Akhilanda

The Throne of Beato was created by a friend to celebrate Beatrice Wood's 102nd birthday. I spent a long time sitting on that throne, gazing at Ojai Mountain. Beatrice said she loved that mountain because it was the most stable thing in her life, it was there when she went to bed and still there when she woke up in the morning. The shimmering shards and fragments that make up the Throne of Beato bring to mind Akhilanda, the Hindu goddess of Never Not Broken. The following, from JC Peters article about Akhilanda, sums up the essence of The Always Broken Goddess.


Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.


Akhilanda's lesson: even that new whole, that new colorful, amazing groove we create is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to. We are already "Never Not Broken." We were never a consistent limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited. And that means we are amazing.


Thousands of shimmering shards, a hundred years, one mountain, and me.