Welcome

 Is This A Blog About Snacks? Not Quite...
Exploring Meaning, Purpose, Love, & a Just(er) World

Hi everyone~friends, strangers, bots (sorry bots, no $$ or political leverage to be found here)...

Welcome to my odd blog. While I love and may occasionally post midnight snack recipes, I share these writings in the hopes that your inner hunger may find some resonance here.

I have spent countless moons awake in bed, mind, heart and belly gnawing away at empty air. Cheez-Its can only go so far when it comes to questions of existence, suffering, the enormous mystery of living, and the purpose and resilience of one's own being. I churn away these silent hours in the infinite caves of my thoughts and imagination. I crave company and soothing. I crave answers and knowing. Rarely do they come. Most of the time, I travel from cave to cave, question to question, until I grow weary and fall back asleep. In the morning, I'm a normal being again. I have Things To Do. A job, friends to call, groceries to get, subways to catch. And the questions remain, waiting, until something ignites them, or until the moon rises once more.

I wonder about art and beauty. I wonder about power and the roots of suffering--specifically the suffering we cause one another. I interrogate our institutions, and why so many of us in the United States have bought into their false promises and stratifying mechanisms. I wonder why and how colonialism seeped into the country of my family's origin (India) and managed to rule many of us from within. How, why and when did we internalize colonial belief systems? I wonder about freedom, about liberation, and what they really mean. What does it look like to liberate a whole people; politically, but also, individually, internally? Can one truly happen without the other?

I wonder how much time we have left, and if we will figure out how to dig straight down, down into the well of our soul's clarity, its purpose. The layers of oppression, doubt, injustice, the missed opportunities for love; what if they are too thick for us to get to our unlimited, full sources of knowing, our enduring spirits? If it cannot be done alone--and likely it cannot--how do we come together for the strength that will move us all through? Can we do it? Will we do it?

I gripe and grapple over activist spaces that reinforce the very dynamics of power, individualism and competition that they are trying to dismantle. I wonder whether we are all chasing our tails or if our tails are chasing us, yelling, "WAIT! WAIT! STOP RUNNING! You need to hear the end of the story. You need to see the end. You need to see the end so that you know it does not exist. There is no tail and no mouth. You never lost, and you never won. Now will you stop running around like a fool? Will you lie down and look at the sky; will you finally open your eyes to something beyond your own frantic story?"

To guide me through these nights (and days), I turn to myth, ancient religions, children's literature, poetry, epics, daily life, nature, art and the stories of every person I meet. I search for truth in the commonness of all our narratives. I pay attention to feeling: The moments when my nervous system relaxes and signals, "Ah, yes. That is an honest, real thing." And the moments when it tightens and says, "A gilded notion. That is a charming, shiny sentiment, made of debris and fear."

If you are kept awake by similar questions: welcome to the midnight table. Please, join me in this nocturnal journey to find an authentic, grace-full way to be in the world. Join me in lying on the ground, in stopping to look up. Tell me, do you see a constellation? Do you see another story hidden in the stars? Tell me, does the ground speak to your tired back? What does it say? Tell me, when everything stops moving, and it is only you, me and our breath, what happens to the hunger?

Tell me, why does it come, and where does it go?

Yours in sleepless wonder,
Nandita