My Light Reflections

To read Dr. Monita Soni's My Light Reflections, is to try and take the measure of light in its myriad illuminations, the shifting rays that color a landscape stretching from Huntsville, Alabama to Mumbai, Jaipur, the Aravalli hills, to a garden, a wilderness, a "reflection pond," a kitchen, an artist's studio, and a pathology lab. Her book is lesson, a lexicon, a legend, story, journey, travelogue, a gift of laugher and exquisite joy. Dr. Soni's reflections are illuminations; they are moonlight and sunlight, science, and art and "a trajectory of life," to borrow the title of her initial poem. To read her poetry is to truly "step out in pure awe."

Dr. Soni's kaleidoscope nourishes the creative spirit as the myriad reflections that bring to view family relationships-the love for a father who quotes the Bhagavad Gita, Arabic poetry, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, for a son who lives in Jaipur, a daughter who is described as a moon-maiden. The book is savory "parathas" (griddle-flaky flat bread) and mangos. It is stories of sisters, the very "keepers of each other's identity": it is bed tea, and "butterscotch laughter." My Light Reflections traces the soul's journey to that place within where the "thousand petal lotus blooms." Dr. Soni reminds us as loving earthly beings that "our body is precious; it is our vehicle for awakening." A painter, poet, physician and philosopher, her words are prescriptions for how to live both fully and well.