That which is much bigger

Stephen Mitchell writes a wonderful introduction to the 2000 translation of the Bhagavad Gita (LINK), in which Mitchell asks the reader to consider the story as taking place before a great battle (as it does), but to imagine a great event unfolding in that one moment before battle when the adrenaline is high and when both sides survey the opposing force in those moments of fear and uncertainty. In that moment, Mitchell suggests,

everything is still. The armies have halted in their tracks. Even the flies are caught in midair between two wingbeats. The vast moving picture of reality stops on a single frame, as in Borge's story "The Secret Miracle." The moment of the poem has expanded beyond time, and the only characters who continue, earnestly discoursing between the silent, frozen armies, are Arjuna and Krishna.

Krishna, of course, happens to be much more than Arjuna's Charioteer, he is also God. He picks a fairly significant moment to reveal the cosmos to the hero. 'Whether or not he should fight,' says Mitchell,' is secondary to the question he faces through Krishna, and that is, 'how should we live?'

At his lowest moment, Arjuna crumbles from the pressure, and Krishna teaches him about being, and in closing, Krishna speaks of wisdom, sacrifice, of facing that which needs facing and letting go that which needs letting go,

The man whom desires enter
as rivers flow into the sea,
filled yet always unmoving -
that man finds perfect peace.

There are moments like this, when the veil between the profane and that which is much bigger is revealed, if even between the wingbeats of a fly. I recall reading a couple of years ago that serves a similar role. It was by an anyonomous author about a river near where I grew up, the Snye, which at one time was known as the Chenal Ecarte (which in French means the Lost or Blind Channel). This also happens to be the river I centered my Masters research on, so it was nice to find that someone, some settler perhaps, dreamt of this river as I did, as something much bigger. The poem appears in Frank Mann's 1968 book A History of Wallaceburg and Vicinity,

Chenal Ecarte
(the Lost channel)

Bright, eddying, shimmering, current.
Have you really lost your way?
From the course of common torrent,
Of the lake, the river, bay?

Men call you "Waif stretch of water,
That has run from other astray,
Your Neptune, the old Sea God's daughter,
A madcap, so blithesome and bray"

We've drifted with boat songs as lovers,
Gay, heedless of rudder or sail,
We have whistled to keep up our courage,
When the breezes were blowing a gale.

Thru' marshland and glade we have wondered,
The sport of the winds and tide
The days of that light childhood laughter
Are lost in the gulf deep and wide.

I'm drifting from my moorings, fair water,
From the banks that in childhood I plied,
I'm drifting on Time's swift flowing river,
And needful as you are my guide.

We are both sweeping to the ocean,
Through channels chance fortune has made,
We shall fade at last in its bosom
As inifinities in infinate fade.

Only someone kin to Arjuna could appreciate the Chenal Ecarte, in that one moment you are told it eventually flows into the ocean, bringing everything with it. This is perhaps the irony of the settler who wrote this (if it was a settler), for he or she realizes that the body of water that settled their childhood is the very same body of water that carries them home on time's swift current. Tide and wind, arms on the geological clock are also there, part of that which is much bigger, non-linear, absolute, and always wavering in its cyclical rhythms.