Following the Roots to Reach the Source of Love

 

Happiness is not a hailstorm bombarding your head with screeching fury. It’s a soothing shower of tiny droplets kissing the dry dust. If little, little things cannot make you happy, and consequently loving, forget about the dreams of huge mountains of things, objects and relationships turning the scale in your favor. You must have experienced it already. So let’s try to delve into smaller things for larger swigs of solace!

You have to recall the roots of your individual self dissolved around in multiplicity of things and phenomena. It helps you in finding yourself. These are the little anchor support of individual destinies. Just like a tree has roots in earth, a human being’s roots lie dissolved in each and everything around us. Individually we are just part of the grand totality around.

This tree that absorbs the carbon dioxide exhaled by you, allowing you to inhale oxygen let out by it, in fact functions like half of your lungs. The water in your body is just an ounce from the reservoir of water on earth. The few kilograms of metals constituting your bones, muscles, fat and blood are just a speck of matter from the minerals available in earth.

So the most important thing is to know and realize your roots. That will melt the painful tumor of ego. These roots pull the strings to shape your unique identity, allowing you to perform your duty, enjoy your privileges on the great stage that creation is. The best thing is to realize and remember as a habit that you are just a tiny leaf clinging to the bough like so many others on the tree of creation. Your destiny is in totality. The individuality lies in knowing only this much.

I on my part try to remember it as a habit. It becomes natural later on with practice. The more you realize your dependence on the grand totality, the more you feel gratitude for the benefits and boons showering upon you. I keep my eyes open for the unconditional love bestowed by the small trees in my yard. I try to reciprocate the smile of flowers. By opening the eyes of awareness, you see the reality as it stands instead of the way you want it to be. It defines your reality out of the churning machine creation is.

I try to soak in weather’s offerings. It’s free and belongs to all and nobody at the same time. For example, October has its early winter charm. There is night blooming jasmine in my yard. The nights are cool and mornings dewy. The tree gets fully decorated at night with beauty and fragrance. In the mornings, a fresh day welcomes me with the day-time vestiges of the night’s smile. The tree smiles through the dewy night, the night blooming jasmine, Har Singar as we call it in local parlance.

As the day opens its eyes, I find the remnants of a perfumed night scattered under the tree. The first thing I do on such dewy, dreamy days is to collect the tree's offerings and keep it as a scented trophy on my desk. It makes my day, keeps it smiling and aromatic. Thanks brother tree! I just put some water around you, and here you are with a shower of unconditional love, life, beauty and fragrance. The weather has turned amazing and your gift makes every day better than the previous one.

I can recall this moment in all vivacity even though weather has changed almost to be the opposite. One more lesson: witness the change around as much as you look for the changes in your life. This observation saves a lot of pain because we get less prone to identify with things and phenomena going in a flux on the inevitable path of change and transformation.

Coming to such delicious, dewy moments, their surreal charms in memory define eternity. If you learn to soak all that a single moment has to offer, believe me, time follows you. You tame eternity.

Another moment etches its story on time’s endless fabric! Quite enigmatically, a smile's life is on cobwebbed lease. Sometimes existential support, as slim as an almost invisible single strand of spider-web, sees you smiling well beyond your expected time. It is 4:30 PM in the afternoon. A pair of night blooming jasmine flowers, a souvenir of a lovely, cool, dewy night, still hangs almost in full life. They bloom under dewy starlight at night, and tumble down happily at the dawn, pulled by Mother Nature’s call for cyclical transformation. But then some chance innings outfox the routine cast of apparent reality to carry further on and reach hitherto untouched milestone.

These two flowers saw the youthful charm of full bloom at the bygone cool October night. Thousands around them toppled down at the day's onset through a slightly misty morning and are almost recycled to dust in the ground. But mischievous destiny lets out a strand of web, and here they are swirling and swaying to the gentle breeze of a balmy early winter day. Little ounce of beauty and fragrance hanging like chandelier, signifying the imperishable aesthetics of love, peace and harmony.

To have a feel of the infinite love and beauty pervading the cosmos, we have to sharpen our aesthetic sense to capture such brief moments with our limited sense perception, which later on opens the vista for unqualified, unrestricted, sense-perception-free view of the ultimate truth in our life. But of course we cannot escape these small exercises before that happens.

Only feelings can capture the infinite vastness of love and harmony in the cosmos. And such little keys hold the prospects of opening the treasure chest. The bigger things turn it daunting. They take you to a world of thoughts and calculation. Nothing wrong with that. After all, it sets the stage for careers and making a living. But if you want to have a glance at the eternity, you have to see through the keyhole. There is hardly any other way.

Some moments, when you surrender your ego and dissolve into the cool shades of eternity, take you to the pinnacle of realizations beyond words and languages. Language is a poor substitute to catch truth in totality. You name a word and it is just a fraction. As Lao Tzu said, words are poor carriers of truth. You name light, and dark is cut off.

Coming to the mammoth canvas of feelings, around midnight a beautiful feeling pervades me as I stand under the night blooming jasmine in full bloom. I feel an ounce of the totality.

