Names
Every time I sit down to write something about my pregnancy I look out the window and, “It’s still snowing??!!” Bam! I’m distracted. There is something about this much snow that makes everything seem surreal. I can’t stop looking out at it, the way it carpets everything, the way colours are muted into black and white, the way it makes some colours pop. The story of Snow White comes to mind. “Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony!”
and then just like that I am free of the spell. My daughter will never be Snow White. The name we’ve chosen for her, its story is irrevocably Indian. An Indian goddess but never a Germanic princess. Now, it sounds so dramatic and it’s really such a common Indian name - Aditi.
Aditi - boundless, free, an infinite and shoreless expanse. The celestial virgin and mother of every existing form and being, the synthesis of all things. In one of the most mystic aspects, Aditi is divine wisdom. Aditi is the goddess of space, consciousness, the past, the future, and fertility. As the womb of space, she is a feminized form of Brahma. The line in the Rig Veda, “Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha” (RV 10.72.4) has reference to “the eternal cyclic re-birth of the same divine essence” (I’m quoting selectively from that most authoritative of sources - Wikipedia).
But who knew Aditi meant something so beautiful?
