Nirmala-Nataraj

Diary

January 3, 2021
Winter’s Visit

Spring is my favorite season now that I live in upstate New York. In California, life drifted from one ice-blue sky to the next. Fog on the Golden Gate bridge was a wraith that always managed to sneak into my Indian summers, and palpable shards of sunlight fastened a deceptive caveat to the long nights […]

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December 1, 2020
Bodhisattva

I was compelled by the idea of the bodhisattva vow—this ancient, sacred contract to achieve enlightenment for the sake of liberating all sentient beings—being tied to something as base and primal as a one-night stand. Of course, for the woman I was talking to, one-night stands were never what they seemed. Furtive trysts with men […]

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November 11, 2020
Island

The hand is a throne, and it lives in the heart. It’s where fire, earth, wind, and water coalesce and become something tangible. It’s where you are drawn when you want to be a body and simultaneously more than a body, when you want to come home to yourself and remember. The memory goes like […]

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October 1, 2020
The Messenger

What are you saying to me? I am listening. I am open. I am ready. Star veil. I wear a shroud of night and I come to you like a breeze through an open window. Open your window. But be cautious. You will know when the untoward things are near. You will know when the […]

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September 8, 2020
Colonies Within Ourselves

We will not know peace until we have driven out every trace of colonization. Until we have returned to some original semblance of who we were before we became so solidified in our identities. It is possible to be colonized by one’s own identity, you know. Whether we are struggling against externally imposed narratives or […]

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August 2, 2020
Body

What many of us experience as the body—as separate but parallel tributaries of corresponding sense experiences—is limited to the Cartesian tendency to extricate intertwined processes from one another and to reduce them to their mechanical components. Thus, the experience of the body becomes not a sensory totality but a description of causes and effects. In […]

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July 12, 2020
Prayer

To the mother, the body, and the holy soul. We are one. From the throbbing clitoris to the pulse of heart and the stiffening of nipple and the wetness of tongue and eye, from the knobby knees to the valley of hair in the secret garden to the hidden caves of the belly button, I […]

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June 18, 2020
Truth from Illusion

When the heart is fully broken, we are able to elicit the truth with our illuminated bodies rather than through senses that have no relationship to one another. This is the truth that runs through all major teachings. When we separate truth from illusion, we discover that no being is to be excluded from the […]

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May 15, 2020
Proclamation

We hold these truths to be self-evident: love is the law of this land, and desire is the true north that will inform our journey. As men, women, nonbinary, transgender, genderqueer, masculine, feminine, and everything in between and not offered on the accustomed menu of options—of all races, all occupations, all persuasions, all spiritual and […]

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April 14, 2020
Thoughts on Forgiveness

Being present with what is, in the moment: how can we do this? Restoration is not necessarily reconstitution of the past relationship. What is present now? (We are mostly present with our discomfort around a story we have that is based on a past experience rather than what is right before us, what is right […]

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