NADA BRAHMA
An essay on what the udu may tell us about the substance of life.
I was about 8-9 months old, when I first saw the sea and an erratic boulder in the water a short walk from my home at the Baltic Sea in Estonia. The boulder had been stranded there thousands of years before, like a refugee from another land mass. The endless expanse of the sea must have created such a strong impression on me as a tiny child that I held onto the shock of such beauty within me and sixty years later I was able to release it into a film.
For half of my life I had learnt not to sink deep roots into the soil. Our feet stand on the earth but our upper body is always reaching for the heavens. The wind touches our cheeks, inviting us to take to the sky. Yet it is impossible. We are both rooted and rootless. The stone resembles a human being surrounded by storms: even an erratic boulder has been picked up and carried far from its geological home. To be at home is to be rooted in rootlessness. I‘ve unconsciously known this since birth and have rediscovered it throughout my life. I have learnt consciously to accept the paradox that life is both open and closed at the same time.
"Wombstone" immerses the viewer in the dawning experience of a newly-born creature, whose first task is to observe its surroundings and establish a sense of scale. Am I tiny or massive? And what kind of creature can I be? An insect? Part of the rock foundation gone astray? Without any human reference points, there is no clear answer. Nor is there history.
Named by a stranger:
only a stranger can give a name,
if for days as long as centuries,
I have been name-less,
undifferentiated from sea or shore,
or the gulls,
who dropped for an instant,
the flag of occupation on my lichened territory.
Found by a stranger.
Strange, because never lost.
I am the conquistador's new-found-land,
forever named, as his creation,
trophy and reward.
This erratic boulder,
crazily carried uncompassed
until the ice-road,
finding no charted destination,
repented it's promise of purpose
and melted without trace or terminus.
I am Uluru of the glacial desert,
Ka'aba of the Ugric tribes,
standing, a grey catafalque,
a stone, proud now,
a holy henge,
in whose hushed presence,
the surf genuflects,
and never turning it's back,
retreats, making way for the next wave of pilgrim piety.
No holy book explains me.
No dogma deadens the vital pulse of my deepest vein.
Serving neither science nor solstice,
I am helpless.
My stone-swaddled fingers enclose no note
to tell my story,
set aside a mother's guilt
or trigger sympathy.
A foundling feared, as fleeing migrants are,
a meteor uncoupled from my asteroid kin.
Will the portress,
unlatching at dawn,
return the bolt in haste,
certain that the naked newborn
is portent of plague, defeat or regicide?
Or will she summon her sisters
to kneel,
yet still exclude me
in awed reverence for this bastard virgin-born?
Or will the sisterhood link arms
and embrace me, a sister too,
still glowing in creation's bloom
and drizzled by the amniotic sea?
An essay on what the udu may tell us about the substance of life.
A journey to the center of the Earth to reclaim the Sacred Feminine.
A conversation in which nothing begins or ends
