Searching for the self

“I am in a serious transition phase,” says Lara, gazing earnestly at the interloper who dared disturb her forest solitude to write about … “Yes, about what? My life? It is not interesting. My transition? But I have been in transition all my life! Is this really the moment...?”

She finally agrees to share. Her early days? “I am one half of a monozygotic twin. And there is a third sister, born two years earlier. We were always called ‘the triplets’. As it was impossible to distinguish me from my twin, for years my mother would put me on the left side in all portrait photographs, so that she would remember later (“Lara on the Left”). But there was more than an outer resemblance. For there was oneness too. Twins have a natural tendency to sublimate their minds to the other mind, and are often not able to distinguish between a single mind, a single ego and two minds, multiple egos. I still answer to ‘Sara’, the name of my twin sister, and for many years also to the name of my older sister. Finding my own identity was a huge problem. For years I was searching for autonomy, for the integrity of my ‘own’ self, breaking and reconstituting the twin ego-self to find my own. It was my first hard work. Once I wrote a treatise on the praxis of being a twin, called Twin Logics, in which I used different metaphors to help a non-twin understand what it means to be a twin. Sri Aurobindo’s “the one in two and the two in one” were words I had been using all my life – though, of course, in a different context. It was in this search for the autonomy of self that my first poetic catharsis came, as a help to work through the double identity and find my own.”

So poetry came at an early age?

“The poetic strain started when I was around eight years old. I loved reading the dictionary, tracing the etymology of words. Later, for my college graduation, my grandmother presented me with the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, printed on ‘bible paper’, where each page held nine pages of the original 20-volume edition. The book came with a magnifying glass; otherwise you couldn’t read the sentences and the etymologies in even smaller fonts. I read it like a dilettante, constructing lateral significances that never existed, and enjoying the history of words. That was a natural introduction to the world of poetry.

“But I never really studied poetry. I went to art school, but for a long time I couldn’t find my medium. I did drawing, sculpture, installation work, but felt most at home in working with bricks and stone and doing landscaping. I took a poetry class for one semester, taught by a lovely teacher. She gave me her personal copy of Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, a book that contains his pivotal writings on art, its role in human life and culture, and its relationship to thinking and truth. This became my favourite book; it may have sealed my calling as a poet.

“But that was not the daily work. I loved masonry and landscape construction, and after I left school I found work doing that for the wealthiest of the wealthy in New York City. It involved very hard physical labour, but I enjoyed it: the heavier the better. But there was something wrong. It was not the pay, which was vastly insufficient – I barely survived, living in the one of the worst neighbourhoods of New York, the one with the second highest crime rate. The problem was that I was working for a class of people who were living in ivory towers, and who look down on labourers who entered their building through filthy back basements using service elevators. I liked being dirty and was amused at being frowned upon by the wealthy when I walked through their pristine apartments to their landscaped gardens. It was even more fun to speak to them in a way which made them question what kind of labourers they had hired. But in the end, I realised that I wanted to work for people – like my crew members – in a public domain, not work for the rich and wealthy and experience the inner angst and outer pain that comes up when labour is not respected.

“So I went back to school, this time to a prestigious place, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, to study architecture and so gain tools that would allow me to free myself for this work and not be ‘behind bars’ for the rest of my life working for the wealthy without any kind of inner satisfaction. But MIT was a mistake. I went there because there was a particular masonry engineering professor I wanted to learn from, and that worked relatively well. Through him I got to work in Switzerland, Singapore and Ethiopia and a handful of other places in between, doing some fancy free-form architecture design and building a few affordable housing prototypes. I even started a PhD, but I quit when I realised that it was a façade and a fallacy. I didn’t want to play that game.

“But it was painful to be at MIT, which is one of the most un-poetic places in the world, at least at the architecture department. I did write poetry in those years, but it was always an extremely painful process, like a hernia that pops out. There was a deep catharsis in the closure of each piece. My twin sister used to say, ‘I just want to weed my garden, but you want to weed your soul’ and that my work was ‘like a shaft of light falling through a window of an abandoned, shattered and dusty house’. So for years there was that forceful, painful effort to bring things out.

