The Croakings of an Old Toad -- 1

 An exciting novel about a count politely moving on his courteous path of inherent dignity in the wake of the Russian revolution, Thoreau’s escapades into the nature and the resultant chronicles in Walden, and Eckhart Tolle’s seminal work on the power of ‘Now’. It’s a little treasure on my table: a self-gift to my very own dear self on a wet, gloomy, cold day. Why depend only on others for beautiful gifts? Start viewing your purchases as the gifts to your own dear self. A warm, exciting feeling pervades my mind and heart. I stare at them like a little hungry puppy ogling at a soft piece of meat. Water-mouthed!

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One can’t hope to survive as an all-out truth-speaking guy. Remember Jesus, Socrates and many others. These are hard times. Truth (majorly) needs to be supported by falsehood (minorly). A fraction of falsehood pandering the vanity of a little section will save your truth against the ire of the bigger section whom you rib-tickle with the iron fingers of your truth.

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Look out for beautiful people around you. They are great in their simple ways. They are exceptional and unique even while they are part of the rutted routine. But they run this world and touch our lives in constructive ways that we hardly realise. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It's not possible to know how far the influence of an amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out into the world; but it’s very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by...’

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Try to stand proud in front of your own conscience first. The rest will follow. As Thoreau sums it up so beautifully: ‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’

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Your time is far more important than you ever imagined. Use it, don’t bruise it. As Thoreau says, ‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.’

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By the diverse sets of cleverest means, most of us arrive at the same set of follies. We are the masters of copying and repetition, even if they are follies. They give us a sense of ‘doing’ something.

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The loving ripple of your lips on my cheek! Softest in silky emotion but sturdiest in ironed strength and steely support!

Postscript: Speaking from objective, theoretical knowledge; not from subjective, personal experience. Well, that shows poetry can come from calculating mind as well, not just from a heart caught in emotional whirlwinds.

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Don’t belittle or glorify your series of relative truths. These are no more than mind-created concepts and no less than the shadow of absolute truth when there is still no clue about the final truth. Watch them as no more or less than what they are and they become the stepping stones to the ultimate reality.

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Just into unexpected fortunes, an adolescent Pip, forced into stylish clothes, muses about a simple rural blacksmith in Dickens’ masterpiece Great Expectations:

‘I am conscious that he carried off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit.’

Playacted niceties are still soulless and genuine rusticity will still have its class and affable spirit. An open falsehood is still better than the pretended truth. Because as another character says so aptly, ‘No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.’

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A message for my dear readers

 

With gratitude and love for all those who read my books. If not for these few lovely people, my pen would turn dry. It’s a pleasure to share my stories with you. Stay blessed.

Dear reader, it’s a beautiful world. If you are happy and joyful, this entire existence feels the same through you. If you exist on a plane of harmony and peace, you invite the entire cosmos to the same plane. When you smile, everything around you does the same. So be a joy-maker and see the beauty underlying everyone and everything around you.

Look out for beautiful souls around you. They are great in their simple ways. They are exceptional and unique even while they are part of the rutted routine. But they run this world and touch our lives in constructive ways that we hardly realise. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It's not possible to know how far the influence of an amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out into the world; but it’s very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by...’

Through my stories, I try to positively touch the lives of my dear readers. These stories deal with common people who try to stand proud in front of their own conscience. The rest of the life’s tale naturally follows from this point. As Thoreau sums it up so beautifully: ‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’

I hope the time invested in reading these stories serves a good purpose for you. Your time is far more important than you ever imagined. Use it, don’t bruise it. As Thoreau says, ‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.’

