A Very Short Engagement
A girl's wedding day is not the ideal moment for her confession. If I could have I would have shouted the wonderful truth across cities and mountains and countries and seas, until the whole world had heard the beauty behind my story with Patrick. But that was unthinkable. Anyway, now that I was standing on that spectacular headland about to stride out in front of the guests, it was too late.
The warm morning breeze rippled through long strands of spinifex grass, and waves crashed into the white sand below Sydney’s gently curving coastline. Ten metres away, beyond the bushes, a few dozen guests stood around the clearing listening to Mozart's flute concerto and anticipating the arrival of the bride. My father, brothers and bridesmaid Lizzy looked on as my mother wrapped her arms around me.
“It's so exciting!” Mum shrilled. “I began thinking you might never get married.”
“I suppose you can't always see these things coming,” I said, thanking my lucky stars she hadn't dug any deeper. Despite being twenty-eight, single for several years and the youngest of the family, to everyone's surprise on that glorious summer morning in January 2005, I was first to be tying the knot. Although I'd always been the black sheep of the family—bit of a wild child—people had a hard time understanding how everything happened so quickly.
“And I never thought I'd see you in a sari, Mum,” I told her. “You're beautiful.”
She stood tall and slid a hand once more down her voluptuous faux-silk-covered side. “I should look the part, shouldn't I, to go with the theme."
My mother's interest in foreign cultures had never stretched further than mild tolerance, yet now India had found her a perfect mother-of-the-bride dress. Peacock blue it was. Her favourite.
“You're going with the theme even better than I am, Mum!”
My interest in Indian culture had been growing over recent years thanks to my meditation practice, along with a keen admiration for India’s beautiful fabrics and women’s clothes, so it felt natural to choose an Indian outfit for my wedding. I’d decided on an embroidered dust-pink ghagra skirt-suit from Rajasthan instead of the more exotic sari, however, because I thought it best to downplay my Eastern influences in front of the guests. And yet this was the day my mother had finally chosen to embrace them. Although she was just playing dress-up for the special occasion, her choice felt important. It felt like she was making a symbolic step towards me.
“And getting swept off your feet by a Frenchman,” Mum said one last time as if it might finally sink in. “It's so romantic, just like the movies!”
“Looks like I might be headed for a happy ending after all.” I trusted it to be true. In a few minutes, I would officially be saying, “I do” to my darling Patrick, and to me he would officially be saying, “Je la veux.” Until death do us part.
“He's lovely, your Frenchman,” Mum added, before stepping out in front of the guests.
It was a relief that my parents had taken a liking to Patrick, considering they'd known him less than a week. They'd heard a lot about my handsome stranger since I'd met him in Los Angeles three months earlier, and they'd been concealing their panic since I announced our engagement six weeks after that. But now that a trustworthy face and a charming accent had been added to Patrick's name, a good measure of reality was fleshing out the dream.
Water welled up in the eyes of the woman who had given me my first birth.
“Dad and I are going to miss you,” she said, removing a tear with her finger.
Love pulsed up my spine. “Me too, Mum.”
Changing countries wasn't going to be easy, but that was the way things had to be. It was written on my palms. It was drawn by the stars. It was destiny.
Mum swallowed hard, threaded her hands through my brothers' arms, and strode out in her peacock-blue sari to the pride of place beside her future son-in-law.
I turned to Lizzy, my bridesmaid and soulmate, who would be next to step out in front of the small crowd. Her golden pantsuit from Punjab made her even more elegant than usual. Like Mum, it was the first time she'd worn anything so Indian. That morning, Lizzy had overseen my makeup and braided my hair, all the while being careful not to let the secret slip in front of my mother. She was the only one of my friends and family who knew the truth of my story with Patrick. Well, part of it anyway. And only because she'd stumbled on it. Lizzy understood me better than most people though. Even if we'd grown separate ways lately, we'd been best friends since forever.
“You got butterflies?” she asked, grasping my upper arms.
“Not much. I’ve never been more sure about anything,” I assured her. I'd come a long way in self-mastery lately. Been discovering the powers within.
