Daily Signet

In the “Ramayana” it is said that Prajapati “brooded ” rather than “meditated” upon the worlds and “from them, thus brooded upon, issued forth” the cosmos. Brooding carries a connotation today of dark, moody, and slightly morbid thinking, but the first few definitions in the OED are: “To sit on eggs so as to hatch them; To cherish under the wings as a hen does; To hatch projects or products; To cherish in the mind, to nurse.” And so, where we might have expected Prajapati to have entered a meditative state of bliss, of perhaps the empty-headiness of a meditation via an escape hatch of guided imagery, rather we find the image of him as if sitting on a egg, incubating it with wings, and then hatching from it something new and never-before born. In this verse, Prajapati broods into life the Vedas or knowledge, broods into life the three syllables of Earth, Air and Sky, and then hatches from them the sound in all sounds: the universal OM. Not a bad brood to issue forth. So it would seem that in the spirit of the great Brooder or the spirit of the Creator, we should fully engage in brooding, in giving our wings to formative, germinal, generative thoughts and actions and delight in their issuing forth. We are here not to successfully conform to a corset of thought or a rigor of dogma, but to brood—and brood in big ways and brood in small ways. We are to gather up what is uniquely ours and wrap our wings around it, cherish it, hatch it, nurse it, and watch it have play in a world of knowledge and syllables and irreducible sounds. Not a bad way to live.                                                          

Benjamin Martin

On This Day…

Ordination date of Benjamin Martin