Dancing in Thin Air

 

Last week a book arrived in the post – new translations of poems by a 14^th century Kashmiri mystic, Lalla, who danced her prayers, naked, through the streets of her village.

Whoever wrapped the book had taken great care:  it was veiled in deep purple tissue, tied with garden twine into which a stalk of fresh lavender had been artfully placed.  After a long run of drab stay-at-home days, it was almost too lovely to open.  The lavender still held its perfume.  I hoped that it would linger for hours.

I left it unopened on the counter, with all of its hidden promises.  In some mysterious way, it grounded me.  Though I’m still unwise in many things, I know enough about life’s gifts to know that they can’t be rushed.  I must simply wait until they are ready to open in their own time.

The night before had been full of troubling dreams.  These days, I don’t know a soul who isn’t assailed by a wildly unsettled night life.  Dreams of stampeding animals, of drowning children, of crying out for help and being ignored.  Or of wandering through old homes filled with strangers.

If many of us are moving through our daylight hours repainting rooms and replacing soaker hoses in order to stay anchored to a sense of purpose, our nights tell a different story — we are out-of-synch, vulnerable as open wounds to unfinished business, wrenched by long-lost stories that are returning with open hands.  I have found myself in any number of conversations, when suddenly the person I am speaking with breaks down in tears.

In our shared rawness and uncertainty only one question seems on point:  What will enable us to find a path forward into the kind of transformation that truly matters??  How can we open our hearts when we are busy with our fears, and nightmare images, and the all-too-suddenly-apparent contradictions, stallings, and excuses that stand between my current life and the life I am meant to live?

I discovered this small book, Lalla Unveiled: The Naked Voice of the Feminine, through my friend Linda Hoffman https://www.lindahoffman.com/blog/2020/6/14/lalla.    Everything about the book is a labor of love, and a work of art.  It is the 20-year project of poet and yogi Jennifer Sundeen  https://jennifersundeen.com/poetry/ illustrated by Linda’s beautiful watercolors.  When Linda described Lalla’s mystical teachings as the journey from despair to inner liberation, I was drawn to learn more.

Before this, I’d known only that Lalla is considered one of the major saints and prophets of her time, not just because of her mature mystic wisdom, but because she found the courage to follow a path from suffocating personal confinement to transformed presence.  As she faced her own demons, and very slowly grew in insight and wisdom, she changed the lives of all she encountered.

At a time and place where women were no better than slaves, chattel, useful for sex and housework and little more, Lalla was married off at the age of 12 to a much-older man.  The story goes that she was abused, misused, and nearly extinguished by the life she’d entered into through no choice of her own.

At the age of 24 or thereabouts, she — boldly, amazingly — left.  She found her way to the spiritual teacher, Sidda Srikanth, where she stayed for many moons.  A condition of her spiritual training required that she survive on alms, moving from place to place by foot and alone, until she became a teacher and a spiritual leader in her own right.

As I pondered her life all through that day, I wondered:  what steadied her?  What gave her the courage to persevere in so socially-defiant a path?  Was there lavender on those mountains passes she walked alone, I wondered?  Some sweet perfume, rooted in rock and rough soil, that gave her gladness and offered a symbol of the path she was following, from arid captivity to spiritual flowering?

During her years of study and practice, Lalla gradually unwapped the binding cloths of custom — even those of the traditional religious thinking of her time.  She did not agree with the prevailing idea that the world was illusory (maya), passive and merely transition to a higher state of being.

The visions that came to her – spiritual wisdom – arrived as our dreams do, from beyond the realm of material reality.  Instead of distancing herself from the influx of images, she came to believe that they were the expressions of a universal consciousness, and that the path to transformation required her to allow their energy to enter into her waking thoughts, and experience them deeply, with openness and vulnerability.  When we can set aside our resistance to change and our ego’s agendas, she believed, the messages that come to us from a deeper level of reality offer the maps by which to navigate to new insights, abundance, and healing.

Lalla found a way to express this spiritual insight in a new form of prayer:  by dancing, using her flesh and bones and blood, in embodied words and song.  In this way, she birthed an art form that celebrated the inseparability of matter and spirit.

Lalla and her remarkable story have so much to teach us, in our own confinements and contradictions.  Her wisdom is that transformation is less about resolving the conflict between our dreams and our reality, and more about allowing — allowing our dreams to sink in and nourish us — not forcing, not rushing to credible analysis, but simply trusting that something new will eventually emerge, if we are attentive and open, vulnerable and willing.

The day on the wane, I took the book into the garden, where my own lavender is a riot of purple wreathing the asters, zinnea, and coral bells.  The bees were dizzy with glee, swarming in the final light.  Soon, I will harvest several clusters, tie them with my own twine, and hang them to dry so that I can make sachets for my winter drawers.  But for now, I sat amidst the perfume, allowing the questions posed by my own dreams to simply rise and drift in a peaceful moment.  The essential activity of reverie, of contemplation, thrives best, as Lalla knew, in the presence of nature.

I unwrapped the book, opened it and read:

To know the Self is a boat towed upon the ocean.

When will God ferry me across?

The rope is frayed, the clay pot uncooked, the water ebbs.

My soul is yearning to go home.

Our poems and paintings and our purest prayers emerge much like flowers.  From darkness and struggle, surrender, and allowing.  From being okay with stepping outside of all that we have known until now, becoming the presence that receives mystery, and in doing so, discovers peace.  Perhaps, even, one day to dance naked in the streets …