The Desire to Design by Varastraa
Beyond the unspoken and spoken words lie thoughts. Those thoughts are also dreams that sometimes urge us to translate that fluidity into a form also called reality. When we realize those inner messages we transcend into our inner being of the subconscious mind, meeting those silent words like a prayer from above.
My meeting with Seema Haydon of Varastraa was an amalgamation of all my scattered thoughts. It was woman to woman.
The journey of a woman and of how we do all that we do in this entire lifetime. It takes years of falling yet evolving to become the individuals we become over time.
We watch in awe as the children become adults and we also create a home that needs attention and care to make it more than a room and walls. I recognize that in every woman, I interact with, the unspoken words of wisdom and experience.
She spoke with so much passion about her love for fabrics and the feel of cloth on her skin.
I saw a dream that she has turned into a reality. When your passion is also your profession, it is a love-locked story, and turning that into a reality is like bringing up a baby with a meditative mind. It is a process.
Seema’s Varastraa is her dream child. Born from a desire to design and identifying with the trees around us is her story.
Today as I draped this light indigo Varastraa Sari, on a January noon, it felt languid in the winter month of my solitude. The holidays are over now. The house is peaceful, empty and the fresh air from my Frangipani tree makes my sari billow in the soft wind.
My sari has a tree motif with a silver border. I always gravitate towards trees, they ground me every time I feel my life is shaken and I need to find my feet back into the womb of the earth below me. It reminds me of Ma.
My Ma always told me to love the Banyan tree, giving shade to many yet asking for nothing in return.
My grandmother loved her sari with the blue border and every time I drape indigo I can feel her warmth and her resignation into life over the years. Having watched her 15 years older husband die overnight and her young son too, whom she adored. I saw her get stronger and bolder over time with this strange relationship she had with grief.
As the years pass me by, I know that blue is considered the color of melancholia. I also realize that this colour has had a history of many struggles. Indigo was derived in India and the origin of the word is from our country.
If the rainbow is looked at from a perspective, blue is a shade and indigo is part of that vibgyor. Except that it isn’t included in the canvas of the child’s drawing of a rainbow. Like many things in life. Some remain unspoken.
Seema’s nature-inspired sari is evocative and speaks to me silently. Just as you de-clutter your mind you need to also re-look at the rainbow at the horizon and find the hidden shades in it. This is the magic of life and finding your space under this January sky on a noon of solitude. De-cluttering is also knowing what is there, that there is something beyond.
I desire to meet myself where the colours have mixed into a shade that envelops me like this sari did to me today.
Varastraa’s collection is an ode to the artisans whose nails have turned blue dipping into the dyes across India, the only hope is we acknowledge their art, hopeful and with gratitude when we buy one from them.
We are nothing without one another under this umbrella of the benign universe and its bounties.
Varastraa took over me in as a memory of melancholy this January sun against the sunlight and my cold heartwarming in its glow..
Link: Varastraa by Seema Haydon
Recent Posts
