tintinnabulation

Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Edgar Allen Poe

I haven't had a cigarette in six years, quitting with holiday bronchitis. Generally healthy since, but now I have been sick with respiratory infection for 7 weeks. And after 30+ years of smoking cigarettes, living through my father's tribulations with the wages of this particular vice, I felt a few times a sort of terror, and at least once I verged on an anxiety attack. Luckily my history of mental health is such that I recognized the condition, so I didn't march off to the ER.

Some seek the consolation of philosophy, but it is thin gruel. I prefer the consolations of religion, which for me is meditation, and the reaching out for the divine that I find there.

I wasn't terrified by death so much as by life; the invalid's life. How much of my life is frocking around with younger friends, making up for lost time, creating Belinda. How much of Belinda is dependent upon Eros. After all Belinda arose out of sexual fantasies and sexual desires. But when you are sick enough, there are no desires, only the desire to be well.

For me, throughout my life there have been intrusions, or manifestations. Events subject to interpretation. A sea aged plastic ornament red hearts connected by an arrow found on the beach on Mother's Day, a few years ago... and going way back... insects droning doom doom doom on a hot summer night and falling confused into conversation with my homosexual neighbor (married with kids, so quite a surprise) but that is a whole other story.

So with renewed religion, studying Goddess, Laksmii, Tripura Sundari, Devi... She of many names and modes of worship, there is sometimes, connection. There are the constants, ocean, birds, winds, the constituents of nature, or MAyA. Kinds of a feeling that it is all pretty good, pretty right. In fact I just wrote on the topic just a couple of monthes ago. Butterflies.

So in my battle with depression sleeping poorly ,waking early, I heard something, and I really couldn't place it. Finally I decided that it was sleigh bells... though we are short of snow and sleighs here in New Jersey this time of year. But later that morning, I was reading the Saundarya Lahari... the Flood of Beauty. Reading verse seven,

Kvanat kajci dama .. from the sound of Her belled and garlanded waist...

purostAd AstAm nah. ..... may she be in front of us...

Not all divinities are outfitted with girdles with bells, and I had certainly forgotten this detail, the Goddess manifest in a sound.

Synchronicities. Divine Coincidences. Some of us seem to need them, and blessedly we receive them. Anugraha... Grace. Small miracles which suggest rather than compel. I am never quite sure what to make of them, and not sure that I make of them what I should, which may be the same thing.

Definitely feeling much better now. Going out Saturday Night... returning to old habits, good and bad. Yet it is hard to deny that everything that you hold onto, clear thought,... Belinda.... goes.. and for me the terror wasn't the going, so much as being left behind... the shut-in. But that is for another time.

Nama Laksmii... Nama KAli