Gaze of a Goddess

My mother died a little over two years ago, after long illness, complications to a tragically trivial bump on the head. Her life was hard, and its end was equally fraught with difficulty. I was very close to her, and her demise has begun a very difficult process in me too: A mysterious process. A struggle toward wholeness, toward spiritual integration.

While idly Netsurfing recently, I came across a beautiful photograph. Before a backdrop of golden sunbeams stood a green onyx statue in the likeness of Sarasvati. There before me, a product of some impeccable stonecarver's skill was my dear mother's face on the image of a goddess. The shock I experienced was especially extreme because this goddess, Sarasvati, is the goddess of knowledge and culture, the sciences, the fine arts, and especially reading.

While father taught me how to read,
`Twas mother showed me what to heed.

My father taught me how to read long before I began preschool but my mother gave me The Bible and later, The Qur`an. Although she was adamantly Christian, we discussed the finer points of both. She presented me with Andrew Lange's The Red Fairy Book (quite antique and beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham), Grimm's Fairy Tales (similarly illustrated, also antique), and Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland. She read mythology to me from S. G. W. Benjamin's The Story of Persia and poetry from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet: "Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles...but even the slow and halting go not backwards."

When I expressed an interest in the Tarot she bought me a deck and instruction book, and also the Gung Hee Fot Choy (Chinese divination with playing cards). She was fascinated to watch me cast runes and I Ching when I discovered them. She listened with great interest when, in my teens, I read her from the Bhagavad Gita and E. Wallis Budge's woefully misguided translation of "Osiris Coming Forth by Day," which he unfortunately named The Egyptian Book of the Dead (an exceptional translation of the same work is the Awakening Osiris of Normandi Ellis).

One of the last things she did before her unfortunate accident was to give me a rare, very old and incomplete set of Lord Litton's Novels which she acquired before I was born, along with the Red Fairy Book, Alice and Story of Persia, all antique. These were things she kept and cherished all her life.

To see, in the gaze of a goddess, my mother's visage or rather, my mother's expression of the face of the goddess, is to see an irreplaceable part of myself that was torn loose and that has been missing, begin to grow back again. It is to see a new fullness emerging. To see her face on Sarasvati is to find her, in me, living again:

In myself;
in the journey I have undertaken;
in the restlessness that desires that very journey;
and in the quietude that has already reached an end to journeying.
...Pilgrim, Pilgrimage and Road,
Was but Myself toward Myself:
and your arrival but Myself at My own Door.
~ from the Mantiq al-Tayr of Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds


For Lover am I, and Love,
and I alone Beloved.
Mirror and Beauty am I:
Me in myself behold.
~ from the ruba'iyat of Abu Sa'id Abo'l-Khayar, Readings from Mystics of Islam