Govardhana, Winter, and the Heart That’s Learning to Bow
The holiday emotional swell is cresting and grief keeps loosening its knots in unexpected places. Just in time for fall turning to winter, the great hunker down. My life is contracting in a lot of ways right now. Relationships waning, some even pinching off, all to make room for the dark season. Winter is coming, literally, and I am not ready. Are we ever ready? We are thrust into a pit of cold darkness, our turn on this globe to settle down and settle in. Let the other half enjoy the energetic bump of summer.
I have been back now for two and a half weeks from what felt like a reprogramming of the heart. Each dandavat bringing my chest close to Govardhana, feeling Giriraj so intimately. His divine vibration, the pulse of His stone, the call of His peacocks, parrots, and monkeys. Giver and provider to the cows, to the plants, to the wildlife that honors all of humanity in devotional service to support our existence. Govardhana carries all. Govardhana supports. Govardhana lives, vibrating the sweetest sound. Giving me shelter of the name, the earth, the energy. Carry what I lack and preserve what I have.
What I wish to plant will be loving, supportive, producing love and relationship. Churning bhakti and harvesting the fruit as an offering to your vast cosmic reality. May you help me use the showers from above as an offering to feed my life firmly rooted in you. My roots drawing energy from you, my stem churning water, fire, light, air, and earth so expertly as to vibrate something, ANYTHING, in service to you. To feel your vibrations and channel them through me from below, firmly rooted and drawing sweet nectar from tradition. Churning with my own fiery perspective for how to use this newfound cosmic energy in the system.
May I twist and shape this loving energy you are bestowing and form the most delicate, beautiful lotus, to offer at your softest pink feet.
And by the way, thank you for even giving me this experience to begin with. For God loved so much He let us become separated. Willingly giving us a chance at material singularity. A chance to feel the pleasure of His energy through material enjoyment. A divine puppet He uses in His entanglement with us, building us a reality we could be happy in, a reality we can feel and experience, and mostly a reality in which we can choose to give and receive love.
How He loves seeing us love each other, passing His sacred love goo back and forth over and over. With each churning, each pass is all the more sweet than the last. Love grows when it is exchanged. Love is the dark, material energy that binds us together. Dark energy feels good. So it feels good to love, giving, receiving, and communing.
When that love is directed back to the original source of its pleasure, God, it supercharges. There is no love more potent than dipping it directly into the divine. It purifies the material goo clouding my heart and warms and charges my being so completely that I have the energy to radiate in your warmth, for myself and others. The energy to burn and churn my existence. The energy to take material matter and transform it into an offering back to you. Realizing I have been enjoying you all along. Enjoying a reality you created and control, and you willingly want me to enjoy that reality because you love me.
Because you are me.
I am you.
I am I.
I am.
Am.
Om.
