The Sacred Cow
Today my thoughts have been with the Sacred Cow and her place in my life. I don’t know much about the significance in Hinduism but this is how she shows to me.
I saw a moving Documentary on TV during the week. It was about ‘locked-in syndrome’, a rare form of stroke in which a person is fully aware but unable to have movement of the voluntary muscles of the body. The programme covered the story of two couples and their ability to continue to love through this syndrome. The women with the syndrome had just had another child and it was beautiful to see the love that is so vibrant for them both. Her main form of communication is through eye movements and the deep sounds from her throat.
One of the things that has stuck with me is the power of transmission and how refined love becomes when it has nowhere to leak out. This woman’s intense bellow as her husband shared of their love for each other, felt like a divine expression of the Sacred Cow in her. The deep channeling of everything from her pelvis and out her throat spoke of how she birthed her child and birthed her love in intimacy. I still feel the open tube through the centre of her body, entirely unencumbered by resistance. She felt and sounded exactly as I did in the final minutes of birthing my youngest daughter. I imagine the capacity of a man and the deep gifts of life to hold and open in a women that constant refinement. This couple have something most people will never experience except for in rare moments.
Maybe she nurtured and fed and knelt to some sacred cow in another lifetime and the very spirit has infused her in the here and now. The Gopi and her Beloved at one. I like to think this. I feel thats what devotion does. Over time there is an exquisite blending and fusion of two until a pure perfume of radiant light is expressed in some form or another. Maybe this story is an example of how we never know how or when we will be entered.
It is not far off spring here and I live in the country. I love driving towards my town at this time of year as there are many big swollen cow bellys and I enjoy the peace of seeing the heifers chewing their cuds. I know its not long till I will hear their bellows of birth and I will see those sacs of flaying legs lying in the wet grass. I will worry about how cold it must be to be born in the late frosts and I will smile when I see the little blue jackets the farmers cover the calves with. I will be upset when I hear the mothers cry for their babies as the farmers take them away. I will hope that the babies get their full of colustrum and that the magical powers of that first food will stay under wraps a little longer so their progeny won’t be weakened by our lack of reverence for this special animal of the Gods and their ability to enter and touch us deeply.