I felt more like a creature than a woman for the month I spent in this process, more elemental than human. I am still unable to get my hands clean. The combination of wire scrubbers and constant wood gathering has left me with millions of tiny cuts that filled with lep, sanskar, haldi, kum kum, and earth, giving me dirt tattoos. I was pushed and stretched to limits I didn’t dream I could reach, kneaded, battered, and almost defeated, but not quite. Starved, force fed, baked in the noon sun, morning cold showered, dragged from my bed eternally early, smoked out, hosed off, covered in everything imaginable, hosed off again, then wrapped in saris and asked to receive guests.

At first, like we all do, I fought it. Tried to find ways to anticipate what was coming, to prepare myself, to hold it together, to avoid the suffering. After a while all that stopped. I let what was coming come. 50 lbs of weight on my back as I try to hold bow pose for 4 minutes? Ok. A Yagna the size of a house fire? Ok.

Because this is how life is; it feasts, and then it famines. It comes at you with its full weight and your only choice is to rail against it or to soften into it. That’s literally all there is. Every time I do this work I gain a wonderous cocktail of softness and resilience. I feel wire brush scrubbed clean. I feel soft and indestructible at the same time.