Short Step

Today is Day Two of the spring celebration of the festival Navaratri, nine nights of the goddess.  It’s mostly a celebration of the goddess Durga, whose name comes from the Sanskrit for ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’.  (Look at that hair in the picture of her in the 1 o'clock position!)  She’s the promise that resides in all of us that we can be more, but it’s going to be rough going.  On this very Day Two in my back yard, we’ve had just enough sunshine and just enough rain to get my tulip blooms out. 

They’ve been waiting since their last bloom, since I last folded their leaves down, through the heat of a mosquitoed summer, through the fall Navaratri, through the bare winter, creating and storing in their bulbs the potency and potential of their short-lived blooms that will show in the next few days.  At the height of their beauty, they’ll be visited by the bees, and then it will be a short step from the bloomed tulip to a bare stem and exposed stamens and stigmas.  She will have put on her best outfit, only for it all to come off again, to be undone by her own beauty.  For the sake of getting to do it again, of reinvention, of fertilization, to make something more than was there before. 

Every time the weather changes, I vow (vrata) to step up my fashion and beauty game.  Yes, it is a sacred vow and worthy of the Sanskrit word.  So many women must feel the same way, as the fashion weeks and 5-pound issues of Vogue arrive in late February and August.  These are the times of the year when it’s easy for life to feel hard (dukha).  You’re either really cold and miserable and over it or you’re really hot and sweaty and need some relief.  So, that first sunshiney day of about 75 degrees is cause for celebration.  We even have an Argentinian friend who looks forward to El Dia de Pezon, the spring day when ladies throw off their scarves and jackets and run around with just a couple of flimsy layers on their top parts.  They are dressed perfectly in their nakedness. 

Navaratri’s goddess celebration, for me, commemorates a period of time when life shifts from feeling tough to feeling like a girl has options, that she might choose to adorn herself and present herself in her best light.  Maybe she’s a little more colorful, maybe a little more studious, but she looks and feels more refined.  No sooner do I get my nails and hair done and my lips painted on that there will be packages to open and wind blowing and the eating of lipstick (insert commercial for lip stuff made from ingredients that you wouldn’t mind actually eating).  This isn’t about trying to stay perfect all the time, but rather about recognizing that lying barely underneath what looks like the most beautiful and refined version of something is that very thing’s hardship, its effort, its edginess and vices. 

You see, it’s a short step from a yoga teacher who looks strong and like she has it all together to a girl with an eating disorder who was doing nothing more enlightened than looking for more time at the gym.  It’s a short step from a sensitive, giving friend to the scared person who wants to control those around her so that they don’t leave.  A short step from loyalty and protection to being a holding tank for resentment.  From our most outwardly presentable selves to our most primal natures, those techniques that have preserved our survival on the most raw level. 

These nights of the goddess invite me to compassion – for myself, for my friends, and for my family.  They invite me to plant the very seeds that were saved from the most fertile experiences in the last growing period, filling me with hope for something that has not yet been and dread of all the work it will take to get there.  Most of all, thought, they excite me to revel in the gorgeousness, knowing that it is already being eaten by time.