On March 25th I will be fasting for 4 days in solidarity with a nonviolent Scientists Rebellion. I am looking forward to joining dozens of other scholars online each day, being hosted by Reverend Stephen Wright, as we reflect on our place in the world. If you are an academic please consider joining us. I have booked my annual leave and intend a bit of a brain fast, away from my research and inbox!
I may have another go at poetry. Here is something I wrote last month, after a Kirtan, as I explored the insights from Hinduism on the sacred feminine, based on the stories about the Goddess Chamunda.
Dropping Demons with Chamunda
If you think you know who you are singing to, then you are not singing to me.
If you think you know who you are praying to, then you are not praying to me.
Drop the demons that grasp you inside, such that you grasp at me
Drop the need to be noticed by me
Drop the need to express towards me
Drop the need to be engaged by me
Drop the need to achieve it with me
Drop the need to be pleased by me
Drop the need to feel desired by me
Drop the need to feel needed by me
Drop the need to feel unique to me
Drop the need to control parts of me
Drop being augmented by me
Drop the need to impact more on me
Drop the need to bar others from me
Drop the need to see me as the cause of your feelings of need
Mother, lover, and world; the need to know me is like a clenched fist catching water
Doomed, just like the demons of desire
They will cause pain even after you think you are free from them
Surrender to the wonder that you sense beauty and feel desire
Surrender to the end of ends, where just like all your desires, we too will pass away
Then allow the experience that we are already one
So even your grasping, your demons, are part of the greater us
If you think you know who you are singing to, then you are not singing to me.
If you think you know who you are praying to, then you are not praying to me.
Drop the demons that grasp you inside, such that you grasp at me
Only then shall we harmonise
Does this jar with you my dear?
Take that as proof that you have more toys to lose
And more joys to find in the heap of that loss.
Only from there can we sing together
And only from there will we sing to each other
So you love the aspects of you that are aspects of me
This is my own interpretation of the energy of a Goddess, making a connection between masculine insecurities at interpersonal and collective levels through patriarchy. To learn more about Chamunda see Wikipedia. Then listen to one version of a mantra sung to Chamundaye. Perhaps you may tune in to that aspect of the divine in you, which refuses to succumb to the demons of ownership and control, whether within you, others or society.
Professor Jem Bendell 