Srivi Kalyan - Pulse

Benediction

3/24/2017

Benediction - I keep coming back to this word in the last few years. Perhaps it is a fitting word to use after a visit to the Banyans by the Valley school. I remember reading Krishnamurti as a teenager and often being moved by his use of the word. Sitting by this banyan and spotting a golden oriole in the tree across; being drenched in the warm glowing light of the sun resting itself on the ground through the canopy of leaves; immersed in bird calls and the strange silence that beckons one among trees, what could be a better word than benediction.

I have grown fond of these dry deciduous landscapes in the last three years. From Bandipur to Lepakshi, the land calls to me in its reddish golden hues. Full of surprises as the seasons change, the banyans are sanctuaries across this landscape, sanctuaries of form and space, of life and energy, of hope and conversations.

What are these roots if not our ancestors standing and watching us pass by! One is embraced in a million different parts and pieces by graceful rivers, lakes, mountains, trees, birds, animals... and all those parts and pieces, in all those fragments of human living, become a healed whole in this benediction of life. At this point, you know it is fine to let go and flow into that greater being and the multiple human selves within selves with their incessant noise cease to exist. Quietude unfolds and the mind stills.

Sacred roots

3/8/2017

Much can flow between a tree root, branch, earth and self. Standing there and touching a hanging vine in the sacred forest, I was linked to all life that lived there. Pulsing, rhythmic, gentle, vibrant life force. It doesn't seem strange to read any of the ancient texts and tales where beasts and birds, mountains and rivers were brothers and sisters and extended family. All forests are indeed sacred and I won't be surprised if a goddess or a fairy, a salabhanjika or a pixie walked upto me in one of them. For hidden among rich moss and lichen is the vibrant story of secrets of the forest. A sudden flight of bird, spider webs dazzling in dappled light, frogs at the edge of the stream, unexpected calls of moon touched stones and warblers. Rhodendrons blooming in all their splendor and lazy butterflies and bees finding their way to them. Life, abundant life, magical, mysterious, sacred, and absolutely normal and real. Alas! What we have lost in perception, in our ability to sense, in our abilities to belong, to be, to cherish, to share!

The forests ask for a contiguous line, will our cities give way?

Mawphlang - 22-26th Feb 2017

Rootedness

1/21/2017

Rethinking the Creative Process

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again...

to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Rainer Maria Rilke―

As I talk to each of you, my students and friends across courses, workshops, conversations, I hear so many different voices, different ways of being. Sometimes I hear thoughtful wonderment, at other times I hear grief, confusion and anger. I also hear contentment and joy, worries and fears. But as I talk to each of you, I am thrilled and at the same time quiet, for it is tremendous the energies, insights and questions that you bring to our conversations. Some of you are confident of what you speak, some of you are wandering and yet most of you do not trust your intuition. I wonder what it is about our education system that has created this dissonance within you. Your body and mind are separate and each cannot inform the other except for basic functions. Your head is split into a hundred pieces, fragmented that your thoughts and intuitions cannot meet. And yet amidst all this madness, there lies within you the most beautiful and powerful of insights that can transform you and change the world. In order to relink yourself to your deepest truth, you must learn to trust, fall down and root yourself. Then you will find ways to be immensity and vastness, intensity and lightness and much more. You will find ways to become banyan tree, river, ocean, mountain and endless sky.

Trust in your creative process by linking it back to the earth. You reside in this tropical belt where life is abundant and rich; watch out for the millions of creativities that are generously surrounding you. How could it be possible that you are struggling when the beautiful aparajita(sangu poo) creeper finds her way across garden, hillside, wall and iron bars!

Let go, trust, find the stillness in your deep inner core and let the creative flow! Make! Let your body, mind and spirit come together with your intelligence. And in this rootedness, find for yourself an alternative creative process! And then like the spider - urnanabha - you spin from within your own core, a zillion different creativities!

Srivi
January 22, 2017

Gentle Time

2/23/2016

It is a loud culture that we have created. Loud in its visuals, loud in its noise levels, loud even in unspoken thought. Loud in work; loud even in rest. Loud in its restless desires, loud in its fears and anger, in its despair and its happiness. So loud that it shuts down the gentle passage of time, the gentleness of the subtler life that abounds around us. I watch the banyan sprawling away in grandeur and yet there is immense silence around its tremendous creativity. And then I come out to see the high rises, loud in their polished splendor, loud in their needs and greed, loud in their emptiness of earth and sky. And I crave for gentler time; Time where each thought rises in the roots of the banyan, in miles of sea and sand, in breeze and stark winter, in stillness. Time, when creativity is not a 24X7 workday of respite-less churning as is the case with most of our lives. Time when we can relish the ground on which we tread and the air we breath. It is not that we work to make our ends meet, to feed our families, to find joy that bothers me, but that we can do it so mindless of all that we destroy in the wake of it, including the very air we breath, the very food we eat. We are so loud that we cannot sense the destruction, leave alone being well read about it. Much like the last calls of species that are going extinct, the voices of the gentle among us will disappear too for human time relentlessly pursues destruction. To learn to be quieter, still, reduce our production, find subtlety and simplicity in our daily lives is more important work than what a lot of us do. To learn to flow in gentle time; cosmic and earthy, seasonal, diurnal, nocturnal, cyclical, eternal is perhaps a greater challenge of our times than endless productivity in the name of work and creativity.