As I write this, a rose in the garden has blossomed almost perfectly. It looks welcoming the entire cosmos, opening its scented petals with a welcoming embrace. This is what we call full flowering. Blossoming so much, opening its petals with such joy that disintegration and decay turn a mere soothing further step in one’s blossoming, in being alive. Once you open up fully, bloom totally and live completely, the scattering and disintegration turn meaningless. To be completely alive is beyond the duality of being and non-being. So blossom fully and live completely to perfection. Painless disintegration is possible only when you have used up all life force in blossoming full. It happens when you welcome life with the widest bear hug. This is expansion. Then a playful tug of the gentle air will aid in further expansion. Like the petals of this perfectly blooming rose fly with majestic ease. A drizzle of ecstasy will occur. The petals will fly away to be a bigger part of a larger dimension. The smile doesn’t die. It acquires a broader plane.

I hope my stories will add to your smiles. Let’s walk together as I share my little stories.

Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 27

 

How would you expect it to be a peaceful world when there are billions with limited means and unlimited infirmities of mind?

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There are far more nice people in the world than you ever imagined. Badness is overhyped. All we need is to keep our hearts open and beautiful people walk into your life like warm sunshine after weeks of snowy blizzard. Keep your hope alive for there comes a beautiful soul just round the next corner. Keep smiling and keep going. Accept the past. Crying over it only spoils the present and breeds bitterness. Crying over it only spoils the present and breeds bitterness. Double said, intentionally. If the present isn't sweet, it only means you carry too much bitterness from the past. Forgetting isn't easy till we forgive. And forgiveness isn't feasible till one is caught in your fault Vs my fault. Don't dissect the past. That's like taking nice dreams and horrible nightmares to be more substantial than the reality. It consumes too much energy. This is cadaverous addiction, a nasty post-mortem of things that hardly matter now. The past is also overhyped in terms of giving us lessons. The present is the workshop to learn and unlearn and all else. Here and now. Here and now. Here and now. One's ability to be here and now gives the weapon to cut unnecessary karmic entanglement. Present moment awareness is the knife that cuts the nasty mooring that keeps us stuck up in stinking muds, keeping us away from the bubbly stream of life. Awareness of here and now is your weapon to slay these phantoms of the mind.

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We come across wrong people only because we have to walk further on to meet the right people who will share a part of their journey with us. Then further on, these right people also appear wrong. So whatever was right was just in its present form. Ultimately, we realise that the final frontier is to be crossed by us all alone. Never expect companionship to see you home in any relationship. These are mere occurrences like trees and flowers falling on your soul's eternal path. Give them respect, give them attention, give them time and energy, for they also do the same. But don't expect them to be the vehicle of your journey. They are just fellow travellers like you and me. Why be so utilitarian to view travellers as the means of taking you to the destination where you feel you will find it joyful. They can be beautiful milestones in your journey at the most.

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Usually, our vilification and villanisation of someone is merely a desperate attempt to ignore the ugliness in our own persona. I think, if we give just one-tenth of the critical attention that we give to others to our own selves, we will have immense opportunity to smile unconditionally as we walk on our path.

Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 26

 

You feel lonely on your path and a stranger comes your way. You both walk and smile and become familiar. And at some turn both of you drift apart. Who won't like to go smiling all the way till the end? But still people drift apart because destination is rarely the same. Pain is natural. Memories also cast long shadows from behind. All one can do is to commit oneself to come as a better, more evolved person if at some turn on the path, faraway in future, you come to walk by the side of that same person. This is what I would say doing justice to one's past without wasting present and losing a sight of the future.

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As Dickens says at some place in Oliver Twist, ‘It's a world of disappointment: often to the hopes we most cherish, and hopes that do our nature the greatest honour.’

But then the maestro gives us our hope back also by saying, ‘This world may be a sad and sorry place, but it's not a hopeless place for it's a place where truth must be learned and souls must be made.’

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If you want to help yourself against blatant lies, stop asking questions to our politicians. Political answers would come out as lies and falsehoods. Almost naturally. So to avoid the mountains of lies adding to its height, avoid asking questions to the politicians.

