On Time and Heart Space

Tags

family, heart, letting go, patience, reason, space, time

A few months ago, I started hearing the word in fragments of mother-daughter conversations in my home. She had been physically out of school since spring break this year, and we had been mostly self-quarantined for several months until school officially ended towards the end of May. No summer camp. No meeting up with friends. No getting together with cousins. I guess, somewhere along the line, she decided that the home – or rather she, wanted another dog to give her and our seven year old puppy some company.

And so her search started with online portals, spreading the word among her friends, calling local shelters and so on. Her  requirements were fairly stringent and that shortened the list of possibilities considerably. Almost every other day, Mom would help her put in adoption applications when there was a “match” online. A few days later the email would come, saying that the “match” had already been adopted. Week after week, I could see her getting more and more disheartened. 

“Give it some time, honey. Be patient, and it will happen. The puppy you are supposed to get will show up.” Supposedly comforting words from a Dad who had tried to discourage her from the idea from the very beginning. I wasn’t sure that she was “ready” for another dog in the house. More like I was the one who wasn’t ready. So, after eight weeks of this roller coaster of applying and being denied, it seemed like she let the idea go for a few weeks. Mom kept making phone calls, leaving messages for folks.

Then, one lady from Indiana called back on July 1st afternoon and said – yes, there is availability. Possibility. Hope. 

So, we decided that we were going to make an eight hour roundtrip to see if things would work out. A few hours later, another phone call. A lady whom my wife had called six weeks ago was on the phone. She said that one of her puppies was ready to be re-homed. In the course of the conversation, we came to know that our current seven year old had the same bloodline as the one that she was trying to get re-homed. Not only that, she lived two hours away and she could bring the puppy to our home the next day as she was going to be passing through Cleveland on a road-trip to north-west Ohio. 

Too good to be true, yes? If I hadn’t been witness to all of it myself, I would have said “no way” too. The combination of yielding time and space to a heart set on a love-driven desire can allow for the universe to work in our favor. On July 3rd 2020, virtually seven years to the day that we adopted “Tucker” ( who was renamed “Bubbles”), we received his sister “Flower” (who was renamed “Bindi”). Unfettered joy, some tears, a lot of broken sleep patterns, and a huge rearranging of our lives has happened in the past week. 

In the small, last minute Zoom meeting on Friday, I asked Lucille – so, what’s new with you? I hadn’t told them any of this story yet. She said, “I just got finished reading the book – ‘When the Heart Waits’ – by Sue Monk Kidd. She talks about giving yourself the ‘chrysalis time’ in your life – time to let the caterpillar develop into the butterfly (of creativity).” How appropriate, I thought. Giving yourself time, allowing the universe to work in harmony with you when you sometimes feel as if the whole world is conspiring against you, your heart and your goals and dreams…

Chrysalis time for the heart and its space, the heartspace that is our constant companion. I dug up an Osho essay where he spoke about time, reason (the mind), and the heart:

Time exists only for the mind, for reason. For the heart there is no time; the heart exists in timelessness. So, the mind insists on haste, hurry, urgency – and the mind becomes tense. Things should happen instantly – such is the insistence of reason. But the heart knows no time, there are no clocks for it. That is why the heart exists timelessly and it can wait — infinitely. — Osho in Vedanta – The Art of Dying

So, here we are. Life teaches us so many lessons. It invites us to listen with the heart, to allow for our heartspace to simply be timeless. Timelessness invites us to disengage from the daily conflict of opposites. In timelessness, the heart of the caterpillar learns to rest in, allow for chrysalis time.

Kumud

P.S. After a few days, Bubbles and Bindi are starting to play together. His heart has accepted that Bindi is here to stay, that she is part of the family. All of us look forward to their football-like scrimmages at all hours of the day. He may outweigh here by a factor of five (that won’t last long!), but that doesn’t deter her from taking him on with the youthful heart and dynamic energy of one who knows not much about reason, time or space. 

P.P.S I invite you to join our weekly twitter conversation on Sunday, July 12 at 9amET in #SpiritChat. I may share a puppy photo or two with you, and give you the daily update of puppy mayhem. Yes, there will be questions and tea and cookies. It will be good to see some of you after a week’s hiatus… – @AjmaniK

Bubbles – the result, so far, of seven years of all-heart

The Heart’s Revival and Revitalization

Tags

family, friendship, healing, heart, revitalization, revival

The Amazing Race

Five airports, four flights, three airlines and two days later, the heart that began its journey on a pre-dawn, cold, rainy morning in NorthEast Ohio reached its destination in a sunny, warm, humid, sleepy hamlet of Kumarakom, south of the city of Kochi, in the southernmost state, Kerala, of India.

It felt like we had been in an episode of “The Amazing Race” over the past forty eight hours of traveling. Except that this was a one-team episode, and so we were the first to arrive at the destination…

The Hole in the Heart

It had been over two years, actually closer to three, that I had been back to India. The passing of my Mom in February 2016, the last of my two sets of parents (birth and sustenance), had created a small hole in my heart that had grown slowly bigger as the weeks turned to months, quarters and then years. After the two year mark, I had begun to wonder, when the road back home would open up to my heart again. The longer I stayed away, the weaker the pull to go back became.

My wife must have felt my fading away. In mid July, the visionary that she is of great intuition, made the decision. It was time to return. In a whirlwind of messages between close family and friends on WhatsApp, a location was found, advance deposits were made, plane tickets were bought, and seven families committed to two separate reunions. The stage was set for the heart.