“I do!” Lizzy said, taking a deep breath and stepping out with her bouquet into Mozart's flute concerto. “Good luck!” she whisper-shouted behind her.
“You too!” I whisper-shouted back.
Finally, I turned to my father and threaded my arm into his. It was just the two of us now, preparing for him to hand me over to Patrick. We sent each other courage through a long-reaching smile, and an eclipse of invisible light shone between our hearts.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes Dad.”
“I'm really happy for you.”
“Thanks Dad.”
“I love you.”
“I know. Me too.”
The steadiness in the brown of my father's eyes told me that he trusted my journey, even though he didn't always understand it.
If only everybody knew a bit of Sanskrit, things would have been easier to explain.
*
SANSKRIT सन्स्क्रित
made holy; perfect; the language of the gods
Five years earlier, I didn't know any Sanskrit either, except for the words mandala, yoga and daal, and at the time I didn't even know they were Sanskrit. I also knew the word karma, though I'd never imagined it would be part of my karma to take an interest in Eastern cultures and foreign languages, let alone marry a Frenchman and move to the other side of the globe. Five years earlier I knew only English, and, like my family and friends, I was accustomed to only the Western mindset and the Western experience of things. But now, despite being a white, middle-class Australian without a drop of Indian blood in my veins, I had adopted a few dozen Sanskrit words as my own.
The word Sanskrit means made holy. It also means cultivated, purified, perfect.[i] When it comes to expressing subtle ways of knowing and of being, Sanskrit excels. It is often referred to as Devavani, meaning the language of the Gods.[ii] The few dozen Sanskrit words that I had recently come to cherish were among the oldest known to humanity, and the most sublime.[iii] Their wisdom was giving voice to my experiences where my mother tongue fell short. These words were expanding my vision and enabling me to express my new understandings with nuance and pertinence. They were helping me navigate my way through the chaos of being human in today's world, because, as I discovered, they contain the keys to understanding who we really are inside.
Of course, the story behind how I met Patrick was about more than just semantics. It was about understanding. For, as language enables one to think, what is excluded from one's language inhibits one's thinking.
*
After twenty soul-stirring footsteps by my father's side, I found myself standing face to face, hand in hand with the man I would have and hold, for richer and for poorer, as long as we both shall live. Guided by the bubbly bilingual marriage celebrant that I'd been relieved to find amid the rush of wedding plans, Patrick and I exchanged vows—mine in English and his in French. We promised to love and to respect, to be honest and faithful, to keep each other in sickness and in health. Against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, we sealed our promise with rings and stepped off the precipice into our future together.
“On behalf of all here today, it is my pleasure to declare you husband and wife,” declared the celebrant, before whispering to Patrick, “Vous pouvez donner un bisou à votre femme.”
A timid kiss landed on my lips. Everybody clapped and cheered and the lingering wisps of white cloud dissolved, leaving an impeccable blue sky.
The picture book day continued with a seaside photoshoot and brunch in the manicured garden of my aunt and uncle's splendid home. Wisteria flowers drooped from the pillars of the swimming-pool terrace beside white satin bows, and smartly-dressed wait staff with silver platters circulated through the crowd, serving fruit juice cocktails and hand-crafted aperitifs. Everybody mingled in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, against a background of classical music and love songs from the 1980s. Everything was perfect. Too perfect to be true, some guests might have thought.
Patrick and I did the rounds, and I introduced him to the friends and relatives he hadn't met yet. Despite the limits imposed by his rudimentary high-school English, everybody liked my Frenchman. His easy smile, European style and polite demeanour made a good impression. We had limited the guests to forty, which had the advantage of not only limiting the amount of explaining I'd have to do, but the number of clichés that came rolling off the well-meaning tongues of female friends.
“You're living the princess dream, Jane!” said one friend, eyes glazing over. The impact of our girlhood mythologies was persistent.
“Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White...” teased another. “Even Beauty got her beast. Though yours doesn't seem much like a beast...”
Patrick smiled and said, “Yes!” sure that this was the best strategy to avoid getting tangled up in yet another language-based misunderstanding of which there had already been plenty, especially in the absence of his French family who had been unable to make the trip.
