Little happenings at a small place

If mother nature takes away, it gives back as well. It wipes the slate clean and then ascertains that there are fresher lines drawn symbolizing resurrected tales. The bees are gone and the empty hive gives a pinching sense of alienation. But the hundreds of sparrows among the group of keekars just outside the yard wall keep it alive and buzzing. They are very chatty, suspenseful, always busy in their birdie gossip. When they change their notes, it makes them sound as if they possess multi-lingual creativity. They flit around during the day, with a kind of self-effacing candor, taking the major portion of their meals from the millet that I put on the wall.

A giloy creeper has completely covered the clump of keekars. It has shed its leaves during the winters but the network of stems is still dense enough to provide a finely netted ceiling. It harkens the little brown sparrows with a welcoming ambience. They find it safe enough to spend their nights here. The little holes among the densely twisting barren stems of the creeper are like tiny hutments flooded with winged visitors.

The very next day, once the honeybees left, some of the sparrows arrived to roost among the little group of small trees in the yard. As if they were waiting for the bees to leave the garden. So the garden turns a big chiming birdie funfair at dusk. They chat a lot before retiring for the day. But they are very respectful to the night, not a movement, not a sound, paying homage to the goddess of silence. They arrive ten or fifteen minutes before the oriental magpie robin. The dashing fellow is still keeping to his perfectly timed twilight arrival. His biological clock is in perfect sync with nature with the days slightly longer presently. But he has to quarrel now to retain his paw-hold. Some sparrows must be sitting on his favorite branch for the night rest. It leaves him in a grumpy mood and so there he goes with his querulous notes. And finding it to no effect, like a naughty imp he head-butted straight into the bough and reclaimed his lost perch. He fights for it every day. Sometimes, in the middle of a cold, lonely, long night, the magpie robin lets out a sudden note as if all its bottled up pathos are suddenly let out to sail into the cold atmospherics like a song of desolation and loneliness. 

A little exercise

The main charm of dewy autumnal mornings is the shower of little Parijat flowers that covers the ground, like offerings to mother earth. It's a little exercise in nurturing care and consideration in my farming gene pool. Walk carefully so as not to crush even a single flower. If you sensitize your conscience to at least this level so as to avoid crushing a flower, there is hardly a chance that you will crush a heart, an organic representative of thousands of beautiful, multi-colored flowers.

Spin your webs well!

 This is your very own beautiful reality dear earthling...a lovely reality created by you through your own experiences and endeavors to cope with the googlies of life. This is a shining monument celebrating that you have lived. It's as concrete, meaningful and real as the biggest block of stone you have seen in life. Your soul has already consecrated it, so no need for its validation by others. It's as real and ripply as a river flowing in front of you, as beautiful as a rose, as seductive as fragrant jasmine on a dewy autumnal night. 

This is a limitless cosmic fluid, a stream of energy, carrying thought and emotional spools in the form of various vibrational frequencies. That's the raw material for all of us to fabricate still more spools of thought and emotion forms as those already created float around and through us. We are an instrument for carrying this limitless game to keep churning fresher realities. 

All people make their realities. Those strictly at the body level make what you see most of that surrounds you. Thought dominated people like yours truly have intellectual and conceptualized energy field. They see it through their own telescope of intellect. Emotional people, the poets and artists, have emotionalized multihued version of reality. Beautiful souls immersed in faith consecrate the surroundings with the tunes of their soulful hymns and consecrate the ordinary surroundings with divinity and create godliness right here on earth. Some are related to the surroundings at the level of still more subtler energies, so subtle that their realities are in the domain of intuitive zone where space-time axis loses relevance and they foresee and feel the looming turmoil. I know a girl whose energetic system was already painfully attuned to the invisibly building turmoil in the middle east and which has now burst out in all blood and gore. She has seen lots of turmoil in body and spirit in this lifetime, so maybe that leaves her a receiver of similar traumas building up at far off places. 

There are always causes in nature for all the effects to manifest. All this happens as per the fundamental laws of causation which are operational beyond the scope of normal physical laws made by the homosapiens. The latter are convenient copies adopted from the primordial laws based on how much our senses allow us to sense and perceive. 

