Tantrik Garden
Wednesday, August 17th, 2005When I was about six or seven, I discovered a secret garden. Well, “garden” is an overstatement. It was just a bit of land wedged inside a city block, mapped out by the edges of other people’s back yards, and cordoned off by a sagging fence. You got to it by climbing over a mound of discarded wood planks, trash, and organic debris nestled between a row of shabby single-car garages and a private home.
At some unknown time, some unknown person had attempted to plant the garden. Hardy vines with tiny orange flowers massed along the fence. Non-indigenous bushes and other store-bought plants straggled along as best they could given the general state of neglect. A jumble of semi-recognizable stone statuary, turned over on its side, may have once been a fountain. Other than this, the objects in the garden had obviously been thrown or dragged there by people from the surrounding houses. A discarded refrigerator featured prominently.
The garden was nevertheless a true garden: a garden of vitality and infinite potential. The relative chaos of the garden was part of its beauty. To enter the garden was to slip between the purposeful, solid, well-defined, predictable molecules of the everyday world. Between those molecules, colors vibrated, the presence of non-human beings could be sensed, amazement blossomed, and every small gap between one thing and another opened into vastness. The garden, even the trash, emanated luminous life, and also a base note of deep silence.
I entered the garden as one coming home and letting go of all the tensions of the day. And yet, I felt I could never stay long. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, but somehow, the garden did not have my 100% confidence. I suspected it of being a fraud. It was too much like magic. To linger in enjoyment of the garden would be cheating.
Recently, the garden reappeared everywhere, vibrating between everything and encompassing everything. And I finally understood that there is no leaving the garden, there is no exile. There is only having to rediscover yourself in it and allowing yourself to remain.
In the Khadga Mala Stotra, one of the central mantras of Sri Vidya, Lalita Tripurasundari, the cosmos, is called by the names gupta yogini, gupta tara yogini, rahasya yogini, ati rahasya yogini, and parapararahasya yogini. Each of these names of Reality means the primordial, great secret.
Reality is the secret garden, the secret yogini, the original primordial secret, but it is an open secret. We are all the children of that same great secret and the inheritors of that same great amazement as the creation plays in the garden and rediscovers itself at home.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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