Sarva Kalvitam Maya

Breathe, I say to myself, approaching the studio, for breath can no longer be taken for granted, not any more, not when the oxygen has fled from our lungs, not when our insides have been colonized by an alien being. Inhale. Exhale. Be aware. Breathe.

There is a pain in my heart. The brain weeps statistics. Despair is in the air. Ambulances wail louder than the cries of loved ones. I smell loss, I sense fear.

I need my tools. I reach uncertainly, for brush, paint, gold leaf, canvas. I must make sense of this world gone topsy-turvy. I must summon—what? Courage, rage, anger. Hopelessness, vulnerability, misfortune.

I breathe. The pen draws, the brush follows. The mind and the heart, separate organs, are united, with a purpose of their own. There is catharsis in work. I aim for it.

Who is guiding my hands? What am I making? I enter a stillness. The world moves out of focus. I am somewhere else. Figures appear. Memories. I channel a vast ocean of learning. I process my wanderings to places sacred. I listen to the words of my ancestor’s, of sages. I collect the wisdom of our texts. I hear the sound of nature. I work uninterrupted.

The canvas divides itself into three panels. In the center is an invocation to knowledge. Yoginis and tree spirits concentrate, break free, move seamlessly, creating and re-creating worlds and universes beyond the understanding of us humans. Tethered and braided, they move still, a vast consciousness beyond our present sorrow. I glimpse a world beyond ours, beyond past or present, beyond time.

But the present belongs to it too. Friends and conversations, relationships and intimacies, rooting us to our lives. Our dreams, our hopes, our aspirations. Our endeavors too.

The twin panels on the sides echo this, longing for liberation from our current malaise that we seek to dissolve through touch and sight—suddenly so precious. The tree roots stretch but intertwine with each other, a web that manifests in the same manner as our relationships.

We stand strong because we have an unacknowledged community that supports us of family and friends, vigilantes who have watched us gain our liberties. To them we are umbilically linked and through them to the universe. Our books are our walls, one that can barricade us in or show us the way out. That choice, of sense and sensibility, is ours to choose.

So, we remain rooted, so we branch out to pluck the fruits of our achievements. The world is endless, infinite, but we must find within it the order we seek. Hence the borders I painted to represent the freedom of our Piscean species, a symbol also of procreation and fertility. Hence too the outermost extent bounded by yoginis seated on trees—a symbol of a step before the final liberation, knowledge, of individuality, of our abilities to rise above chaos and disorder, but also of our ability to remain committed together. The self and the world.

Once this was part of nature’s rhythm for us to claim, but misshapen by humankind it has unleashed its wrath on us. How strange, I discover, that it is nature too that will heal. The trees that nurture our appetites, the rivers that replenish us, the skies that let us live. We must re-create these bonds, bind us with nature, be one with the universe.

The universe is eternal. It is unmindful of our sorrows and pains, our joys and happiness. We who see the brahmand through the illusion of maya must correct our ways, we must follow the cycle and rhythms of its heartbeat to be part of the universal consciousness.

My work is done. I feel satiated, grounded, at peace. I am a messenger; I offer it to the world. Accept it as belief. The world will heal. There is no other way. I remember a few lines of my father, Mr.K. D. Kohli’s poetry

Mera kaam hai Kashtiyan shakth karna

Janamdata hoke mein en Kashtiyan ka 

Khuda to nahin nakhuda bhi nahin

I do create these artworks, but from where they come and reside on my canvas and leave of their own will and permission, I have no claim on.

Seema Kohli

June 2021