Saraswati and Her Swan

Once upon a time, in a timeless time, long ago- the creator god, Brahma, sat in deep confusion reflecting upon the chaos of the cosmos. As he turned within and questioned, “How do I transform this chaos into order?”, he heard the words, “through knowledge”. And with that Saraswati appeared from Brahma’s mouth, riding on the vibration of OM, the cosmic force of creative word. She rode a white swan and was holding the veena. From Sarawati’s stringed instrument, the letters of the sanskrit alphabet appeared and sacred mantras took form in the cosmos. Brahma was enamored by Saraswati’s grace- her shakti (power), and claimed her as his consort. She became the goddess of language, knowledge, sciences, arts, insight, and sound.

Saraswati means “the flowing one”, and is associated with flow in all its aspects: the flow of water- the water from which life emerged, the water of the womb, the water of manifestation. Her vehicle, the swan, is said to live in a lake high up in the Himalayas and is endowed with the ability to separate milk from the water (good from evil).

The sacred meditation So ‘Ham (Sah + aham- I am that) is the mantra of the breath. When we practice yogic breathing, we are silently repeating “sssssssssoooooooo” on the inhale, and “hhhhaaaaaammm” on the exhale. By continuously breathing (repeating the mantra), we begin to lose track of where it begins and where it ends. So Ham begins to sounds like Ham Sa. Hamsa is the sanskrit word for Swan.

To dive deeper-

Are you able to extract the magic from the mundane, or the spiritual essence from your everyday encounters? Can you see the ordinary and the sublime in the same breath? We share reality through narrative. Storytelling is our native tongue. Every story we spin will literally change some piece of our world, for better or for worse. To be blessed by Saraswati is to be able to transform the world through words by way of discernment.