Romancing with peace

 

Remember the wonderful time you spent on a beach facing a calm, bluish lagoon? Its soft bluish ripples gently tugging at your soul. Silence and peace seeping into your ruffled, wavy self. Remember walking on the soft sand of a desert on a wintery, windless day? The sand cotton soft and the sun kindly warming the rigid clods of pain. Away from the hot sandy blizzards, the mirage buried under the sand and you joyfully watching the footstep trail, gently tugging at your soul. Remember rolling on undisturbed pastures on a balmy noon away from the icy shrieks of windstorms? The grassy softness assuaging all hard knots of suffering inside? Remember a calm lake? Its soft ripples gentling tugging at the aggrieved self, asking why are you so sad? Remember the spotless blue sky of the spring season, looking amusedly over the colors that have sprouted below?

Stormy seas, heaving lakes, disturbed desert or wind-lashed pastures hardly beckon us. We move away from them. They remind us of the storm within our own self. Most of us carry tiny invisible storms within, invisible storms let loose by the onslaught of nervous energy. There are waves of random thoughts, overbearing emotions, fears, insecurities, complexes. That’s why the symbols of peace represented by the kind, peaceful face of nature appeal to us so much. They are like a healing pill, a medicine of peace that we soak, inhale and gulp down to do away with the stormy sea inside.

Most of us carry a choppy sea inside, tossing the boat of our existence. The wind howls and waves shriek as the nervous energy moves randomly like in a puzzle game, seeking a way out of the troubling alleys and corridors within. Shaken by this stormy onslaught from within, it’s quite natural for us to run around in order to seek solace. It primarily is the base of our eternal urge to connect, interact, build relationships, friendships, setting families, careers and all that we engage in order to make it somehow meaningful.

There are people within whom the storms have died; so much so that they are a human representation of all the peaceful scenarios given in the first paragraph. They possess the peace of silent, bluish lagoons in them. They have the serenity of a wintertime desert on a windless day. They have the gentility of gently rolling pastures. They have the flowering of joy like the spring season. They have the summer warmth of kindness and empathy to melt others’ icicles of pain. They have the autumnal surrender and detachment to carry an unconditional smile. They have the coolness of winters to undo the burning hot turmoil in others. The best of natural peace out there gets sublimated inside their persona. They come to represent the calm, peaceful, assuring, healing aspect of mother nature.

Won’t the people feel these peaceful vibes coming from such souls? They surely will. When we talk of enlightened sages and benevolent saints, maybe we have the vast picture of calmness, peace, tranquility, stability in a human form: A human representation of all the beautiful things in nature that heal and assure our tossed self. The gentle sea, the calm desert, the peaceful lake, the softly musing sky, the soft carpet of pastures need not say anything to us to undo our pain and suffering. They pass the message just by being there. Similarly, the vastly stabilized self of a spiritual person gently, invisibly strokes our hair, kindly embraces our presence without any judgment. They are not left with any possibility for judgments because these are born in a tossed self only. No wonder, the people will look for such gentle souls. They might be hiding in forests and caves but we somehow seek them out. Just to watch them, be with them and feel their presence. Because it heals. It pacifies the storms within.

Postscript: Inspired by the interaction with a gentle soul who is on the path of becoming exactly such a person.