Tigress; Unbound strength
gently caresses the earth
in stealth and stride

Garden

11/15/2015

Hibiscus opens,
A spiral unwinds
Turns back into herself
Twenty days

Compost
Slowly generating
From kitchen waste
Breathing back into tulsi
A month or more

In my balcony
Ten plants
We breathe in
breathe out
All morning

Rain beats against the grill
Slipping into red earth
And she turns back into herself
Quietly in the night,
Hibiscus

Grief

4/8/2015

Embellished,
Raw, Hidden,
Brutal and wishful,
Crawling its ways through opposites
self pity or 'righteous' anger
Cushioned in new age healing!

It can't move to rich sorrow
for it's too violent,
It can't move forward or backward
neither to a sappy level of a whine
nor the agony of physical pain
or just simple tears.

Ah but it is fine
because some beading work
would embellish it
make it pretty
a few threads of embroidery
and it may herald the entry of a new artist

Grief,
loud, thundering, insistent
politely woven in
gauze like lace
the wound, a brilliant red,
raw, refined art work

for the initiated,
the uninitiated devotees
singing the praises of surface emotion.
Grief plunging into itself
like the kitchen knife
slicing unsuspecting cabbage.

Garnished, embellished, raw,
provocative,
sexy, elegant,
graceful, hidden
crawling, plunging,
Silent!

Bandipur

9/11/2014

The banyans in monsoon mist
Ah, stillness takes root
far inside the earth,
permeating through my senses...
As longing reaches out and touches
open grasslands hidden in the forest,
The tiger prowls by somewhere near.

The banyan breathed me in early yesterday morning
and I found myself in bamboo growth, leaf, shiver
Only to become camouflage
Of stripes
And tiny wings in momentary rest
Oh but, she hurled me out of bamboo
Root and all
And I was left
Soul in tango
With the tiniest black
Frog

Soon lost
breathing as mushroom, monitor
and water holes...
shy gaur
Swinging their heads in graceful rhythm
Babblers, warblers and the golden oriole...
Oh she took me far into the earth,
All the way to the night sky...
The banyan
Roots and all, she took me in
And with a careless flick
Sitting in the bus back home,
I was uprooted...

State of mind interwoven with work and ... life

6/22/2014

The strange roads
of culture
of people’s songs
of the colours that their woven garments
fade into
in the flowing
rivers of life
the structures
of enclosed
spaces called
home
breathing
into the wilderness
beyond
encroached by
strange developments
enveloped
in the quiet disappearance
of a natural world
of old ways of living
of lost voices
forgotten threads of past
of stories
that are
to strangely become
cultural artifacts

who then is me
in artistic tapestry
of a designer’s language
learning and teaching
gathering
and dispersing
a tree,
a root
sands
in the
winds
of time
travelling
carefully
in silent
waters
within the soul
in dance with the
rivers
and her tributaries
on ancient desert lands
of
life,
undivided,
blossoming;
a narrative
in
change,
mutation,
growth,
loss
disappearance
deep sorrow,
poetry
and engagement
within
a strange
withdrawn
detachment
behold!
the strange roads
within
in that rare
stillness
of
existence!

Richness

5/1/2014

Some days, I must write. Writing is that strange ray of hope, the one thread that holds me together on the most disconcerting of days. And the 'disconcerting' is not a new event, an issue in particular, it is like the sum of parts, slow growing moss, except that moss, I associate with freshness. 'Disconcerting' both metaphorically and in truth has been a visit to the landfill, the trash bins, the waste basket at home. Somehow, like an ominous symbol, the trash that we generate seems like a barometer of who we are, in our brightest, most wonderful, beautiful human dreams.

For years now, I fear a strange blankness within me. It is as if I have fallen out of love, of the simplicity and naivety of people's lives. I have fallen out of love of cultures, history, fragile human hopes recognizable in their monumental accomplishments in architecture, religion, family. It is strange to club it all together, the quiet growth of an individual species in its many forms, its most humble huts and greatest temples, no more complex than an ant hill, no less wonderful than a weaver bird nest. And yet, I fear this blankness, this inability to embrace and be in love. This worry and prayers for the birth of yet another human child, replacing the celebration and wonder I see in others around me.

