Sa Ham- I am She (2024 series): Surrender is Abundance

Small Basket of Various Flowers

(This is the eighth post of the 2024 Sa Ham series. To read first post, please click here. To read the second post, please click here. To read third post, please click here. To the read the fourth post, please click here. To read the fifth post, please click here. To read the sixth post, please click here. To reach the seventh post, please click here.)

This Navratri I felt called to offer a hibiscus to Mother every day. I was not sure how I would find one. I knew flower vendors did not sell these flowers in this area. I also knew there were veteran flower pickers in this area who had a routine around plucking flowers. By a certain time in the morning, one can expect the flowering plants to go bald. I was also afraid of being scolded by someone for plucking flowers.

The first day when I came down my building, she was waiting for me. Diagonally opposite, I saw a single red hibiscus fallen on the wall. I could not believe my eyes. I rushed to get the flower and decided to stroll around the area. Maybe I could find one more. And I did. I was so excited. I plucked a few other flowers too and returned to my building happy.

I saw our building watchman, very Mohanlal like, was noticing me from a distance. As I neared the elevator, I saw him run with his chubby body and return with something in his hand. It was a palmful of hibiscus flowers of different colours. Ohhh. He was a veteran flower picker! I was in bliss.

Since then, I have learnt to happily go around the area in search of flowers. Instead of scolding me, I have seen men step in to help. Some bend branches so I can pluck easily, some guide me as to where a flowering plant is. All the while saying, “Teesko, teesko.” (Take, take).

Today, the eighth day of my hibiscus venture, I found three watchmen in other buildings had already plucked flowers for me. Take, take, they said. My bowl was overfull of flowers. And I thought maybe I should give some to others. My neighbour is an elderly couple with some severe health challenges. I knocked on their door and handed them some hibiscus flowers. Uncle was surprised. He said, “From where did you get these flowers? How were you allowed to pluck them?” I smiled.

He was saying what I had thought on the first day.

Urban Indian lifestyle has groomed us into a kind of lack-of. There is water available if I open the tap. And then I must be careful not to waste water by closing the tap. Electricity will run the bulbs and fan if I switch it on, and I have paid the electricity bills. I must remember to switch off the geyser else my bill will run high. Food is available if I can go to the shop or order it on an app. And I must have money to pay for it. Nothing is just there without my agency, without some exertion on my part.

And those who exert more can receive more. In other words, our abundance is directly related to the amount of energy we can exert in fruitful and pre-decided directions. Study hard, work hard to ensure there is prosperity.

Many years back, my family visited me in another city. And my mother joyfully walked around the neighbourhood, plucking flowers, noticing fruits and weedy berries. She had tales to tell. I, as usual, was flustered and worried she had been rude. She was, in return, very surprised at my reaction.

My mother grew up in a world where it was less of switch-on-off and more of go-around. Her family kitchen had a window that directly connected to a well. The well had water all year long. Or she went to the pond. Flowers bloomed everywhere. Sometimes my mother plucked and weaved them into a garland. Sometimes her neighbours weaved a jasmine garland for her.

There were many fruits like bananas and jackfruit. The large jackfruits were shared across neighbours. The vegetable garden in her family home had some vegetables or other all year long. I see the same abundance growing in my mother’s terrace garden in her current home.

Her hands, so used to abundance, would cook for way more than the family. We would scold her—Amma, cook exactly what we need. Let us not waste food. She never understood how to do that. She would simply say, someone may arrive, and we need to feed them. And food never went to waste. There were hundreds of recipes to use leftovers. We would groan.

The only area her hands would shrink and close was physical money. She worried if we would have enough money to run the month.

Even those who have lived for centuries in the desert do not see their landscape as lacking or needing the same kind of agency that we do in our apartments. They live in an active alive relationship with their environment.

My hands are exact in measuring. I have no extra food anywhere. I have no extra anything in my home. And I have wondered about this exactness of things and worry of wasting. And I realize “wastage” is an urban phenomenon, tied to its architecture, materials and personal energy (or what we call bandwidth).

Surrender, in modern parlance, is often associated with defeat and passivity. In my community, in my younger days, the ability to do namaskaram (the full floor prostration) repeatedly was appreciated. Especially, as people grew older if they could still do namaskaram, it was adulated.

Namaskaram, the full prostration, is symbolically so much more than showing respect. It is the art of giving up agency and trusting in the magical living processes of the Universe, just the opposite of anthropocentrism. It is symbolized and attributed to a Divine form or to a living elder.

We have inherited the colonial shaming glance and stare at our practices as superstition or ignorant rituals. The reaction to shaming has unfortunately been a rigid enforcement of practice which also does not help.

I suggest that we look at the ecological consciousness that is embedded in not only our tradition but all older traditions. In East Asia, Japan, Mongolia, Scotland and Ireland, Native Americas, Aborigines of Australia, Maoris of New Zealand and more have stayed deeply related to rest of nature. They have known the importance of maintaining respectful and alert relationships. They have known the importance of humility and no-action until it is the right time. They have known the rest of the Universe is alive, active and moving in ways that we could label as “their agency”. That the relationship is alive on both sides.

Surrender is welcoming and accepting Universe’s alive movements. It is an opening of possibilities beyond what we can think and achieve. It is a portal to hope and magic. Iain Gilchrist in his work and in many of his online lectures speaks about the importance of faith as a neurological right-brain opening to something more.

Surrender does not come with guarantees that we have become used to. Open the tap, water should flow. And we are stressed when water runs out. No guarantees but that everything that comes your way is an evident or hidden blessing in the living universe.

Many folks in the systems change space make the mistake of continuing the usual scripts. They believe they must act and change our world. That the world is a passive savage, needing guidance and intervention by earth’s youngest child, the brat called human.

I think it would behove all of us to first learn the ways in which life continues to produce life and re-learn to dance with it. The Earth Oikos will turn as needed.

Ya Devi….

Namastasye Namastasye Namastasye Namo Namah!