“Ishvari” in Sanskrit means “goddess” or “female power,”
and the “Akhilanda” means essentially “never not broken.” In other
words, The Always Broken Goddess. Sanskrit is a tricky and amazing
language, and I love that the double negative here means that she is
broken right down to her name.
But this isn’t the kind of broken that indicates weakness and terror. It’s the kind of broken that tears apart all the stuff that gets us
stuck in toxic routines, repeating the same relationships and habits
over and over, rather than diving into the scary process of trying
something new and unfathomable.
This figure has snuck up inside me and settled into my bones. She
keeps coming out of my mouth every time I teach, and she’s given me so
much strength and possibility during a time of change and uncertainty in
my own life. I wanted to unpack a little bit about who she is for those
that might be, like me, struggling a little bit in that pile on the
floor and wondering how the hell to get up again.
The answer, it turns out, is this: in pieces, warrior-style, on the back of a crocodile. Yee ha...."
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.