In South India, nothing was ordinary.

The crushing delight of sights sound and smells. Latent little threats, real and imagined, routinely destabilized my self-determined trajectories. Everything was an adventure, whether I was up for it or not.These adventures were laced with quickening. "How do I survive in India on a motorbike?" I asked the watchman at the ashram. “When you being each day, just imagine yourself safely home, that evening, madam,” he replied. I turned the key, gunned the engine, and poured myself into the mad weave of cows, carts, auto rickshaws, goats, and busses.

Quickening. It sounds like an acceleration, a making fast or becoming faster, but moments of quickening usually invoke the opposite, bringing the plans in motion, course of events, or progress towards a destination to an abrupt halt.  These moments are not scripted or even sought, they find us, they hold us, and they slam the door behind them when they go.

Quickening grips like a pure pulse of love, then slips back into the haze of the ordinary - a muse, appearing and disappearing as an apparition of time. Should we write it down, sketch it out, or just keep moving?

“We navigate by stories,” writes Rebecca Solnit.  Stories hold us in place or set things in motion. The dramas, large, small, or almost imperceptible, that careen us onward from one thought to another, from one place to another, from one person to another.

If a story is a landscape, a quickening is the cliff. It is deeply gravitational and you don't see it coming - a moment so poignant and direct, it becomes fixed and set in a suspended state. It's when we say everything changed, life would never be the same, and time stood still, but only for the briefest interlude, a single breath, the blink of an eye, the flap of a wing.

In India, everything changed, everyday, day after day, for months. These quickenings became lodged deep within, and I never unpacked them, but I did write them down, in just the briefest form. And now? Does each become a painting, a poem, a soundscape? Or are these quickenings fully crafted as memories, requiring no absolute form? How do you make something that already is?

Standing in the pouring rain, watching the sugar fields burn

Playing tennis in three different languages

Standing on the beach, watching the monsoon come ashore

Mobbed by children in Kanyakumari

The trees whispering secrets in goa

The frog in my morning coffee

The pit viper sleeping under my shoulder bag.

Thunder, lightning, and temple music

Cochin’s synagogue full of chandeliers

The world’s smallest bhagavad gita as 24k gold necklace 

Rain coming, madam, boat not working

The sparrow hawk that flew through the kitchen

Cremation on the outskirts of Edaiyanchavadi

Reading Shantaram on the train to Madurai

A store called “Aroma Sports”

Another store called “Magical Plywood”

Weddings upon weddings at the Sri Meenakshi Temple

Dogs barking, cows walking, goats running

A box sewn shut with muslin