The Mahogany seed spirals

Swietenia Mahagoni, Kintsukuroi, art and the greatest life lesson I learnt

Hi! I tried something new and you can now enjoy the main write-up of this post via the article voiceover above. Hope you check it out!

I did not know much about what they were - just that they were carriers of seeds. A secret elf gave me a pod a few weeks ago and I pictured one curling in the air, spiralling towards the ground, windswept - a little or far away from its parent tree. I did not know it was Mahogany.

I shook the hard brown pods that glistened in the light of my room and heard a cluster of seeds rubbing against each other, eager to burst out into life.

I am not sure if my memory is failing me but I remembered seeing them twirl as I took walks on my college campus - the bittersweet time I would give anything in the world to relive again and not change a thing. N said they didn’t want to go back to campus because they weren’t sure the nostalgia could be handled. I think we miss some things in life so dearly and it’s painfully beautiful, but only so from a distance.

I’m reading Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast’ where he documents his life in Paris and I’m here for the writing style. It may be the most relatable Hemingway I’ve read so far and perhaps will ever read.

But the pods…

Through an emotionally hard time, the pod that was with me broke in half. I had accidentally put my hand on it and the light pressure I applied as I was shifting in my seat tore it apart. I was sad. I thought it symbolised the impermanence of things and people in life. Things break and people leave. A sense of gloom and doom blanketed me that whole day after someone pointed it out to me too. “ I thought it would be safe with you…”, they had said.

Having to go work for a couple of weeks in a new city for my new job added to the changing prospect. I tried hard to shake it off. Like everyone in a panic, I repeated many a time, with myself, friends and family that life is all about change, trying to forcefully internalise it. But there was a part of me that couldn’t accept it - my melancholic side, the one Susan Cain writes about in ‘Bittersweet’.

The next day I remembered I had read a long time ago that the Japanese patch up their broken ceramics using gold - ‘Kintsukuroi’ or the golden joinery. I had saved the mahogany pod, of course, and I wanted to try repairing it. Taylor Swift’s ‘All Too Well’ had a couple of lines that read like pure poetry to me then - the falling of the snow and the descent of the mahogany pods onto the earth. I tore apart a piece of paper from my sketchbook leaving haphazard edges and made a card.

I thought Rumi had said the line about light getting in but turns out writers and philosophers are not separate. This card brought me comfort but also an illusion. I misunderstood the point of the golden repair - I imagined it would bring the thing that I was losing back to me but didn’t realise that it would not be the same anymore.

I gave the card to H and I left for Hyderabad with a heavy heart.

If ‘growing up’ was a feeling, I felt it that night.

Over the next few days, I grieved for what I had lost and smiled for the personal effects I was allowing space to arrive…

And now? I take walks now, with just myself mostly but sometimes I have company - friends of all kinds - human, dog, kitten and always trees. I wake up in the morning and sit on the balcony and get the sunlight in my eyes; I manage to catch the sunrise sometimes, the first light of the day breaking through the canopy to hit my pupils and driving the cold darkness away. I journal if I’m feeling like it and sip on hot water with lemon and honey. Any which way, I see the eagles soaring in the sky, the chickens that the watchman raises in the next plot and various tiny birds from the narrow strip of the balcony we have. And I feel my golden skin soaking the sunlight in…

I went out into the balcony today as well and guess what I found!

Three pods from the sweet mahogany; a bounty, a symbolism and a life lesson - when you move on from the old, you give life a chance to surprise you with something new.

P.S. N and I booked tickets just a while ago to visit our college campus for the cultural fest. Ultimately, if you don’t experience it all - the good and the bad - have you lived well?

A Note from Naya

What I’m reading:

• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

  • Hemingway’s journal-like description of his life living in Paris, writing and trying to make it as a young expatriate journalist.

  • “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

• The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov: A Collection Of Fifty Stories

  • My favourites so far - The Death of a Government Clerk, A Malefactor

What I made:

• Wax crayon art - she looked right into my soul. If you have a name suggestion for this lady, I’d love to hear it.

---

Thanks for reading! If you found what you just read interesting, consider sharing it with your friends using the button below and leaving a comment below.

‘Naya’ is a reader-supported publication. If you would like to support my work and receive new posts, all for free, give me a virtual high-five by subscribing below. I will only send you the cream of the crop! :)