The first time I visited the crater was a few weeks earlier with Nicole and Devin. We’d walked along the dried-out bed, stepping over the bellies of the rocks, veering towards the shade of the rockface where, in another time and space, people had gathered and dreamed. They painted those dreams alongside their realities: scenes of animals and human figures fishing, hunting. These scenes were punctuated at times by the rhythmic lines of what seemed a cosmic intuition: abstract arrangements of marks, stars, triangles, and circles. One of the rock paintings was a boat. This boat is the one I recognise as Last Ship. I am not really sure if it’s a boat though… a boat painted onto the wall of an ancient crater, somewhere on a plain, halfway between Khajuraho’s sensual temples and Kalinjar’s morbid ecstasies? But I know that my imagination was sailing, carried by awe at the fast succession of imagery and symbols, and my musings on the nature of these ancient lives.

Babaji led us and sauntered ahead with fluidity. He knows this land just as well as he knows the secret of time hidden in his swaying hips. He made small stones appear from somewhere, and arranged them into a descending staircase, inviting our bodies to sink deeper into the landscape. The rock basin we had entered resembles a natural yoni framing a mesmerizing emerald-green pool.  The cryptic symbols of the rockface seem to have been repeated here again, but in another form and by the nonhuman; they have turned into multi-dimensional imprints of last year’s monsoon energies.

If you’ve ever visited an active waterfall, you may recall that it is more a sonic experience than a visual one. The water moves too fast to be observed; what resonates is the sound of white noise. In this landscape, which is usually under water, it was as if the sound of the rushing waterfall had been preserved in biological matter; in the frills and fractals of the fine textured mats of algae that cling to the sides of the rocks. The movement of life in suspended animation. Matter – etymologically linked to mater: mother –remembering the past seasons. Matter wishing to be heard when the next waters overflow. Matter waiting to be reincarnated. Matter contemplating the emerald pool’s pulse, the green rhythm of the heart chakra.

~

I am sitting on the narrow ledge under the rocky outcrop at the highest point of the crater. I hear the swooshing of aerodynamic lift. An eagle with a wingspan larger than my outstretched arms takes off directly above my head and floats into the crater effortlessly. Now I know I must do it…

I must return to this water body, where the sage Brihaspati summons the great Jupiter, the planet of emergence and submergence. I must die at the crater, my hope must dissolve entirely, and I must learn the secret of renewal from water’s rushing sound, and then swirl again with its living cycles.

~

I returned to Brihaspati Kund to invent a personal ritual of initiation into love. In those months, the temples had taught me that the heart-wound I came with was not just mine, in a time of incomprehensible suffering, this is the world’s pain. I sacrificed my DNA for what I thought was ancestral melancholy, but which is really the planet’s grief. When ‘love’ has been extracted and debased, through gender performance, ‘kama sutra’ voyeurism, and pornography, all for an obsession with (illusions of) social status, power, and control… aren’t we at risk of losing the swirling knowing, which in its human shape, is the s-curve of the tribhanga: the sensual motion of liquidity, that is the very juice of planetary futurity? Or does the ship continue its drift into the end of time?

~

22 March 2025

A day to be reborn
at dawn, by the crater
under the influence of
Jupiter.
Liquidating the dreams
of a past absurdity
burning empty words
to feed the infinite fire,
To be free to whirl into the unknown.
Who was I?
Who am I, now?
The astronaut from 2001 Space Odyssey ejected from mind control.

I severed a lifetime's worth of an image I held my self in. I broke the sacred cow's body bones, tapping out the rhythm of change to come, that must come. I offered an embrace of kilo-loads of flowers to the water yoni beneath my feet, beneath my body, that sustains and loves me even while my hands still tremble, as I carried the fear of not knowing: Who did this? Who made me go there? I did it anyway.

The day was my mother's birthday; I had gone to the crater to lose something, in the hope of finding the truth of love.