This is the story of Tapovanbaba, a retelling as handed down to me from my elder who encountered this mystic baba that lived in the Tapovan meadows at 14,000ft settled at the base of Mt. Shivling in the Himalayas.

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Footfall after footfall, courting the sacred Ganges River, my elder walked the pilgrimage path unknowingly following in the many footsteps of others that trek to this high place for one reason: to have presence with the "baba" or holy man living at the base of the glaciated hallowed Ganges. My elder journeyed here with ordinary intentions of exploring these sacred lands, yet unaware that the non-ordinary would mystify him into the an invitation of a lifetime and meet Tapovanbaba. Like sentient signposts along the river-way, sadhus began hinting at where the pilgrimage path leads to, geographically and spiritually. Bending their yogic bodies and minds into other realms of reality, they adorned their faces and bodies with ash as a doorway into the contemplation of death in its many forms. A foreshadowing influence "to die before you die" as the initiation my elder would move through as the release and death of elements of his being that were preventing his passageway to more illumination of existence.

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Receiving sadhu teachings along the way, he climbed higher and higher to the meadows and to the mysterious threshold he was unknowingly ready to walk through. Approaching two small earthen dwellings, he met Tapovanbaba.

 

Tapovanbaba was "muni"--vowed to silence, and a man that seemed barely a man as he beheld something incomprehensibly expansive within him, and radiated it far out into the ethers. My elder, in and out of ordinary and extraordinary consciousness, he describes that during the night that he stayed in the "guest" hut, it was as if Tapovanbaba came into him: he could feel his ineffably expanded energy from within him, attuning him to a greater embodiment of being, and releasing stale aspects lingering within him and his relationship to life. My elder describes it has terrifying in experiencing a moment of great unfamiliarity and uncertainty, while also comforted by the signature of unconditional love and trust. Tapovanbaba seemed to immediately release obsolete energy within my elder's energy field and perhaps ancestry, just by being in his presence. These experiences are barely and rarely captured in words, and even here rambles mysteriously uncontained and far from understood.

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My elder brought potatoes as an offering, and had urging curiosity of how he and his consort survived in such isolation and altitude through the winter. He learned that Tapovanbaba practices "tumo" or yoga of the psychic heat, to remain alive in the height of winter. 

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He left after the next day, descending down the mountain while descending into the deep processing that would continue to inform his understanding and confounding of existence, bending his grasp on human capacity and the reality he knew.

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P O R T R A I T   M A K I N G   P R O C E S S:

An exploration of Self through relationship with this story; this man that lived teetering upon the known ordinary consciousness and incomprehensible extraordinary consciousness. He was an entryway into other realms.

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A part of me needed to know him more tangibly than in my mind'd eye, I needed to midwife more of him physically into the world I lived in, the western culture that has little to no room to acknowledge the value of mystics and those with the call and ability to perceive the world through a beyond expanded narrative; the natural ability to discern archetypal + primordial energies that bring our world and its energetic compendium into form.

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I needed to bring alive more awareness and merit of the mystic's path to my own psyche and sense of identity; to nourish my own intrinsically mystical capacity to bring out of societal hiding.

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And, I needed to not just create this space of acknowledgement and potential within me, but for possible others to identify within themselves the parts that travel a transcendent knowing and communion with our uncontained, unexplainable, reverent knowing of this existence.

 

I needed to utilize art as a way to point out that our culture is under-developed without the value of the mystical path and part within us.

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Hence, a portrait, a mirroring reflection, a peering into the mystic foundation permeating all existence.

 

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