–interview with Bhanu Kapil on Mars Poetic blog.

B: I read your question and immediately see the balcony of a temple in Mussoorie, in the Himalayas, where I stayed with my uncle for a few days when I was twenty. I was traveling with him from temple to temple, training or witnessing, really, the ancestral practice in my family of “healing with light and color.” My uncle would give a dharma talk, give healings, then the temple would put us up for the night, or as long as we could stay. I remember sitting on the balcony looking down at the mist in the valley below, the sun rising through the clouds, which turned rose and gold in turns — perhaps twenty variations of these colors — wrapped in a quilt, drinking chai from a little glass, and — from this time on, I never lost hope, no matter what happened to me or to others. I was recalibrated by atmosphere to the light in my own body, and lately, as I engage questions of aggression and community, what I do is go to the river near my house in Colorado, with my dog, and sit until the river comes out of itself and into me. It is the same thing. It is SHAKTI, which comes to us through the earth, its ethers and its bodies of water.