“So tell us,” queried another friend, placing a bite-size aperitif upon her tongue. “How did you two meet?”
I took a deep breath and dived into the story one more time. Half of it anyway. The half that was, though relatively sensational, culturally acceptable enough for family and friends to digest.
“Well, once upon a time...”
I told them how Patrick and I had literally bumped into each other at the luggage conveyer belt at Los Angeles airport, then found that we were both on our way to the same meditation conference. I told them how we went for a coffee at Starbucks, about the ice-breaking moment when he spilt his, and about how we gestured our way through our early conversations with the help of his English-French pocket dictionary. I told them how amazed we were to discover that our pre-booked hotel rooms happened to be right next door to each other, and how we were inseparable for the next four days.
“... and now we're going to live happily ever after!” I concluded.
“So amazing!” shrieked my cousin, who'd heard the fairy tale at least three times by now. “So Hollywood!”
Female friends took turns to coo.
“Awww... It's destiny…”
“Bet there were fireworks when you first looked into each other's eyes...”
“It's so mysterious! So exciting! Love at first sight...”
I smiled and let them believe it. There was no harm in that. How else could a lightning romance like ours be explained? The facts are Patrick and I did meet in Los Angeles airport in November, and we were both on our way to the same meditation conference. He did spill his coffee, our hotel rooms were right next door to each other, and we did spend all our time together for the next four days. Those four days with Patrick were mysterious and exciting – not because they were passionate and carnal, but because they were surrendered and divine. Meeting Patrick was romantic—not because there were fireworks and champagne, but because what we chose was unconditional. It was destiny. It's just that things had been a little more arranged than I was letting on.
Not everyone in my situation would have held back the truth, but I felt I had to. People tended not to understand the choices I'd made over the last few years, and because meeting Patrick was deeply entwined with those choices, I figured it was better to keep certain parts of the fairy tale just for us. The fact that I wasn't being entirely truthful was ironic though, because I'd recently come to value Truth above all things. Truth with a capital T, that is.
I had tried to explain the things I’d been experiencing, but my recent attempts at being open and honest with family and friends had been met at best with tolerance, mostly with indifference, and occasionally with outright concern. My oversensitivity and a pesky fear of being judged had made for clumsy explanations at times, and earnestness had tainted my words with the appearance of self-doubt. I couldn't blame people for their scepticism though. Before receiving the spontaneous connection, I would have been sceptical myself.
After the speeches, Patrick and I cut the wedding cake and spooned pieces of outrageously delicious white chocolate mud-cake into each other's mouths.
“C'est tres bien!” I said, showing off one of the few phrases I'd learned that week in my French evening class for beginners.
“C'est très bon,” my husband gently corrected.
Learning French was going to take time.
After a few more delectable mouthfuls of cake, Patrick and I did a final round to bid our guests farewell, starting with my parents. Mum's sari had stayed perfectly in place since I'd wrapped it around her early that morning. She'd thoroughly enjoyed the day, and I was glad. She'd already missed out on so much of the important stuff.
“You're going to love the Blue Mountains,” Mum told her new French son-in-law. “You couldn't have picked a better place for a honeymoon.”
Patrick smiled and said, “Yes!”
“Jane's always been one for adventure,” Dad said to Patrick. “You must be the brave type too—it takes courage to marry a foreigner.”
We were courageous. More than Dad knew.
Patrick smiled again and said, “Yes!”
My grandparents congratulated us and said that at my age it was high time I tied the knot. My countryside cousin was sure I'd regret leaving my homeland and my mother tongue, and my uncle Jim reckoned our marriage would only last six months.
“'Til the pheromones run dry,” he mocked.
According to him, four days in Los Angeles, ten weeks of emails and a handful of phone calls across time zones was nowhere near enough to guarantee any couple a stable marriage. That might be true under ordinary circumstances, but Uncle Jim didn’t know that our circumstances weren't ordinary.
I smiled and brushed off his comment. “Time will tell!”
Patrick smiled and said, “Yes!”
Lizzy hugged us and said we looked like two peas in a pod. My middle brother Lennie said our wedding might make him believe in marriage after all, which was looking more likely since his girlfriend Karen had just caught my bouquet.
