Kannadi - Mirror

In a place some 8,000 miles away, there is a small village called Aranmula. In that tiny corner of the Indian subcontinent, lives a family of alchemists. For hundreds of years, this family has jealously guarded the secret of the kannadi, or mirror, of Truth.

It is said that the family was first conscripted -- along with several others -- to create objects for a temple to Krishna. That temple, now over a thousand years old, traces its lineage back to the Mahābhārata and is alleged to have been built by the great warrior Prince Arjuna himself.

All kannadi today are descendants of the temple Kannadi in that they follow a carefully-guarded family recipe in a complex series of steps by which tin, copper, and other alloys are alchemized to create a reflective surface that reveals the True Self. 

Grab the closest hand mirror you can find and take a look. What you see is a close approximation of what you really look like...but it's not perfect. If you lay the mirror flat and place a quarter on it, there will be a slight break between the quarter and its reflection. That disconnect is due to the distortion of glass and light. 

In our modern mirrors, we lay glass on top of the metals that form the mirror's base. Possibly you've noticed this if you've ever broken a mirror and -- while contemplating your 7 years of bad luck -- realized that some of the shards you swept up were only glass, with no mirroring elements. Or maybe, like me, you first noticed this when you tried to step into a mirror as a child and saw that there was a break between your corporal body and your reflection.

Unlike our mirrors, in the kannadi of Aranmula, the alchemized metals (copper and tin, as opposed to aluminum and silver) form the uppermost reflective surface. That is, there is no layer of glass to refract light and distort the image. If you lay your quarter on the surface of a kannadi, there will be no break between object and reflection. If you try to step through the looking glass, there will be no breach between your reflection and your Self. According to Eliot Stein in Custodians of Wonder, "Because the light doesn't have to penetrate any refractive medium and change directions, what is staring back at you is a perfect reflection of who you are." Needless to say, there is a spiritual element to the mirror. It is said you have not truly seen yourself until you have gazed into an Aranmula kannadi.

The directions for creating this miraculous mirror aren't written down in full anywhere. Rather, they've been passed down orally over hundreds of years by the Vishwakarma or "all-maker" alchemists -- believed to have descended, if Eliot's research can be trusted, from the Divine All-Maker himself -- Vishnu, creator of worlds. 

As the centuries march on and the world moves more quickly, it is uncertain whether younger generations will continue the kannadi tradition. Creating a true mirror is complex and physically demanding, and currently, there are only 13 creators left. Once they are gone, the secrets will die with them.

I've been thinking about mirrors a lot lately because I hate them. 

When my sisters and I were kids, our mom never told us we were pretty, or let anyone else tell us that either. She was raised in foster care, where it seems extra dangerous to be pretty or attract attention. I get it.

But when I was 25, someone told me I was beautiful, and I almost fell over. I immediately called my college roommate, BJ. 

"YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT SOMEONE JUST SAID TO ME, BEEJ!!!" THEY SAID I WAS BEAUTIFUL!!"

She was confounded, but I thought it was extremely exciting. Mirrors were my new best friend. I wanted to see what there was to see.

That all changes, though, once you hit 40. No one warned me about this. Or maybe they did, but I was too busy buying Windex.

Lily and I hung out the other night and I said, "Do you ever feel like you don't recognize yourself when you look in the mirror anymore?"

"OH MY GAWD YES!" she said. "WHO IS THIS PERSON!? WHERE DID I GO?"

That's 100% what it feels like to get old. I don't like it. I hate it, in fact.

It's not just that there are more wrinkles and less hair, either. It's like, this constant drip drip drip drip reminding me that Time is marching inexorably toward some cataclysmic end.

"I could never be an English teacher," I once told my AP World Lit teacher. "It would be too depressing to face the continual reminder of my own mortality with each new iteration of students."

Dr. Holley snorted at me and rolled his eyes. 

I'm an English teacher now.

Looking back, I suspect that at 18, I knew this life would be hard, that it would be difficult to watch generations of students grow up, graduate, get married, have children. For me, hints and cracks of a pretty crippling mental health disorder started showing up at 16. At 24, I finally began taking medicine for OCD and depression. At 27, I went to the hospital. And when I was about 33, my best friend said she sensed "a great emptiness inside" of me.

I think when I look in mirrors now, I see the emptiness, and that's all I see. When I was younger, I was distracted by the image on the surface of the mirror. Now that that image has faded, I'm left with what is underneath it, the thing the kannadi would have shown me from the beginning... 

And the thing is, if emptiness is a listed symptom of a medical diagnosis in the DSM-V, there's not a lot you can do about it, is there? You can try with all your might to create meaning by going on spiritual quests to Bali, and volunteering on various boards, and teaching 7th graders to "stay gold." But at the end of the day, you cannot force yourself to feel meaningful. And it gets really hard to keep getting up and facing the mirror day after day.

I think I teach and practice yoga for the same reason I used to run so many miles a day in college -- because, for at least one beautiful, torturous hour, I am relieved from the reality of my own mind. I don't know, maybe that's why violinists play and rock climbers climb and all sorts of people do all sorts of things. It is so fkkking loud inside my head, all the time.

If we're lucky, we find a handful of soul friends in our one, short, beautiful life. Those are the people who pick us up off the floor after we've collapsed in grief, exhaustion, or despair. Those are the people who don't demand we give their life meaning, but maybe help us see a glimmer of something redemptive in our own mirror when it's foggy. To be honest, mine is really foggy right now.

Over the summer, I read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men. It was already so freaking loud inside my head, but this book made it hard to hear anything else. I'm still waiting for someone else to read it so we can discuss. If Life is about connections, what does it mean when they splinter? Or worse, never existed to start with? What is the meaning of any one life?