The Book of Dawn – Randhir Khare

Description

Featuring artworks by Chetana Sudame

From the introduction: I stumbled out of bed, feeling like a body shot by a sniper, trying to reassure myself that I was alive. I was frantic. Out on my balcony, I breathed deeply, letting the early air in and out of my lungs, relaxing them until I was still. I looked up at the Rain Tree in front of me and waited. I didn’t feel time pass. It was a continuous present of which I had become a part. Light washed leaves and gently trickled through. The tree hummed and sang with birds as dawn washed the sky. I saw and felt the world through Tara in one brief fraction of a moment. Long enough to part the curtains. Turgid streams that flowed occasionally apart, now flowed one into the other, dark water rose from within and seeped out until a torrent broke through. It was like a belly-surging retch. A Flood. The Pretender came out, gave up and drowned. The axis of my earth swung and the poles shifted one to the other. In the clear light of dawn, I felt the beginnings of deep cleansing without understanding what was really happening.

The experience of that Dawn was transformative in its own way. Akin to the cycles of living and dying, of feeling and unfeeling, of loving and unloving, of being and becoming, of Divine creation and destruction within and around, manifesting with defining certainty. Out of the manthan of hurt and loneliness, violence and desperately wounded tenderness, of guilt and the need to belong, cut loose from a make-believe sense of belonging and identity, came clarity as pure as first light, an expression of surrender and devotion. Since then, Dawn has been the seamless link between waking and sleeping, one flowing into the other, between the self and the other, between losing, finding and becoming whole. Dawn is the experience of divinity far beyond all that I have experienced in my childhood, youth and grown years.

These prayer-poems have grown to their fullness within, have been born ‘whole’, and are expressions of devotion to the all-consuming presence of the spirit of Nature.