“I'm proud of ya, sis,” Lennie said, wrapping his arms around me in that familiar, bear-hug kind of way. “Just hope you know what you're doing, that's all.”
Cool vibrations blew strong in my palms. “I do, bro. I know what I'm doing.”
“Congratulations,” said my older brother Donald, giving me a rare stiff hug. “Hope it works out for you.”
I was sure that it would. My faith was unwavering, but explaining that to Donald was impossible. Faith wasn't his thing.
“France sounds great,” said Donald's girlfriend Felicity. “Maybe we'll get to Paris one day.”
Patrick smiled and said, “Yes!”
“It was a very short engagement,” said my aunty Nance, kissing us on both cheeks the way they do in France. “But why not? I wish you two all the happiness in the world.”
The divine breeze tickled the crown of my head.
“Thank you,” Patrick and I said in unison.
I threaded my arm into his, and we waved a last goodbye to our guests.
My brothers and friends had decorated my car in secret with ribbons and tin cans and shaving cream, to ensure we newlyweds would get noticed on our drive out to the mountains. Out of respect for tradition they'd written those two legendary words across the back windscreen:
– JUST MARRIED –
Of course, they weren't to know this wasn't the first time.
*
BODHA बोध
awareness (of self)
In reality, it should have been very simple to tell the truth of how I met Patrick. It was really only a question of awareness – bodha. No word exists for bodha in English or in French, but in India, this beautiful Sanskrit word had been born and kept alive, unchanged, for millennia. It means awareness—of self.
All of the world's major religions highlight the importance of self-knowledge to help us move beyond the everyday and penetrate the purpose of life. In the West, however, where knowledge is considered to come from the outside, we humans think of ourselves as empty vessels that get filled. What the West does not yet allow for are spiritual ways of knowing – knowledge that comes from the inside. Bodha derives from experience of the Self, the subtle self. It is not founded on mere belief. It is tangible, evidence-based knowledge that is accessible only through one's central nervous system, not through reading books, listening to podcasts or watching videos on YouTube.
The word bodha, among others, carried the subtle knowledge that had become mine and Patrick's – knowledge that had transformed us and deepened our understanding of life. Bodha was the basis of the revolution that we were a part of: a grassroots movement that had been growing for more than three decades by then, slowly branching out across the continents from seeds that had been sown thousands of years before. Patrick and I were part of a community that held this knowledge more preciously than anything in the world, and we would have loved nothing more than to share it, wholeheartedly, with that world. If only people were ready to receive it; ready to become self-aware.
Five years earlier, however, I too was not yet aware of how unaware I was.
*
People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.
– Paulo Coelho
[i] The profoundly spiritual wisdom carried by the classical language of Sanskrit is both primordial and universal. Its written version emerged over 3000 years ago in the 'Seven Rivers' land of India's north-west. The earliest documented texts are the sacred Vedic compositions dating from around 1500 BCE, and over the centuries the refined linguistic precision of Sanskrit made it the language of choice for composing poetry, drama, prose, religious and didactic literature as well as treatises in philosophy, astronomy, astrology and mathematics. Sanskrit boasts the most extensive literature in the world and it continues to be used today in scholarly, scientific and popular texts, even surpassing its sister languages Latin and Greek.
[ii] Sanskrit is said to have been brought forth by the goddess Saraswati, whose name means the essence of self. Draped in a white sari and seated either in a lotus flower or upon a swan, Goddess Saraswati is the symbol of ultimate truth, knowledge and discernment. Language was considered sacred in ancient India where Sanskrit was used with great vigour and depth to explore the deeper human experience. Sanskrit is also said to be the mother of all languages, one of humanity’s greatest living treasures, and India’s finest gift to the world.
[iii] As today's physicists use the language of mathematics to research and express their field to perfection, so the early sages – the earliest scientists of spirituality—used the pure sounds of the Sanskrit language to research and express the field of consciousness. Several notions in Sanskrit terminology have recently been found to have striking similarities with concepts evolving in quantum mechanics and Western psychology, as they capture with precision the subtle relation between thought, energy and matter.
