This is not a fever dream. And yet, it was after weeks of enduring and tending to sickness and physical dysfunction, within oneself, that Bab’Aziz, arrives in one of my dreamtime meditations. 

Not in the form, i was familiar with imagining him, but one that is beyond age, time, name and body. One recognises him from his shining soulful eyes and his still flowing moonlight tresses.

He was standing on the edge of the lake as I walk across to him on the waters. He tells me, “i am you”, as spores are released and arise in the lunar night air, like luminescent stars from friendly funga amidst us. The smell is stark, full of moss and peat and sleeping animals in the warming belly of the earth. 

He is no more his human form. What remains is a skull face with eyes aglow that transmits, “Nowhere is here. There is nowhere to go but here. And that is okay. To be nowhere is okay. Do away with fear. Magic happens here, as well.”

We talk to each other, without words, without language, without form, without sound. An invisible tongue speaks. The sun has set on so many old stories, iterations and selves. Its fiery light rekindles the skull bone light of his face, in new ways. Leaving the safety of all that once protected oneself, all that once was familiar and therefore, apocryphal, is not as difficult as it is made to be. 

Death can be blissful, sometimes.

What if one’s moon is a grandfather ~ 

Someone who is nurturing, healing, guiding, protecting and praying with an acute vision, through fiery eyes, as that of a magician. Someone for whom every moment is like a prayer bead on the shimmering tasbeeh, every moment an awakening, an animacy unto oneself with the cosmic forces.

Someone who has met loving Sophia. Someone who knows how to bath in the sands of desert wilderness, a ritual in bodily intimacy itself. 

Some one who knows how to prepare themselves, religiously, passionately, loverly like, in the moment of their death. His “marriage” to the eternal. Someone like Bab’aziz. 

Someone like the glowing mushrooms, deep within the edge of the forest; their mycelial rooted intelligence beneath our feet, love making with a pulsating force of life, creating, sustaining, knowing when their time arrives, disseminating their magic still.

What if death means to still hum with aliveness, in the void  ?

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Image is of one’s own spirit permeating the white sheet with resonances of a deep connection to one’s lineage and roots, which include the wild lunar kins, kings and Bab’aziz.

…

Sitara Leela is a poet, artist and oracular storyteller living the sacred grove of her home in Kochi, Kerala.