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Nobody leaves anyone. We are all simply running away from our own deep personal pains. Never forget, usually when two people meet, they are coming together to beat their loneliness and forget their pain. But the intrinsic restlessness stays and people again try to move away from it. The ego construct will always blame the other. These are but our own scars. We can't be a giver in any relationship until we are at peace within. Till then it's a psychological drama of hurt, pain and blame game among unhappy people bumping into each other as tankers. Sorry takers. Hardly any difference between ‘tankers’ and ‘takers’ by the way. I remember myself as a tanker, firing out the vollies of my frustrations, believing others to be the cause of the outpouring, while all along this, the ammunition lay within. And once you realise this, the live-fire ammunition turns damp. It loses its fiery heat. Only our ego keeps it alive. Then the minor irritants, which serve as tiny triggering sparks at the most, fall on a dead heap that's not inflammable. No burning within and you get sips of succour, self-driven solace and restfulness.

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Most of us terribly under-do most of the things in life that should actually be done and over-do the things that should have been avoided. Plain cowardice. Full of imaginary fears. Fear is the soul of a cowardly, curtailed life. As Dickens says, 'I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.'

Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 25

 

Pre-script: Female readers kindly replace ‘She’ by ‘He’.

Gibran: She was fashioned with the gentleness of the dove, the evasiveness of serpents, the vanity of the peacock and the cruelty of the wolf.

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Life can be tricky,

if even about the simplest issues

you are too frisky,

Prudence is to be at ease with situations and time,

Complications then wouldn't chime,

And days would pass like a free rhyme!

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Poetry died a long time ago, the real poetry. Now it's pseudo-poetry just like we abound in so many pseudos. Things stand in letter only now, as we have slaughtered the spirit. We are lesser humane now, so our muscled, hardened, tainted emotions fall short of conveying that unstigmatized purity that found outlet through this great art. Sad but that's true. Change for more complexity is inevitable. May be there were still purer times than the pristine days of classical poetry. Maybe development is inversely proportional to goodness.

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The potted rose has surely given it all it had for Mother Nature. Its branches droop with the sweet flowery bunch-loads of roses. Fullest expansion is painless dissolution. Fullest being is non-being itself. A life harnessed to the full is griefless death. Isn't a tree just mother earth expanding and this air merely further expansion of the tree? Live and blossom so fully that you explode with ecstasy instead of burning to painful oblivion. And what are the fuels of this painful burning? These are the things that hold us back, preventing our fullest expansion. Fear is the primary roadblock. It breeds many other offshoots like anger, hate, jealousy, greed, judgements. Smile, laugh and explode with ecstasy like this rose does!

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It's a wonderful symmetry of spider web among the guava leaves. In the foggy morning, it looks a beatific beady design with the dew-strings drawn to perfection. Homosapiens please don't be too proud of what you create. The littlest of players in the existential game create far more complex designs in their individual capacity. Most of our creations are an offshoot of the mankind's joint imagination and effort. What a spider does is equivalent to one man making Eiffel tower. An ant carrying a huge dead carpenter ant is equal to a man carrying an elephant on his head. So please let out the extra air of pride in the stomach. All this drama around is primarily self-manifesting.  It's a series of self emerging designs and patterns. We just hop around for some time as a tiny part of some design in some corner.

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It's a little story of 6 inches and 7 months in a corner of the existential game. It’s a little sadabahar flower that set out to etch its destiny in a little crack in a plastered wall about 6 feet from the ground. She was born in the killing heat of June in this little crack in the wall. Well, one can't choose where one lands at birth, so no point in complaining. In the killer heat she kept her little self alive, waiting for the rains to come. There is no point in comparing. There are plants of her species who have entire earth to themselves and grow in feet. She but managed the best with her little crack. The rains came. She blossomed to get her sole flower as the trophy of her passion for life. Now the hard winters are buffeting the surroundings. There she stands tall in her smallness, waiting patiently for one fine spring morning when the sunrays will have enough warmth for another smile. Her few inches carrying the worth of many feet in normal circumstances. Her sole flower carrying the gist of fragrance and smile worth hundreds of flowers. Well, that's the hallmark of a meaningful life: Do the best with whatever you have received to begin with.