A Peek into the Misty Fluidity of Life

 

It’s a small book, this world of ours, having still smaller layers after layers of canvas and each one having the potential to give a glimpse of the ultimate truth. There is a glance of the ultimate truth at this dawn in my village. On the infinite canvas in the sky, He, the ever-creative artist, paints one mural after the other, gives a fleeting vision of the ultimate truth, of transience, of ever-transforming shades. The creator does not hold onto the fleeting shades. He allows these to dissolve into newer and newer frescoes.

The marvelous fluidity keeps on unfolding unmindful of the Angry President thousands of kilometers away. Like a pissed off kid raising a ruckus about going to school, an angry Trump skipping lunch and cancelling his Denmark holiday. Not being able to purchase Greenland, the future's prime location and the present's last hideout for mother nature, to change its status from nature's estate to real estate, I hope there aren't broken windows in the White House. An angry businessman is scary man! It's understandable, there can't be a bigger loss for a businessman. My sympathies with him for his mood getting spoiled. And God save the dining set, bedside mirror, housekeeping staff and even officials in the office. All of us are mother earth's kids. But the tantrums of the fattest bully among the famished mass of we poorlings can be very testing. I pray to almighty that there is a surge in President's business to make him forget about the loss!

Well, all this happens to be inside the mightiest place on earth, the White House. Let us come down to smaller places. A somber dawn of faded blue, grey, dark, pale orange and rusted silver opens up new vistas of agonies and ecstasies. Nature holds the ultimate copyright on colors, shapes and phenomenon. The lanky lad/lass—Parijat—stands with elegant pride. Well, with painful pruning, which hurt my conscience and his/her body as my pruner did its job, my friend will at least won't blame me too much after looking at himself/herself. A fantastic tree model he/she appears. A gorgeous adolescent! The nutrition of monsoon season and my jimmying instructions have put it on the path of developing a well-chiseled tree body. He/she appears like a tautly proud and confident NCC cadet. All the best! Grow to be a firm soldier against pollution and ecological degradation!

A few yards away, there blooms the story of love between a thorn and a rose, a sort of monsoon wedding. The husband, a prickly, stern, hard-wooded acacia; the wife, a mellow, soft, delicate, juicy, attired in heart-shaped leaves embracer Giloy (Tinospora Cordifolia). She covers her beau's hardy ruggedness. He spreads his tough self for her soft, supine creepy love notes to climb high and kiss airy swirls of the monsoon season. All of us are just parts of a larger beauty, mere contributors to a bigger picture. No life stands in isolation. All are contributing characters on the largest canvas where colors, shapes and panorama keep moving in a circulatory fluidity, giving rise to stories, anecdotes and episodes. Feel the mammoth river of life flowing around your apparently distinct self. Spread your wings. Enlarge your vision. Broaden your heart. Embrace more of life and living. It gets you freedom from the chained self imprisoned in narrow confines of illusions and ignorance. It melts the block in the smooth flow of life and living. Claim your liberty!

Among the excited nuptial ceremonies, on the same tree, a little story of an abandoned nest tugs at the time’s sleeve to catch attention. An abandoned home waiting for mother nature to dissolve it into a different shape. A masterwork of tailoring by the tiny tailorbird by stitching three heart-shaped leaves of the climber wife to make a cozy home. The interiors have strong webby framework of buffalo hair and cotton. How do I know these are buffalo hair? Haaa haaa! I do! We know them with more familiarity than even our own crop on our head. Grew as we wallowing in the village pond where buffaloes swam, defecated and urinated with an utmost sovereign ease. Haaa haaa! I can even recall the taste on my skin, including the tongue part—sorry to disturb too polished tongues—as we played in our aqua playground. Well, leave it, coming back to the little abandoned home. A little sugary sweet lump of love and care arranged this texture. A new life flew out successfully, as I myself bear witness to at least one hatchling taking on to its first flight out of the tiny cluster of trees. So the sweet home will be dissolved, recycled and change to a new pattern. It's a long and winding story to the ultimate home dotted with little, little temporary shelters where love coos in finest, delicate most tunes.

An abandoned nest cannot steal the entire show. A few inches away, the time stands struck to the ultimate cocoon of the penultimate camouflage caterpillar. A case moth, a camouflage caterpillar, is on its leaf-eating sortie. This chap makes a silken cocoon around it and attaches tiny twigs around it. It then moves like a little cylindrical wagon of firewood. Amazing! But, of course, the poor leaves have a different tale to tell. Well, he should not be deprived of such hardworked breakfast, lunch, brunch and dinner all put on the same plate. The noisy babblers though happen to have this feaster on their own lunch table. The cantankerous kings of the quarrelsome birdie world make lot of noise while undoing the protective wood wagon and gather their own food from something that was gathering from someone else. So, now the case moth has a sorry tale to tell. Ask the babbler. It definitely will have many of the same genres to tell. Well, this sad touch in the story is simply our mental projection created relatively to a so-called happy touch. Beyond our mental projections, there are simply stories in nature, cyclically interweaving their threads to make one singular entity, the ultimate case moth, the final camouflage.

Wait, before you decide to flip over this section, another little character is performing on the ever-busy stage. It is a cool late August morning and a lot many hominids are having hasty breakfasts before catching onto the bandwagon of survival through the day. This little Indian yellow wasp, unfortunately maligned with a pinching adjective ‘stinging’, is not breakfasting on the dry bark of this dead Marwa plant.  With the unhurried ease of an artist, it’s scratching away little bark crumbs to use these in making its paper carton galleries to lay eggs and start the process of life from its end. In the slow-paced, unhurried smaller world, they use pollen crumbs and dead bark pieces to build their umbrella-shaped nesting hives, the little galleries to shelter eggs.

Well, it’s a sad tale from colonies to couple; from booming, buzzing colonies to sad, solitary couples. Earlier, during the times when they stood a chance to freely stand and play their part smartly, or when the mankind was not too imposing, they thrived in colonies and valiantly defended their citadels. The days are gone. The human heart has shrunk and his pest control arm has expanded well beyond his home and hearth. It now covers every nook corner of earth. So the colonies are out of question these days. All you have is just a wasp couple sneaking like thieves and set up a little nest in some inaccessible part somewhere around overhangs, porches, eaves, attic corner, barn, porch shed, some abandoned ceiling, railings or doorframes. More than the artistry, it is about the theft of temporarily stealing a little space somewhere. Just a tiny bulb of nest and a few eggs. All that is left of the maligned stinging nest. A little unbecoming projection at the risk of being swatted out by the gentlest touch of a cobweb cleaner.

There will be many who feel like rapping my knuckles for speaking for the stinging wasps. Well, do they sting for pleasure? Let somebody come barging uninvited into your bedroom and then watch your own sting. Just because you hold man-made papers of the property, it doesn’t justify your sting, just like it doesn’t the biggest wars for land and resources on earth.

Nature has a place for them. They pollinate flowers and control many insect species. Now don’t look at the insect species controlled by the wasps as the primary villains. They in turn must be controlling something else. In the two-way scheme of things, every species receives something in lieu of what it gives back. We have but turned the tables. We have re-calibrated the natural instinct to give back also. It’s a mad rush to take as much as possible, without the willingness to give back anything. No wonder, we have raped mother earth. With newer and newer techniques to plunder resources, we are giving back long, long tragic tales of ecological degradation, extinction of species, wars, diseases, strife and unrest. Well, the list of our give-aways is endless on the negative side.