Dewy fun under the nightly sun,

Winter night with a full moon,

Night jasmine smiles with honeyed spoon,

Swathed in the cool shades of a dewy night,
The flowers stand brave with smiles and innocent delight,
When all sleep, they hold the beacon of love and light,
The moon is their sun,
When we humans will get up in the morning,

We can't imagine how much was the nightly fun!

Lost in the poetic swathes of the dewy night gone, I walk with slow steps in the yard and see the game of death played so harmlessly without its otherwise fee-fawing avatar. A butterfly corpse I come across. The tiny shove of mortality, which freed its little consciousness from this flowery shape, still has the mercy to leave the sleeping beauty on jasmine leaves.

RIP Lime Swallowtail! It presents me with a picture perfect view. There are large number of irregular creamy yellow spots on dark wings and red tornal spot on the upper hindwing. More importantly, the sleeping beauty has a hearse of jasmine leaves and sadabahar flowers. She still looks full of flying life, as if ready to take off any moment. She had her colorful days, flowers, nectar, airy swirls and rainbow darts. Quietly she landed then on the tarmac of mortality; and her little ounce of spirit flies and takes off to the highest station to be one with the primordial spirit. From limited to the unlimited. From here to everywhere. From these few colors to all the colors of paradise. From now to forever. From this beautiful pattern and design on her wings to the primal self-evolving pattern of nature.

I have a sad smile on my lips, a deep sense of acceptance and detachment fills my being. But then there is an excited flutter nearby. This game of creation is ever so busy. I look up with a smile and see the bulb of life on an electric bulb holder. Well, this bulb holder was lying idle for too long, till it gets the attention of natural intelligence. I see a mud fort in the making. Hope it will cherish the bulbous fluid in eggs that will sprout the light of life.

A wire-tailed swallow pair is busy making their mud nest. The muddy ark is being drawn upwards from the central holder. They pick up mud from rain puddles and deposit it layer by layer, slowly mixing their saliva and droppings in the mixture. During the breeding season, their glands have extra salivation equipping them with a suitable adhesive. This is what I call environment friendly birdie cement.

My mother has a problem though. She finds it disturbing because at this stage it appears a mud sling on the painted wall. I have to convince her that it will be a very nice, decorative wall hanging once it's completed. Best of luck beautiful birds. They have very bright colors of metallic blue and white. They just love their job. Tirelessly they go on making a new house, raise kids and then fly away without clinging to the earthy possession. Godly detachment, by the way. I definitely take inspiration from these few grams of wonders.

To someone feeling lonely, with not much happening around in the sense we relate to happenings, free moments easily become agents of depression. But not to someone basking in solitude because so much is happening around all the time with silent majesty. So the day moves on and I keep on taking larger and larger sips of solitude. I feel like it’s solidifying my soul in an almost mystical way. One more thing, it’s impossible to slow down one’s time to the extent of feeling the nature’s spontaneity and be angry and hateful at the same time. Only a spread self doused in love and compassion slows down time like this. So here we come across another nice exercise to build up the muscles of our loving self.  

Thus the day seems full of countless prospects and I keep my eyes open to the marvelous plays unfolding around. Here comes a surprise: awakening the dead. It was a dry, dead branch at the top of an acacia. But that was before the monsoon touched with watery pout, to kiss and infuse greenery even in an otherwise prickly, irritatingly imposing silhouette of the acacia. Overblown life from the surroundings is creeping into the dead wood. The creeper with big green leaves is handing over its extra greenery by climbing over dead pricks and crown the treetop with a symbol of life. The canopy is getting its leafy top. Wonderful greenish encroachment. Leafy donation. The birds though may not be happy because this dead branch at the tree top is their favorite sentry point to look around. So they have almost lost their bare watchtower. It helps me in retaining my sense of wonder. I find it really essential for my humane self.

More wonders waiting! Lo there is a birdie coup in the shrub. Olive-backed sunbird hatchling I see out of a sudden. Freshly minted birdie wonder. Well these tiny flirtatious birds have done a coup in the jasmine cluster right under my nose, right under my gate-crashing presence. And I haven't the littlest clue. I am busy watching the progress on the bulbul front in the slightly bigger world on the Harsingar tree above. Lo! Here is the swift hatchling! Straight from its tiniest of grassy hideout in the jasmine shrub. Not only it escaped my eyes, it also beat the cat in master camouflage. The way this one and its brother or sister already dart among the branches, I am fully sure of their survival and taking the world on their own. Best of luck sons or daughters! Fly safe for the next week and always obey your parents. Then you guys can scale the world on your own.

Our survival basically depends on the things that we have taken for granted by default in life. The irony is, the things that we tend to take as the survival tools are merely conveniences, mere comforts, like house, car, jobs, gadgets, etc. I try to take a stock of the millions of roots holding the tiny iota of my existence. These flowers, birds, insects, reptiles, all these and more are nothing but the building blocks of the platform I stand on to enjoy life.

So guys keep your eyes open for the little wonders of nature around. In any case, they are supporting our existence, just that mere recalling of this fact gets us grounded, making us gentler, humbler, and these definitely make life more positive and more enjoyable. And loving, without an iota of doubt!