Autumn could only mean ever-darker evenings and ever-colder feet for months to come. It’s also a fine excuse for a new scarf and more honeyed crumpets than usual, but if it weren’t for the coloured magnificence it may be a little dull and daunting. How welcome then such beauteous distractions as leaves and conkers!

* * *

I love everything about the Horse-Chestnut tree, or Aesculus Hippocastanum to use its grandest and most proper name. It is always straight and strong. The scent of buds is like the freshest nectar in spring. The leaves are like ample hands spread open in gladdest offering. The nut itself though is the most glorious component, dropping in a most hostile yet beguiling transport. Its green and spiny capsule with leathery skin over fleshy white may seem to the untrained and unintrepid hand to garner nothing at all. The trophy is well worth the tricks and travail though, as a bright new conker greets the light. If the skin is left to crack naturally, it looks to form the slit of an eye with spines for lashes, the conker resting in that socket and peering ever wider.

“There You are!”

The nut is damp and cold, shiny and richly grained like oiled walnut wood, but the colour more like an opulent mahogany. It is weighty in the hand when new, but dries to a prizefighter more adamantine than Auntie’s shoes. Its fate may have it soaked in vinegar, baked in a mother’s oven, burnished, varnished and nurtured into a near-invincible player in playground tournaments.

Conkering was never my first choice of break-time pastimes - the pierced and strung conker would too often reach a knuckle before clashing with the opposing nut, and too often with terrible belligerent force or even malice. No, I would stick to sourcing the largest and most handsome of them for my brother’s sporting. Though they were doomed to a warrior’s end if I came upon them, they were assured a generous admiration first.

* * *

I always buy the same brand of chocolate - I know it will always be exquisite. I never tire of it because I am different every time I sample it. The Bach Invention never twice sounded the same to me, as I felt different every time I played it. No two conkers are alike, but equally marvellous finds are enveloped in each inhospitable Horse-Chestnut shell. Through my simple eye, still childly for all these years, I fancy God still goes on and on making conkers and painting leaves because He knows no two will be the same: He Himself is new and different each time He creates. Maybe one day on meeting a creation with this simple eye, I will be able to say, “There You are,” with yet more certainty, and that fleeting glance will stretch to an eternal wondering gaze…

* * *

Image: Pavitrata Taylor

I was fortunate to be introduced to meditation at age sixteen, and somehow intuitively knew it was the key I needed to access satisfaction in life. Without a spiritual teacher, spiritual family background or spiritually inclined peers, I regularly became discouraged, and made all sorts of excuses for ignoring my intuition. I drifted further and further out to sea while chasing the seemingly close, yet ever-elusive outer happiness.

I knew all along I was avoiding the one thing I really needed (the spiritual life), but it just seemed easier not to address it. A strange conscious thought was always at the back of my mind: God would have to give me a pretty life-changing experience to redirect my attention towards Him. For some reason, I assumed it would involve a car accident. Don’t ask me where this thought came from; I have no idea. I was surprisingly unconcerned though, and assumed it would happen eventually. In the meantime, life was just a very long party.

In late August 1995 I was about to journey into the most significant (yet remarkably strange) day of my life. I had just passed the scene of a road accident, giving thanks to God that it was not my turn, when suddenly… it was my turn.

I was in the middle of three lanes on a very busy motorway, about to overtake a slower car on my left (because that’s the way we do things in England). To my astonishment it indicated and pulled out inches in front of me. Somehow I saw (or rather felt in such a small span of time) that there was space for me to pull into the fast lane. As I was driving faster than the intruding car, we were getting closer by the millisecond. I had to move immediately, but then correct myself so as not to hit the central reservation. This did not look very feasible overall, especially in an unfamiliar hired car.

I missed the other car and the central reservation probably by millimetres, but could not correct my car very smoothly; soon it was weaving about like a fish on a hook. Trying to steer into the swerve to regain balance seemed almost to work, but then I lost control all together. The back end flicked out like a whip and I was spinning anticlockwise in a circle across all three lanes.

I saw that all three lanes of traffic had stopped in a perfectly straight line. To me it seemed there was a line of light in front of them forming a barrier. I could almost make out people holding hands, like the sort of paper-people chain you may have made at primary school. I can’t exactly say I saw it with my eyes, but I knew it was there.

I know this sounds strange. It was.

Have you ever heard people say their life flashed before them during a “near death experience”? I thought this was a Hollywood invention, but it actually happened, like a video on fast-forward. I gripped the steering wheel and looked down at my arms and legs for a moment, thinking it might be the last time I would see them. My thought for them: “Well, thanks limbs, you have served me well.”

