The Whirlwind, The Feet, and the Geometry of Grace

If someone had told me six months ago that I would soon be standing behind a pop-up desk at a market, physically hawking my own artwork to passersby, I would have laughed in their face. Selling art from a stall was genuinely the absolute last thing I ever imagined myself doing.

Yet, looking back at the past few weeks, "unexpected" doesn't even begin to cover the trajectory life has taken.

Ever since returning from Kailash, the floodgates have burst wide open. Opportunities are flying at me from every direction, bringing entirely new circles of people, uncharted creative momentum, and a brand of chaos that I am scrambling to navigate entirely on my own. I feel disorganized, mildly overwhelmed, and running on a creative streak that feels less like deliberate effort and more like catching a live wire.

In the middle of all this, a moment occurred at that art stall that completely stopped time.

Three women walked into my space, browsing the prints. One of them suddenly gasped, looked at me, and said she had already been following my work online and was so thrilled to run into me in person. While we were talking, her friend stood quietly, scanning the display.

Her gaze locked onto a specific painting of mine: the Devi’s Padukas.

Her expression changed completely. She murmured that the piece was deeply personal to her and that she needed to buy a copy immediately. When I gently asked if she wanted to share what had moved her so deeply, she began to recount an accident she had survived years ago. Trapped inside the wreckage, all she remembered was a presence pulling her out of the vehicle. Through the haze, all she could see were those exact feet. She looked around afterward, but the person had vanished.

Listening to her, standing in a crowded market, we were both reduced to tears. A friend who happened to be there caught the raw, unscripted moment on video. When I later shared it on Instagram, the response was overwhelming. The sheer volume of sincerity, love, and emotional resonance that poured in was unlike anything I had ever seen. Orders surged, but more than that, it was a staggering reminder of why art exists in the first place: not as a commodity, but as a bridge between unseen spaces.

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What made that entire encounter so chilling was what had happened just days prior.

I was attending an event, seated in the front row, with zero expectation of anything out of the ordinary. Out of nowhere, my Guru arrived to attend the show. Through an improbable alignment of timing, his niece (the sweetest human I have known) introduced me to him without any reluctance, mentioning that I was an artist.

Before my mind could overthink or freeze, I dropped down and touched his feet.

It was something I had never done before. And looking at the calendar, it was exactly forty days to the date since my return from the Kailash Yatra.

Forty days from being broken open on the snows of the mountain, to placing my hands at the source of that Grace, to watching those very Padukas touch a stranger's life in a crowded stall.

Now, I find myself in a bizarre, beautiful tension. Art pieces are gaining wild traction online, ideas for a solo exhibition that I’ve carried for years are finally crystallizing into tangible reality, and new horizons keep opening up. At the same time, the human in me feels the quiet terror of it all: What if this burst of enthusiasm evaporates? What if I drop all these spinning plates?

Between keeping up with my daily sadhana, working through therapy, untangling internal knots, and trying to fix my own foundations before I throw myself fully at the world, I am realizing that balance isn't a stagnant state. It is learning to stay anchored while the wind howls.

The mountain didn't break me to let me hide. It broke me so the current could finally flow through without obstruction.

Shambho.