Lakshmi, Hindu Goddess of Abundance · Female Voice

Let your eyes close.

Whatever you were just calculating, put it down.

Not solved. Just down. It will still be there tomorrow, and you will be better at it then than you are now, at this hour, in the dark, with no way to act on anything you decide.

Let your breath out. All the way out.

And again.

Notice your hands.

Most people who lie awake about money are holding their hands in some way. Curled. Or pressed flat. Or gripping something that is not there.

Open them.

Let them lie loose and empty on the bed, palms up if that feels right.

Nothing is being taken from you in this room.

Nothing in here costs anything. Not the dark. Not the warmth. Not the next few hours. Whatever else is true tonight, this part is free, and it is the part you are actually in.

Tonight I want to tell you about a goddess people have got completely wrong.

They think she is about money. She is not, and she never was.

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Her name is Lakshmi.

She arrived out of the sea.

The story is in the Mahabharata, and it is told at length in the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana. The gods and the demons churned the ocean itself, the way you would churn milk into butter, using a mountain as the paddle and a serpent as the rope. They pulled against each other for an age.

And out of that ocean came the treasures. They are usually counted as fourteen, though the texts do not entirely agree on the list, which is worth knowing about any old story that arrives with a tidy number attached.

But the treasures were not first.

The first thing that came up out of that water was poison.

In the telling in the Bhagavata Purana it rises before anything good does at all. Halahala. Dark, and spreading, and enough to end everything.

And the story says Shiva took it into his mouth.

He did not swallow it and he did not spit it out. He held it in his throat. In the usual telling Parvati puts her hands to his neck so that it can go no further, and it stayed there, and it stained him, and he has been called Neelkantha ever since.

The blue throated one. Named, permanently, for the night he held something terrible and did not let it move.

Only after that did the good things begin to come.

I want you to stay on that for a moment.

Because you know the feeling of the poison arriving first. Everyone who has ever lain awake doing sums knows it exactly. The bad thing comes early, and the good thing takes an age, and in between somebody just has to hold it in the throat and not swallow and not spit.

That is not you failing at this.

That is the order the story says things come in.

And then, after the poison, she rose up out of the water standing on a lotus, and the churning stopped.

Now here is the part that gets left out when people make her small.

Her tradition does not give her one job.

There is a devotional grouping, later than the oldest texts and strongest in the south of India, that counts her in eight forms. The Ashta Lakshmi. The lists vary a little from region to region, which tells you honestly that they were assembled by people over time rather than handed down whole.

Eight forms.

One of grain, which is food on the table. One of courage. One of knowledge. One of children. One of victory.

One of the elephants, which is the old sign of sovereignty, the ones shown pouring water over her.

One is the first form, the primordial one, and she is not about having anything at all.

And one. Only one. Is money as we would name it.

So when you lie here at two in the morning doing arithmetic, understand what you are actually doing.

You have taken one of her eight faces and decided that it is the whole of her.

You have taken the narrowest available definition of having enough, and you are measuring your entire life against it, at the one hour of the day when you are least able to argue back.

And here is the thing her own tradition says about her that nobody puts on a greeting card.

She does not stay.

There is a name for it. She is called Chanchala. The restless one. The one who moves.

And the Mahabharata has a scene about exactly this, in the book of peace, and it is a strange quiet piece of writing that almost nobody quotes.

She is leaving. She is walking out on Bali, a demon king who at that point had everything there was to have. And Indra finds her on her way out and asks her why she is going.

And part of what she answers is that she is governed by time. Her arriving and her leaving are the work of kala. Of time itself. Not something a person is assigned, and not something a person owns.

Sit with that for a moment, because it sounds like bad news and it is not.

Nobody was ever promised permanence. Not you. Not the person you are comparing yourself to tonight. Not the one whose life looks solved from the outside, who is very possibly lying awake somewhere at this exact hour doing this same arithmetic.

The tradition that built a goddess of fortune built the leaving into her from the beginning. They did not hide it or apologise for it. They gave her a name that means restless, and they wrote a scene where she walks out of the richest house in the story.

So the thing you are afraid of tonight, that it might not last, is not a warning about you.

It is just the shape of the thing.