I walk out of my home, another human city, beautiful with the sea, the neem and the banyan interwoven, and then all the houses, the glorious dark-complexioned faces transforming into shy riveting smiles, the malls, the unending shops, the traffic, the new metros.... and it bothers me, the sheer number of people, there is a claustrophobia of existence that fills me up, chokes me. The weight of my own physical being on this bridge of life feels like a travesty of evolution. I can see negotiable spaces all around me, I can see compassionate loving souls finding their own ways meaning-making, helping, supporting, but within me, I am disturbed, for I have become numb to everyday sadness and pain. Almost, almost I find pettiness in our human worries, our endless entangled desire for growth, our naivety in our beliefs, even harsher than our blind belief in religion and science. As yet another parent comes and shares their tender worries about their child's schooling, learning, college admissions, financial stability, a safe home, I wish I could stand by telling them that those worries are deeply meaningful, but I only feel sorrow, sorrow for a bird whose name I don't know, a vanishing tail disappearing behind a forest slowly transforming into an air-conditioned mall, a railway line, a computer chip, a mobile phone; a life moving faster and faster, a vision of human success blinded by a tenderness and love of family bonds, friendships, sentiments and courage as much as it is bound by human greed.

I find it marvelous to watch those people who can find ways to negotiate these rich, interwoven stories of people and nature, steering life towards balance, health, safety. I try to find a space for myself within these paths. And yet, I resist, I fight, I wail, I cry, I am numb, I fall out of love again and again, trying in desperation to find a way back.

I seek to find words that can describe this sorrow, this inability to find intimacy. I wait.

At a school I teach, a second grader suddenly spots the space between two leaves; at another college I do a workshop in, young people create spaces interwoven with nature, desiring space for thinking, reflecting, conversation; a young man I mentor talks to me trying to find words to describe the stillness that permeates his work... and in these moments, I find the same desperation, a sudden spectacular acknowledgement of the unspoken life, a life that can never be reached by our chosen vision of successful growth, for the paths are vastly different. A strange craving for silence takes over, and writing, once again my saviour helps me navigate this painless emptiness, this fear and anger, this incredible sorrow for the limited beauty of human life; this brash love for our own creativity, the richness of which our trash bins exemplify.

Perhaps I will fall in love... fall in love with the richness of this mess, with the power of the same human kindness that has taught me to see, perhaps... a year from now, I will have different words to speak of my despair. Meanwhile, I wait...

Reclaiming

4/18/2014

And that evening, last September, I watched Alarmel Valli dance to Alarulu Kuriyaga, an Annamayya Krithi. What touched me most was the sacred sensuality, the glory of being alive, the playful wondrous nature of the body in movement. Strength and fluid grace intertwined with joy and delightful embrace of one's existence! The sacred and the profane, intertwined with no divisive lines.

As I watched, I knew that the sparkling gems on the anklets of the goddess were lighting me up from within. In a strange sort of way, I knew, here was the clue, the energy, the healing source for reclaiming my own tired body. As if infused by new life essence, I remained in a trance for many days just letting that dance flow into my veins.

And slowly I have watched my body come alive after years in pain, a reclamation, a vessel to contain my spirit, a spirit to contain my energies...

Quiet, thankful and moved by the immense power of Bharatanatyam, the incredible meaning of practice, the beauty of a tradition that has delved so far into 'Beingness' in all its forms of art. Thanks Akka for the deep change you have brought into my life.

Reclaiming,
like the roots of the ficus
growing in glory
on concrete human accomplishments

a strange thread of physical movement,
intertwines with my architecture
reclaiming,
the earthy essence,
threading me back
to the sky
as if we had never
been apart,

and the waters of life
intermingled with
the scent of the earth,
the tenacity of the tree,
the gentle lullaby of
stars on the river bed
flow,
relentlessly...

reclaiming me
back to
the earth
and in
reverie,
I clutch
a dream passing by...

A remnant of a past tale
earthern pot
mud house
wet ground
life abundant
Fluid grace
of dance...

Tyagesa reveling in movement
in the affectionate glance
of the Goddess,
embraces me
and sprinkles all that he holds
into fine dust!

I scatter
and a thousand
stars
reclaim me...

Srivi Kalyan

Srivi Kalyan works at the fluid and exciting intersection of arts, media and education. She is the Founder-Director of Fooniferse, a company that enables a 360 degree approach to working in the arts through a confluence of arts, education, media, design and self-reflection.

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