the medicine of mantras

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today i will receive a diploma for the panchakarma diploma course i have completed. today i will receive a piece of paper that will say i have completed x number of hours doing x number of things. today is another steamer, 35 degrees celsius, baked men driving buses, rickshaws n trucks will skillyfully honk n drive three lanes in a one lane, going back and forth, to and fro.

today is day trillion cubed in ayurveda. today, bombs somewhere. today the bombed will be on the news, for being savages with beards and guttural tongues. today my mama n my papa will wonder about we. today is ubuntu.

today is a wedding of a 20 year old girl down the block that the 30 year old childless/husband-less western women staying here will comment on, say how oppressed the women here are. today they will meet, run into each other, mutually curious behind kajol and language and permanently change each others lives and mine. today everything is everything.

today, after the graduation, as matthew waited for a took-took that would take him away to a train to bangalore, and as we stood around, saying goodbye and watching him pace, radha, lulu and i talked about the grades we received and whether it was fair. the conversation became cigarette smoke. a funeral processcion took over the street. a group of muslim men, young and old, walked with a coffin on their shoulder. the coffin was held steady by sticks of bamboo. the men, focused beyond our presence, seemed to look inward with their long eyes. the mantra that glided them, that gave meaning to the qaugmire of a life no longer being, that weaved me into their pause, was: la illaha illala, la illaha illala, la illaha illa.

there is no god but god.

today i chanted coldplay: we live in a beautiful world, yeah we do, yeah we do. it was my mantra, a frequency to tune into the vibration of meaning, when meaning slips from under your feet like the floors of turn of the century houses.

mantras are a road in. they can tune us into essence, into being so tuned in, we become the music. mantras are said during shivarati in temples in the south, are caroled beyond christmas on rosary beads, are repeated 99 times on muslim prayer beads hidden from view and whispering each of the traits of the magnificent.