my grandmother
My grandmother calls herself an absolutely normal, regular person. When paranormal or unexplainable abilities come up she listens, interested, but shakes her head when I ask her if she’s ever experienced anything. “That ability to see, that vision is a gift some people are born with” as we have talked about previously “And I don’t have it. I’ve never had anything like that happen. Unless..” Sometimes, she tells me, she knows when the phone is about to ring. And then it rings. Sometimes she thinks of a person she hasn’t seen in years and that same afternoon she runs into them in the street. Small premonitions. The paranormal or the unexplainable for her is part of the unnamable universal energy that is ever-present. She reads the Tao te Ching often, and the copy she keeps by the windowsill is well-worn and heavily underlined. She loves tai chi. She likes her house to be tidy and uncluttered, so the chi can flow freely through the rooms. She thinks it’s good luck that she lives in a building next to a fountain, because water stimulates the chi. She decorates her house according to the Chinese art of Feng Shui and a couple days ago she lent me a book detailing how to do it properly. North is water, so she spreads seashells, and she tells me that I should always study in a rectangular table so my concentration doesn’t flow away.
She knew someone, a philosophy teacher in the school that she taught, that seemed to innately know things about people- one coworker told her that he’d immediately guessed she was a lesbian. She asked him about her daughter, and he told her she protected her intimacy with such care that he could never know what he was thinking.
She doesn’t read the horoscope often but she does respect it, and sometimes brings it up as a means to understand the people in her life.
In every book she reads, she draws a spiral next to something profound or anything that has resonated within her. She loves that symbol, I see it everywhere in her house. The symbol of evolution, segun ella. The Fibonacci sequence. The golden ratio. The sacred spiral. 1,1,3,5,13,21. Present from our DNA to flowers to the hierarchy of bees to the Milky Way. Everything as a manifestation of Brahman, the building blocks of reality are a sacred geometry. You see it nature, in art, in the human being. She believes that the energy that breathes life into everything manifests through spirals.
After talking to her, I always have the feeling that I’ve never truly understood how intertwined some things are with others. And I’m not talking just about the zodiac or perfect mathematics. We human beings are only a part of something much, much greater. Maybe when we walk we crush an ant or we simply create a small current of air that makes a fly land on a place it otherwise would never have landed. And if we think of this example, but placing ourselves in the place of the ants and the flies, and the universe in all its (extension/grandeour) in our place, we can clearly see that every day we are affected by forces we have no control over, no more than the ant has control over our giant foot falling on top of it. My grandmother, in her way, does everything in her power and every method that makes sense to her to understand the movements of the universe around her and plan her actions accordingly, so as to not fight against the current, but flow serenely with it.