Poetry, Photography, Nature, Life, Indian Philosophy

Cloud Ruminations

A poem and essay about the strands of nature and the pulsation of reality

Liquid mesas of languid light hover low over golden pools of ocean. At the horizon, the waters darken to indigo.

Rivers of clouds? Or rivers of sea?

It’s hard to say which is the foreground and which is the subject.

Like Indian silk or a fine Turkish carpet held up to the slant of the sun streaming through the window,

you turn it this way or tilt it the other,

and embroidered birds, fine things woven by deft hands, emerge from the background.

They were there all along.

We just didn't see them through the explosion of tufted petals and twining designs of leaf and stem.

Designs handed down through the generations, designs soon to be lost to the automation of looms….

I am here. I am now. But who am I really?

Am I truly different from the parakeet peering through the canopy at the changing landscape of its world?

Or the white rhino who has to trudge just a little bit further for water each year?

Or the humpback whale who’s learned to bubble net fish solo?

Mushrooms with vapored caps, and an old woman’s skin, gathered with wrinkles at her wrist. Undulations of a nubbed cotton sari, discarded on the bedroom floor. That’s what the clouds look like now.

Or you can focus on the ocean, its hammered tin surface melding into shadowy realms gathered beneath the cumulous hand of creation.

Ephemeral. Transcendant. Enduring.

These are the strands of nature woven into the tapestry.

We are the bird. We are the background. We are the loom.

We are of the clouds.

And we are the blood of the very earth.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence….I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine….We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime in man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty; to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beautitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

On a recent flight to Maui, I looked down at the expanse of sea and clouds and endless horizons over the open ocean and was struck by the lack of separation of the three. Where does one really begin and the other end?

I am so small in the grand scheme of the universe.

And yet, I am — and you are too — a part of the pulsing blood of creation.

Mysticism and awe seem to me to be a “breaking through” of a border, an expansion into another realm. And so often, this realm appears to us in nature.

But what is this boundary, really? Perhaps it is breaking through the walls of our perceptions of singularity into a more all-encompassing vision of unity. Perhaps it is a glimpse of Universal Consciousness at play in the world around us.

Mystics, poets, and ordinary seekers have long inhabited these zones of mystical experiences, these places hovering between the world of the manifest and the unmanifest.

And they have described these journeys into places of light and vibration, into places which you can’t see with your eyes, but which you can see, and into places that you cannot touch, but that touch you, and which leave you forever changed once you have crossed their borders.

A teacher I studied with in graduate school, Mark Dyczkowski, author of The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, taught about prakāsa, the light of consciousness.

As “pure ‘luminosity,’” prakāsa “constitutes the essence and ultimate identity (ātman) of phenomena” and the fact that anything appears at all is due to this light of consciousness, which “bestows on all things their evident, manifest nature.” Dyczkowski tells us that the Universe is “nothing but the shining of the Light upon itself.”

In looking at those clouds beneath me, I recalled visiting a weaver in old town Varanasi, India.

In this age-old tradition of crafting the finest silks in the world, each family member learns one part of the pattern. In this way, no one can complete the masterpiece by themselves. It is a process of co-creation.

It reminded me so much of how the second section of the ancient Spanda-Kārikās (written around 800 C.E.) describes spanda, the pulsation of the universe, not only as “identical with the essential Self, but with the whole universe,” and also speaks of experiencing unity in the midst of diversity, because diversity itself is the very nature of the light of prakāśa and her vibrations.

Without diversity, there would be nothing to unify.

And so we need the clouds.

We need the backdrop of the ocean.

We need the unending horizon.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we can reach beyond the borders of our own perceptions and begin to taste upon our tongues and in our very souls a bit of that throbbing essence of the very universe, itself.

To hear this poem and essay, in its entirety, in the author’s voice, please listen here:

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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