I must confess to being afraid of many things, but somehow I was not afraid then, or even worried; about death or even injury. Time stretched out and my perspective changed totally. Some things in me were changed forever.

I felt like God was having a conversation about me. I know that sounds strange. It was. It was like being a child, knowing your parents are talking about you, but you can’t get your ear close enough to the keyhole to make out the words. I don’t know to whom I thought He would be talking, and I can’t say I exactly heard anything with my ears either. It was like an awareness somewhere above and around me. I just assumed He was deciding my fate.

I was fully ready to accept that my almost complete conscious avoidance of Him over the previous nine years might well throw up a fairly significant result. The only thing I couldn’t stand was waiting for that result while spinning in a car, for what seemed like hours. It was like waiting for all the exam and test and interview results of a lifetime, multiplied and rolled into one.

Each time I faced the row of traffic I looked into the eyes of the open-mouthed drivers as they also gripped their steering wheels in anticipation of the outcome. Finally I hit the central reservation backwards. Game Over. The car was about half its original length, but I walked free without a scratch.

I should point out here that I am not the kind of person who sees and hears things outside of herself without using the normal human senses. I would be of no interest to the Arthur C. Clarkes of this world.

Suddenly life went back to full speed and I found myself running down the middle lane punching the air with my fist like a character in a Charlie Chaplin movie, and yelling a few choice words at the culprit who had pulled in half a mile away. Two guys who had witnessed the whole thing ran after me and sorted everything out with the police and so on. I can’t explain why, but I totally trusted them as if I already knew them. Strange. They took me to a service station where I could call the person I was due to meet. The voice on the other end of the phone said,

“WHAT? Are you CRAZY getting into a car with two strangers? How do you know they’re okay?”

I looked out of the phone box to find that one was helping an old lady from her wheelchair into her car, and the other was handing me an ice cream. It seemed God had it all pretty well under control.

That night I felt like I had just been born into this world. Everything sparkled with newness, and held such fascination for me. I don’t think I have ever been so close to an understanding of the meaning of gratitude, or of the truly unconditional nature of God’s Compassion. It was a new experience at the time, but all of these feelings have stayed with me to enhance my view ever since.

The year immediately following this event was somewhat challenging. I will spare you the details, and myself the memory of them. A good result was that I started meditating pretty much every day, using a visualisation exercise I had read about in my teens, but which I had never actually practised. In short, you imagine you are in a safe, beautiful place and that your spiritual guide meets you there. Then you meditate. This exercise really helped me to get through that year; I don’t know how I would have survived it otherwise.

I was never consciously searching for a spiritual master, and did not even know of the existence of Sri Chinmoy. I just wanted to meet spiritually inclined people and learn some meditation techniques, so I started looking for classes.

When I found the Sri Chinmoy Centre, I realised that the guide in my visualisations bore a very striking resemblance to Sri Chinmoy.

Read more in Learning To Live.

Image by Prashphutita Greco at Sri Chinmoy Centre Gallery

I don’t mind admitting that beauty is crucial for my inspiration: in itself, and as a context for other experiences. Beauty owns a door through which I reach the vestibule of love for God, from which I can (potentially) access doors to other spiritual qualities: service, patience, trust, carefulness, willingness, (et al, ad infinitum). If I return through the door to beauty having experienced love for God in that central vestibule, that beauty is augmented.

Colours are nutrients. I crave them and forage for them. When I see a new combination or ingenious use, I gorge and am replete. A visual clash or lack of care unnerves me like an ugly noise. Like sounds or scents colours harbour harmony or dissonance; they breathe or bleed life and energy.

On the balance of my life’s priorities, it was the relative weight of beauty that enticed me to study art.

It was not glamorous.

Socks, books, hair, fingernails all betrayed my occupation. Everything I owned was ink-smirched or bore a stray blotch of colour in a circle of oil. However carefully the charcoal was stowed, a crushed stub would find itself a most inconvenient and disappointing home.

I walked eight miles a day on flimsy plimsolls, in all the relentless weathers of North Yorkshire, existing mainly on potatoes and donuts. Why? To pass a day in paint fumes, observing the scales of a dead fish, or callusing my young fingers with wire. Why?

They were bleak, hungry years, but they were beauty – inward and outward.

I went nowhere without a sketchbook, and nowhere without observing the shades, shapes and spaces in things. Fine art formed my first year, but textiles and costume followed. My tutor was ruthless, for which I am now glad – that built me self-assurance. For me her common comment was: “Nice maquette” when presented with a finished piece. Costume thrives on impermanence, thus its enchantment. It is now that I can see reverence for impermanence as a useful quality: to move on to higher perfection without attachment. Are we not ourselves just God’s maquettes?

