Expanse

A teacher in a rainbow

The first time I saw “sky” given as the translation of Ākāśa in some book (I’ve forgotten which one) I was mildly annoyed on the word’s behalf. The word has many interpretations. Sky. Ether. Space. The subtlest of the five elements. But for me none of it had landed.

Then one morning it did. The dictionary wasn’t wrong. I just had to experience the word.

A slightly cold March morning in Brisbane. I took Bhuma out for our 5 o’clock walk, yes, the small ritual-torture I inflict on my body for my fur-boy’s sake. Never regretted it once. We once trekked through a reserve for almost 3 hours because I got lost and he found the way out before I did. Australia makes this easy. Bushland spills into reserve, reserve opens into park, and every suburb has a bike path running straight through the middle of things. Neat and tidy but still wild. You may see a python on a tree or kangaroos staring at you from a bush, yet you will never feel threatened.

That morning was nothing special, Bhuma did what Bhuma does. Nose down, reading and replying to his pee-mails. By 5:30 we were at the top of the oval, a raised patch of lawn for sports, maintained by the council. Grass still wet. Air sitting in that narrow gap between cold and warm. And then the sun broke through the mist, and there was a rainbow in front of me. Not a faint one. A full arc, and just above it, softer but definitely there, a second. A double rainbow. My luck!

I stood there for a full minute with my mouth actually open.

The phone failed to capture what I experienced

Bhuma stood there, staring at my face, visibly anxious about why the playtime was interrupted (classic Border Collie). Somewhere in that moment I took a photo, and it caught none of it. Not the size of the thing. Not what it was doing to my chest.

Because something was happening to my chest. Wonder? Fear? Though there was nothing to be afraid of. Or disbelief? But about what? Then, with no warning, a huge burst of happiness led to a stream of tears running down my face. There was nothing to be sad or happy about, but there was this feeling of having stepped into something larger without meaning to.

This is the point where my thoughts shifted to Arjuna on the battlefield when he saw Lord Krishna in His cosmic form. A point where vastness stops being a concept and becomes a sight. Arjuna, the brave warrior shaking, unable to hold it together asking the Lord to return to the human, gentler form again. The real scale of things as seen by Arjuna, isn’t something a human can hold for long.

I am not going to put “a rainbow over a suburban oval on a Tuesday” in the same sentence as the scene from the Gita. But to be honest, for one minute my mind did what Arjuna’s did, at a much smaller scale. I saw something too large to comfortably contain. And I was no warrior but a regular woman, just 5 foot tall.

So that’s the closest I have come to what that word means to me, an expanse, where the known and the unknown stand together and a moment when I couldn’t have told you where I ended and the sky began.

Bhuma completely missed the rainbow; he was only looking at me, waiting to hear the words he’d been wanting all along -” Let’s play!” That struck something in me. Maybe that rainbow in that sky existed only for me. To teach me about a word. Not because I was special but because I was for a moment aligned in an unrepeatable way in that exact moment to receive something.

Ākāśa opens up to anyone as long as you’re willing to stand still enough not to notice you’re standing in it.