In response to the Spring Equinox, Public Parking Editorial Resident Amy Fung invited multidisciplinary cultural workers Indu Vashist and Cecilia Berkovic to engage in a mindful and honest conversation on themes of cycles, practice, violence, and endurance to mark this year’s Summer Solstice. Meeting and working in the Toronto arts scene in the 2010s, Berkovic, Fung, and Vashist reflect on the present era of what it means to be alive. 

I had been thinking of cycles before consciously becoming aware of completing one. I turned 42 last Fall, which can be divided as six cycles of seven, or two cycles of 21, or 14 cycles of three, or any number of reversals. Throughout my 20s, I was borderline obsessed with my Saturn Return, which is when you complete four cycles of seven, a spiritually significant number through most of human history. Seven is a number that appears and reappears from the Sumerians’ seven-branches in the Tree of Life and the institutionalization of the seen day week to the seven heavens of the Qu’ran, and the Talmud to Hinduism to the seven virtues of Buddhism and the Catholic’s seven sacraments and seven sins, and so on. Music falls across seven major note scales (do rei me). The spectrum of refracted light is expressed in seven colours (roy g biv). From tip to tail, there are seven chakras from crown to root.