A Resurgence Story

After having read all the reports of the massive flooding which had happened in August, I had expected Kochi city and her surroundings to show signs of damage everywhere. I was to learn from the local cab drivers that the shiny, gleaming airport terminal we had arrived in had been three feet underwater, and had to be shut down for four weeks. Everywhere we went, whether by auto-rickshaw, car or boat – not a single person complained about what had befallen them. You could see and feel that they were happy that we were visiting and investing in their recovery.

As we took multiple boat trips through the backwaters and on the massive lake, more stories of overcoming and resurgence filtered through. I asked questions of everyone on the lake house that we were staying in – the cleaning lady Asha, the cooking lady Jinu, the manager Aarokya, the boat guides. I asked questions of a mix of Hindus, Muslims and Christians, for Kerala is a state where they all blend together.

All of them would speak of their beautiful families, how much they were grateful for what (little) they had, and of how the floods – and their subsequent recovery from them – had brought them closer as communities.

Family Foundation – Revival Begins

As the long languid days of sitting by the pool unfolded, entranced by the lake as boats of all shapes and sizes slowly slid by like a knife through slightly warmed butter, I felt a warm glow beginning to heal my heart’s hole. The heart started to feel a revival, an increase in functional and emotional capacity. The first reunion, with my brother and sister’s family, laid the foundation for the revival. The feelings of disconnection that had grown with time and distance after my Mother’s passing, were rearranged and reframed like the floating hyacinths that constantly reconfigure themselves on the lake surface.

The heart felt closure, it felt rooted and anchored again. It was a bit like the houseboats that anchor themselves overnight on the lake, and whose solitary lights could be seen like a string of pearls in the distance every night – an entourage of twinkling stars brought down from the heavens onto the waters.

Reunion with Friends – Heart Revival

And as if the revival with the family reunion wasn’t enough, what followed during the reunion with four friends from undergraduate engineering school (and their families) was an even greater closure of the heart’s hole. The five of us have a friendship, a kinship that goes back over thirty years. It has sustained the test of time and space, grown through our weddings, our children’s births, our travels across the world with our businesses and careers.

When you gather the energy of five families, in a five-bedroom lake house, where there is not much else to do but to sit around and swim in the energy of each other, a healing synergy surges through every heart. The five of us are like the five elements, and every time they come together, the limits to our creativity seem to be transcended.

For those of you who have read this far, I am grateful to you for coming along on this journey with me. I share with you with the intent that somewhere in this retelling of my personal revival, you find inspiration to be led to a heart’s revival of your own. I also hope, that when your heart’s hole does close, that you will share a bit of your revival journey with us.

For we shall all be grateful to draw inspiration from the resurgence of your submerged heart, your resilience, your heart’s revival.

Namaste,

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter conversation with the #spiritchat community on twitter – Sunday, January 13th at 9amET / 730pm India. I will step up to host, and I look forward to hearing stories about your heart’s revival. I will bring the tea and the questions… your presence is much looked forward to 🙂 – Kumud

Permalink: https://spiritchat140.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/the-hearts-revival/

The Spirit of Family

Tags

family, spirit, spiritchat

As social media goes, it took me a while to get the ‘hang’ of twitter. I ‘stopped and started’ a few times on the platform until I found a couple of friends who ‘adopted’ me. They treated me kindly, gave me space, and let me learn, make mistakes as I tried to ‘figure it out’. After a few months of being ‘active’ on twitter, talking to a couple of folks about the lack of a ‘group chat’ which engaged in discussion of spiritual matters, I decided to start #SpiritChat.

It has been a terrific three months. And some of the folks that attend the Sunday group chats, and tweet with the #SpiritChat tag through the week, have become great friends. We converse about spiritual matters and more, see each other in chats hosted by common friends, and learn little details about each other every day. Some friendships have gone beyond twitter into other social media like Facebook, to email, to voice conversations on the phone and other means of communication.

It wasn’t until I was in the middle of an overseas trip to India ~ visiting the land of my birth and the land where most of my family still resides, that I realized that some of the folks on twitter are slowly rising to ‘family-like’ status. They are influencing me with their words, their thoughts, and their acts of kindness. Some days, I have meaningful conversations with some of them almost as much, if not more, than with some of my offline friends and family.

So, as I sat around a table full of my immediate family, and just my immediate family, on Thursday evening (India time), it struck me that it had been many years since all of us had been together like that. Yes, a couple of key members were missing, but this was as close as it got to a Thanksgiving meal ~ albeit, celebrated a week early 🙂 There was great conversation, laughter, and food for memories, which will sustain my spirit for a while.

I woke up with these questions ~ what makes my ‘blood’ family (who I don’t see but once a year) different from my ‘online’ family, in terms of ‘level of communication’? Are they really that much different, particularly in the realm of providing ‘food for my spirit’? How can an online relationship, which starts with the seed of a conversation, grow into a ‘family-like’ relationship? What factors are necessary for this to happen? How big is your twitter ‘family’? Is it possible to ‘celebrate’ with online families in the same way as we celebrate with ‘real-world’ families?

I invite you to join my guest-hosts @JoanneCipressi and @MartinaMcGowan (yes, they have joined my twitter ‘family’ category :)) to discuss the ‘Spirit of Family’ at 9am ET/2pm GMT on Sunday, 20th November.

Love well. Live well. Be well. Be with family!

Kumud

P.S. Please leave a comment about the “Spirit of Family” if you cannot join us at the appointed hour. We would love to hear from you. Thank you.