“Auroville came up because of the Auroville Earth Institute. I had known about the existence of the Earth Institute many years earlier, since my New York years, but at that time I was broke and couldn’t come to India. That changed after I left the US, when I was building catalan and other vaults in Ethiopia. I came to Auroville to study the earthen vaults which the Earth Institute was building. So, indirectly, the mistake of going to MIT brought me to Auroville. In hindsight, I have come to realise that all my mistakes conspired to bring me straight here. Mother uses our mistakes and all our gaping wounds that lie dormant within us to capitalize on the moment She sees fit.

“I worked as a co-director for the Auroville Earth Institute for almost eight years, primarily involved with earthen architecture and construction projects, in particular those with thin-shell masonry vaulting. I also gave courses on the structural theory of masonry and on the construction of arches, vaults and domes.

“And now – back to my roots – I am working at the edge of Darkali Forest in the International Zone, doing forestry work. I mulch, I fell dead trees, and I prune. Tree pruning is like a zen art. When I am pruning trees and look up at the canopy, I let nature speak to me. There is no active mind, the mind doesn’t interfere in the action. Then there comes an automatic discernment of which branch to prune and where. I listen to what the trees want. Sometimes the pruning work is done to let light in, so that the indigenous species can grow and develop. At other times I correct a shrub which is twisted and causes damage to other plants; you prune and it all becomes different, like a sculpture of canopy.

This time of year there is a need for ground protection so I increase soil cover wherever I can. All that for me is karma yoga: the mind not interfering, there is a free flow between mind and action and giving up mind and serving something that is higher. That service, for me, is to the Earth Mother.

“During the time at the Earth Institute and now working in the forests, the poetic expressions have intensified. I am writing about stone, water, nature, the metaphysics of nature, essentially an introspection. For many years of my life I would have called it self-searching; but it is a spiritual search.

Home grows in the forest

The home, it grows in the forest –

Self-germinating, all effort joyful,

Seeded by the ancestors, fostered

By the Mother, and offered by she

Who dreamed before me.

What future lies in this forest hut

The place to go and do my yoga –

To trim the plants and sweep the

Stones, bring creativity into being

Rise with the sun and set with the stars

Surrounded by the light and the life...

The ancient sages sought such places

Turned away from the world, to gain

Enlightenment. The shamans too –

Who did their work between the planes

Of the living and the lost. Is it in solitude

That this yoga must be done?

February 1, 2019

“The poetic intensity has changed. For years I used poetry to air my own dirty laundry, attempting to clean the inner channel so that there was no garbage on the road. I’ve discovered that this is an unending process. Every single day I have to clear the way, actively, but gently. The voiding of – or rather the facing of – the self used to come as a painful exercise; but now it has become a gentle observation of oneself, and it helps in empathizing with others.

Human weakness

Our greatest human weakness, we have

Little imagination for the Divinity in people

Even those we love, we want to support

Yet constrain to a prison of our expectations.

We patronize, appeal to lower natures, we

Make it difficult for them to step beyond, into

Their own natures – vast and unfathomable.

Most human love smothers in this way.

To empty ourselves, approach others with

No expectations, speak to the luminous vastness –

This is beyond our expectations for ourselves.

Who are we to be surrounded by light and love?

We feel we must protect ourselves from

The precipice of disappointment, and so

We never approach the cliff of the Divine

In others. We shield our eyes.

We never look out over the luminous sea,

And never jump into the cold, hard waters

Of Divine bliss. To do so takes enormous courage

And openness to the presencing of Divine in us all.

4 April 2019

Slow Emergence of the Dawn

Was it ever there?

Did I imagine?

How can the rising sun

Set? Patience –

Brings us through her retreat

She is there, still emerging – yet

With soul and spirit so shy, as not

To reveal her full glory at once.

The first burst awakens the heart

But her full emergence takes time.

Close your eyes, and open again

There she is – coming into being.

Brighter every moment –

At each stage, eyes widen

With shock of love to receive her.

Does she rise for me, oh Lord?

There is only the rising –

In each and every one of us.

“And then I write in solitude and silence. If I am not totally still, if my mind is active and makes an effort to produce things and tries to write poetry, I stop. I have to silence my mind. Then the flow comes, effortlessly. When the effort is there, I have to stop. When there is no effort, there is no judgement either; then there is just the bliss of creation. Then the “good” poetry comes. And then there comes the opening to the true essence of your being, who you are behind the ego formation.”