Drishti

Beauty and sorrow are heartbreaking and heart-expanding every which way. It’s gift and challenge that we are asked to hold and balance the two at once. How to appreciate the beauty in the world when we want to cry, Stop for a moment. Please, let me lie down. Spare me your blinding light. But like hurting children who are angry with their parents, we also crave soothing by that which we think we wish to escape!

I asked the brother who surfed when he was younger what it felt like. He said it was kind of like balancing on a ball, side to side, front to back. I don’t know what it’s like to balance on a ball in the ocean, or anywhere else, but I have a vivid imagination—sometimes too vivid—and I continue to be fascinated by that description, in awe of him and my eldest niece as surfers, and of all surfers balancing on and riding the waves.

In yoga practice, for balance or to hold a pose, we are instructed to find a drishti, usually a point in front of us, a self-designated foci to softly gaze at and allow us to center, be still, hold steady. In Sanskrit, drishti can encompass much more. “Drishti is a means of developing concentrated intention, the ability to cut through illusion and see the world as it is.” (Isabelle Pikörn)

The musician and writer Nick Cave, who lost two of his sons, writes: “… the meaning of life – its joy, boundless beauty and love – emerges out of our most devastating losses. I learned that without the savagery of life, love had no true domain, and the relational quality of joy and beauty has no way to express itself. I came to understand that although the world’s energizing principle is love, joy ultimately declares itself most intensely through our heartbreaks.” (The Red Hand Files, #285)

For you, I am trying to balance on a ball in a whitecapped sea of emotion. So, go on then, drench me in beauty. Wash over me with holy silence. Hold me steady with mighty grace. Baptize me again and again. Expand this vessel to hold as much as it possibly can. Let me be shelter. Make me a drishti.