The Alchemy of Loss: A Short Journey in Mountain Time

I find myself journeying to the Nilgiris in the wake of the demise of such a dream and the falling apart of what was meant to be a lifetime together.

In the days following my separation and leading up to this journey, my interior landscape resembles the desolate courtyard of an abandoned house. This courtyard, which used to be the sacred heart of the house, a place of gathering and refuge, has lost its heartbeat. Where laughter once echoed, collapse now hangs heavy in the air.

“…are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”* Yes. Grief can do that. It can put you in suspended animation – alive but only technically, still there but not quite here, merely going through the motions.

In this fugue state, I am returning to the Blue Mountains, guided by a homing instinct that has somehow survived the oblivion of the fugue.

The road home has been long and winding; much lost and learnt along the way.

But where the road rises to meet the mountains is the frontier where I step out of evanescent human time into enduring mountain time. The baggage of the past and the burden of the future fall away.

Human time is marked by a before and after. It is measured in seconds and minutes. Its tyrannical temporality keeps us constantly striving to move from here to the elusive there.

Mountain time is beyond measurement. It is made of expansive moments and eternities. It liberates through presence. There is no before or after—only here and now. I realize that “there” is an illusory place one can never reach. There is the horizon, which keeps moving further away as I approach it. The only place I can arrive is here—this moment.

The gift of the Nilgiris is a moment in an eternity, an eternity in a moment—the circularity of deep time.

To receive this gift, I need only be present and willing to enter this sacred circle.

I am willing. I am here.

On the road to Ooty, there is a ramshackle tea kadai, perched on the mountainside overlooking a lake. Emerald-green pastures cradle the lake, cows graze along its edge, and the dreamy blue mountains lie in the distance.

The winter sunlight dances on the water’s opaque surface imbuing it with a soft, shimmering, golden glow reminiscent of fireflies.

Another winter, another waterfront – Hirekolale Lake in Chikmagalur, my former partner’s hometown.

He and I stood on the water’s edge watching the evening sunlight filter through the canopy of a solitary tree on the lakeshore.

I remember thinking we had all the time in the world. I remember the warmth of his hands, the kind that offers succour to the heart in existential winters. It is not unlike the warmth of the cup of tea I am holding in my hand now, on this winter day, a little ways away from Ooty.

Ensconced in the circle of mountain time, I inhabit that memory and this moment. The past and present exist here in seamless intimacy. The winter that was gone has come around in memory. But so has warmth in this moment. The steam rising from the tea cup is a grounding and elemental reminder that solace can still be found in a cup of tea in the winter of life, absent a warm hand to hold.

In the Nilgiris, the setting sun steeps in the ether like tea in water. First, the sun tinges the ether with a pale blush of colour. The blush then deepens into striking hues of mauve and rose gold that linger in the sky long after the sun is gone, like the cherished memory of a lost yet ever-present love.

Beauty and longing are inherent in sunsets. So is acceptance.

Accept that light will come and illuminate your world.

Accept that the light will change.

Accept that the light will fade. Only to come again.

I watch the sun set in Coonoor with the reverence and surrender of someone in prayer. I ask nothing of it, though. Merely witnessing this light magic is enough.

I remember the lost love with the same reverence and surrender. I ask nothing of it, either. Merely being able to feel it was enough.

In human time, loss is felt through lived memories. It is often felt as keenly in the moments that follow it as in the moment it occurred.

In mountain time, however, a past loss is experienced as an inherited memory—a story that precedes me, one that I have not lived through. It is as though the loss was borne by a past self, long gone, like an ancestor whose burdens I may be intimately familiar with but need not carry.

This is where I learn that love is the duality of holding and letting go of what is only mine to cherish, never mine to keep.

The keenness of loss alchemizes into the knowing of love. The fugue state of absence from myself transforms into a quiet presence.

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* Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches, Mary Oliver