When the fog rolls in

The intense summer heat of Bangalore is making me long for the crisp fresh air of the hills.

I love mornings and evenings in the hills when wisps of fog and mist swirl and drift about like fairy wings.  I love walking on paths covered in shades of muted greys, as the surrounding landscape takes on a sepia quality and you can smell the moisture in the air, a fragrance as precious as petrichor.  It is how I imagine walking on clouds must feel like.

I remember waking up to such mornings when I was growing up in the hills, the fog used to roll in through the windows into my bedroom and everything took on a hushed and moist quality.  It felt as if a portal had opened right there in my room and I had to take just one step to be transported into another world.

I read somewhere that we need the fog to remind us that all of life is not just black and white, darkness and light, meaning and hopelessness, leaving and arriving. The grey yet warm hues of the mist are the liminal spaces between the dawn and the day, the dusk and the night, the betwixt and the between. The Bardo between one moment and the next.

This is the space between stories where stillness calls in subtle whispers to slow down, to pause, to reflect, to breathe, and to just be.

All over the world right now, we are right at this threshold moment, where our old ways of being and what we considered normal are gone, and the new world is yet to emerge.  We might be longing for the things to get back to normal, and yet all the indigenous leaders and wisdom teachers are asking us to not rush towards new beginnings. It’s as if Earth is saying, not today humanity, you need more reflection.

The pandemic holds a mirror that reflects our relationship with ourselves, with the Earth, with each other and with the broader systems we live in.  We have been allowed to weave a new fabric that reflects the interconnected pattern of life and stitch a garment from it that fits all of creation on Earth.

We need to participate in these moments of fog and mist with an open heart, humility, and sacredness, trusting that the unveiling will take place according to a timeline originating far away in the stars. By staying in this place of not knowing we prepare the ground for a more rooted knowledge to emerge.

Instead of the dominant paradigm of looking for immediate solutions, we learn to live the questions that merge and reemerge from the mist like shadows.  

What have we learned during this time?

What do we want to keep the same?

What do we want to do differently?

How do we want to relate to each other as human beings?

How do we want to relate to nature?

If the fog gets too thick and we lose our bearings for a bit, we can take inspiration from the stories of generosity, sacrifice, and kindness that are coming in from all parts of the world. Stories of nature reclaiming spaces, stories of clean skies and clean waters, stories of caremongers and mutual aid workers, stories of immense courage and personal sacrifice by the front-line heroes.

It’s similar to the moment when the sun shines through for an instant through the misty landscape, and we get a glimpse of the perfection that lies behind the veils.  We don’t know exactly the form that it will take but we have a vision of it in sepia colors.

Maybe, what we are being called to do now is to hold that vision of a more beautiful, more loving, more connected world in our hearts, while we wait at the threshold for the fog to lift.