Everyone alive is standing on ground that moves. Most of them are simply not thinking about it at two in the morning.

And then there is the flower.

She stands on a lotus. She is almost always shown standing or seated on one, and she holds them in her hands as well.

The lotus does not grow in clean water.

It grows in mud. It needs the mud. It puts its roots down into the thick dark silt at the bottom of a still pond, and that is where it feeds, and then it comes up through the water and opens on the surface without a mark on it.

That is not decoration. That was chosen.

Of all the flowers available to a civilisation that had every flower, the goddess of abundance was given the one that will not grow in clean water.

And nobody looking at a lotus is thinking about the silt.

But the silt is the reason that there is a flower.

So consider where you are lying.

In the mud. In the part of the night where the arithmetic will not resolve and there is nothing to be done until morning.

This is not the failure of the thing.

This is the part of it where the roots are.

There is one more thing about her, and it is the reason for every lamp.

On the night of Lakshmi Puja, in the middle of Diwali, people clean the house and light rows of small lamps and leave the doors and the windows standing open. This is not something out of a book. It is living practice, every year, in millions of houses.

And when you ask why the doors are left open, the answer is that she is thought to come to the houses that are lit and open, and to pass by the ones that are shut.

Not because she is judging you.

Because a shut house cannot receive anything.

And notice the order of it, because the order is the whole point.

The lamps are lit before she comes. The house is opened first. Nobody earns the lighting of the lamps, and nobody is told to wait until they have earned it. The opening is not a payment. The opening is just the opening.

You have been shut all day. Braced, calculating, holding your hands in fists in the dark. That is a house with the door closed.

So open it. Not to attract anything. Not to deserve anything.

Just because you have been clenched for fourteen hours and it is time to stop.

Let your hands go first, since that is where you have been holding it.

Let the fingers uncurl. Let the palms soften. Let the wrists go loose.

Feel your forearms getting heavy against the bed.

Your shoulders coming down away from your ears. Further than that.

Your jaw letting go. The tongue resting. The small muscles around your eyes releasing, the ones that have been narrowed all day at screens and at numbers.

Let your forehead smooth out.

Your throat soft and open.

Your chest rising and falling without you managing a single breath of it.

Your belly soft. Let it be soft. There is no one here to hold it in for.

Your lower back releasing into the bed.

Your hips. The long muscles of your thighs, heavy.

Your knees. Your calves.

Your ankles, and your feet, finally still.

Every part of you that was braced for something is allowed to stop bracing now, because nothing is going to be decided tonight and you already know it.

Here is what is true right now, in this room.

You are warm. You are lying down. The door is locked and the roof is holding.

Whatever the number is, it did not come for you tonight. It is not in the room. It is a thought about a possible future, and futures do not arrive at two in the morning. They arrive in daylight, slowly, and usually smaller than they looked from here.

You have enough for tonight.

That is the only bill that is due.

So let the room go soft around you.

Let the walls go far away.

Let the ceiling go.

Let the sounds outside become weather. A car is only a sound. None of it is asking anything of you.

Let the numbers go. Not solved. Just set down on the floor beside the bed, where they will still be in the morning if you want them.

And you may not want them. That happens more often than people admit. A great many things that were enormous at two in the morning are simply gone by nine, not because anything got fixed but because the hour that made them enormous has passed.

You are lying in the mud at the bottom of the pond, and that is the correct place to be, because that is where things root.

Nothing is being asked of you.

Nothing has to be earned before you are allowed to sleep. That is a rule you picked up somewhere, a long time ago, and you have been quietly paying it ever since.

Her own practice does not ask for it. The lamps get lit before anyone arrives. The door gets opened first.

She came up out of the ocean standing on a flower that only grows in the dark at the bottom. Grain, and courage, and knowledge, and children, and victory. One form out of eight for money.

And in none of it is there a test.

She never once asked anyone what they had.

She is not counting.

Nobody is counting.

The lamps are lit and the door is open and the only thing left tonight is the sleeping.

Let it come up around you the way water comes up around a stone. Slowly. From underneath. Without any effort on your part at all.

Nothing needs you now.

Not until morning.

Rest is a practice.

You practised tonight.

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