There is a bird tattooed on my hand. A phoenix. People sometimes ask what it means, and I give them the short answer — rising from the ashes — because the long answer takes a lifetime, and I am still living it.
This is not a story with an ending. Transformation, I’ve learned, is not a door you walk through once. It is more like a river that keeps arriving at the sea, remaking itself with every bend. What follows is simply a report from somewhere along the current.
The Child Who Listened to the Old
Some children run toward the playground. I was the one drifting toward the veranda where the elders sat. I have always felt a strange gravity toward the subtle — the unsaid thing beneath the said thing, the weather behind a person’s eyes. While others collected marbles, I was collecting impressions: a sense of self that arrived early, an emotional and cognitive empathy that let me feel the room before I understood it.
My mother gave me my first compass. In her devotional life, I saw that the sacred was not a Sunday event but a daily posture. By fourteen or fifteen, I was reciting Sanskrit shlokas to Lord Shiva — not as homework, but as hunger. By nineteen or twenty, that hunger became surrender. I still remember tears arriving unbidden during remembrance of my deity, the kind of tears that don’t belong to sadness at all. They were the overflow of something too large to hold.
The Garden Had Thorns
But the same garden that grew that devotion was full of thorns.
My high-school years were a siege of the body — recurrent fevers, month after month; a frame that was short, weak, feeble against the tall confidence of my peers. And there were disturbances of another order altogether — paranormal, psychic interferences that I understood later were not misfortune but intention. Harm was directed at me and at my family through the darker crafts, the kind that work in shadow. I say this plainly, though I will not name it further in public; some knowledge is best held, not paraded.
For a long time I did not understand what was happening. But truth has a nature of its own: it never truly hides. It may arrive late — years late — but it always surfaces, the way a stone dropped in a well eventually shows its ripple. In time I came to know who the internal enemy was, the one who moved against us from close quarters. An inferiority complex took root in that soil, as such things do.
And here is the part I hold with quiet awe: I did not have to lift a finger. I watched Mother Nature — call it karma, call it dharma, call it the long arithmetic of the cosmos — settle the account herself. Those who set the fire were, in time, consumed by their own. I witnessed it. Not with triumph, but with a chastened understanding that the universe keeps its own ledger, and no debt goes unrecorded.
Even so — thorns are not the whole plant. Even then, good results at school earned me a quiet reputation, the respect of teachers, the trust of friends. Looking back, I see that the fever and the respect grew on the same stem. The wound and the gift were never separate. The oyster does not choose the grain of sand, but it decides what to build around it.
The Turn After the Twenties
Something shifted in my mid-twenties. The seed of bhakti planted so early finally cracked open and grew roots deep enough to hold weight — enough for a 360-degree turn.
I often feel I am two people walking together: an inner guru and the sevak who follows him. Astrologically, this is written into my very chart — Jupiter and Saturn sit together in my first house, conjunct with my ascendant, the two great forces standing at the doorway of who I am. Jupiter, teacher of dharma; Saturn, relentless disciplinarian of karma. One points to the ideal; the other insists you earn it, slowly, in the currency of effort. Between the two, a life gets built.
Why the Phoenix
I chose the phoenix because I have, quite literally, felt the jaws of death close and then loosen. When you survive that, you stop negotiating with life for comfort and start asking it for meaning.
Here is what I now hold as bedrock: life is uncertain, death is certain — and death is not a wall but a door. A threshold where prarabdha karma is carried forward, like a traveller changing trains but keeping the same luggage. If that is true, then how I live matters — not for reward, but because every action is a stitch in a garment I will wear again.
So I choose consciousness over surface. Courage over comfort. And when I fall — I will fall, that is not in question — I choose to rise. Not because the ashes are pleasant, but because I have felt, more than once, what waits in the rising.
The transformation continues. I would not want it any other way.
And you? Somewhere in your own story there is a grain of sand you’ve been building around — a thorn that became a stem, a fall you’re still learning to rise from. I’d love to hear where you are on your own river. Leave a comment, share this with someone walking a similar path, or simply sit with the question tonight: what is your fire teaching you to become?
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