We are fortunate indeed to have devised ways of reproducing colour. Gone the days when blue came only sparingly from the grinding of precious lapis lazuli, and the hues of cloth relied on the nearest available herb. At the click of a button we may change the shade or shape of anything.

Yet in God’s Lila the spectrum always jumped and spread in endless glory as it does now. The cornflower defeats even lapis in brilliance; the sunflower deafens a saffron robe. I am more content nowadays to see art in natural situ; un-transferred to canvas, and un-described by paint.

IMAGE:
Courtesy of my Mum: me making a happy mess of colour, age 2.

LINKS:
For an in-depth study of the relationship between art and spirituality, you may be interested in Art’s Life and the Soul’s Light by Sri Chinmoy

Alleluia: Qui timent Dominum
“He healeth those that are broken in heart: and bindeth up their wounds.”

This line shines from the page handed to me at the entrance of King’s College Chapel, part of a sung mass I am about to hear.

I have been here once before, many years ago, in the company of my Spiritual Master, Sri Chinmoy. He had come to pay homage to his own Guru, Sri Aurobindo, once a student at Cambridge University. I sat in these very pews and heard a similar mass. So much has changed in me since then, but the chapel stands quite the same: a vote of integrity in a changing world.

Almost everything reminds me of Sri Chinmoy, more now than when he was alive. The earthly loss of him, less than a month ago, is still raw in this fragile human heart. One thought is still enough to prick my eyes with tears. But just as the reminders of him come swift and hard from unexpected sources, so does solace to counter each blow. I am in Cambridge to meet with other students of Sri Chinmoy—about a hundred from Britain, Ireland and France. There is no sweeter solace than the family feeling amongst those I love.

King’s College Choir is considered one of the finest in the world, and I am especially fond of religious music. “We pray that you will sense something of the presence of God…” says the printed welcome. I pray the same, and that prayer is soon answered.

The ceiling is all half fans of stone, delicately crimped, sweeping to meet each other along the nave. It is as well to be indoors on a sunny day, if “indoors” has such a body of stained glass. The robes of saints glow as magnified rubies, sweet strong faces, soft leather shoes, strange serpents, rocks of orange gold, all the tales I do not know, as I was not raised a Christian. It is enough to gaze up to them and see the devotion that made them reflected onto me.

The Dante Quartet arrives accompanied by all its stately poise, then the choir in red and wide pleated white, some so tiny, barely old enough to leave their mothers’ sight. Schubert’s Mass in G could not have found a more subtle and receptive home, warm pure notes climbing the golden-white stone.

One—is he even ten years old?—commands a solo so brilliant, so strong, each note exquisitely tuned and executed, such as any cherub would envy. I study his features for the source of it, but find only a tiny boy, soft face bespectacled under a wide brown side-parting, standing quite firmly on the earth in sensible black shoes. Baffling.

The Bishop of Winchester treats us to a sermon on “Continual Godliness”: to maintain a general goodness in our own lives. Rather than thinking it the sole property of our elders and mentors, seeing it as something real and achievable. A most encouraging reminder.

Amazed, I remember the tune to one of the hymns. I disliked hymns at school, simply because they came at a very difficult time of life. Rather than giving me strength they always pulled me into melancholy—the jollier the worse somehow. But perhaps I am grown out of that phase: I hear only the jubilant praise of one God, my God, as we sing into a listening cavern of coloured glass.

Out in the autumn chill, we seem suddenly caught in an old movie; these views are such a dear part of England, and a dear part of my own memory. I breathe in their dignity and nobility, hoping to carry them home as inner souvenirs, so much more real and valuable than postcards.

The trees are in that state of perfection which only lasts two or three weeks. Red flames litter the roads, and yellow half-fans, delicately crimped. My walking companion tells me these particular yellow leaves were just so in the days of dinosaurs. I feel a sudden solace in that fact, and their mirroring the shapes of stone I had seen earlier; a hint at God’s Constancy perhaps.

We drink some tea and eat together, then watch a slide-show of Sri Chinmoy. To see him in health brings him so alive. To see his smile brings me tears: tears of thanks to God that I could spend these years absorbing all I could of his wisdom and joy.

Riding home I let my thoughts spin out from a melting sun as it disappears into a pine forest. Memories become a potent balm, softening the recent sense if loss. The heat of grief dissolves like the sun.