We have our own karmic memories in our genetics and coupled with the experiences in this lifetime, we frame newer realities. And this new drop of creation from our end is left to float in the stream of creation forever. It will affect our fellow creators till eternity. So it's advisable to create well, something that is assimilative and helpful for fellow creators. At least as per the notions of what we term as loving, friendly, helpful, caring in human terms.

All these creations in thought and emotion forms are different manifestations of the same primordial soup. But it's lovely to come to terms with one's very own reality irrespective of what others see of it. I really understand and feel what our individual triggers want to convey. There are workshops busy, billions of them, busy in carrying forward the task of eternity on this little planet. 

We ought to accept other's realities. And keep evolving as per the directions of the energies flowing through us. We aren't that isolated as individuals as we seem on the surface. Multiple layers of mental, emotional, astral planes, and God knows how many more that we don't know yet, cut across us as we proceed on life’s journey. They are floating around. It's natural that we relate to or are positively or negatively reactive to the energetic forms building around. But what we produce as a response to the individual stimuli is our own creation. So we can be very responsible creators. Some things we relate to because we have seen its very manifestation in our own body through all that we have seen in this life or experienced previously. And in attunement or discordance with all that--which primarily defines our individuality--we spin further webs for mother creation. Spin well! Smile...cheers...dance...

A little lesson from the book of life

 Have you seen a snake beautifully crawling across little spaces, tiny crevices, stony earth and prickly branches and thorny boughs? It slithers away so majestically; with a fluidity matching the water’s. I think a snake is almost a more tangible manifestation of water in fluidity; a crawling mellowness. So the next time you come across a snake, don’t jumpstart and put your body in panic gear to saunter away. Just gently stay there. Believe me it won’t turn back to kiss your skin. It has far better things to kiss including his woman for love and frogs and mice for hunger. So as long as you are an appreciating spectator it would mind its business and allow you to mind yours.

A snake crawls so beautifully even across the big heaps of prickly boughs and branches of thorny keekers without injuring itself. Its mellow fluidity allows it to circuit around the thorns and obstructions. I think a snake has a message here for we humans as we move on the prickly path of life. To move with gentleness, fluidity, acceptance and liberty across the thorns of judgments, hate, complexes, anger, fear and insecurities. These are the thorns put on our path through which we have to crawl. Run or walk with all the negativities and rigidities of fears and insecurities and they bleed our feet. And move with the streaming gentle fluidity of acceptance and non-judgments, we simply find ourselves beautifully crawling across the pinchy, thorny obstructions. Mother nature has scrawled beautiful life lessons across the vast sprawl of her book of nature. We just need to be a bit more aware to read it. Ahha, the wonders of the book of life!

Tau's Grouse

 

Tau Hoshiyar Singh is confidently inching towards the three figure mark, a century of years on earth. He has been a cricket fan and would like to hit a ton. If he gets out in late nineties then he might consider his innings a failure. So I would pray that he meets his target. A very hardworking farmer till five years back, when his grandchildren and wards forced him into retirement (because he would hackle with them at the farms trying to force his age-old farming techniques), he now spends time at chaupals. He has enough stamina left to compete with young idlers in cards games, drawing hookah smoke in a long-long draught, and giving his opinions on political and social matters. From his enthusiasm, I’m sure he is up for a century of years.

He sometimes pays me a visit, special visits I would say. These are primarily to make me realize the real me and act accordingly. An illiterate hardworking farmer, he has been, like others of his ilk in the peasantry of Punjab and Haryana, a follower of Swami Dayanand. To them the Swami’s words on all aspects connote the ultimate earth and they just deny any possibilities beyond that. So he wants to have a modern-day Swami Dayanand. He has cutely misinterpreted my bookish ways as signs of saintliness. ‘You can become like Swami Dayanand, I tell you! Just that you need to simply leave house, abandoning everything and set out on foot like he did! You have it in you!’ he would express his expectations from me. ‘Why don’t you quit this house and everything else?’ he has asked a few times. At those times I feel like pouring salt in his tea and chilies in his hookah tobacco. Don’t know why he is so eager to see me as a beggar roaming around. Anyway, he is an elder and he has his rights to expect.

The other day, he is taking sips at tea served by me, coolly taking out a flea that had fallen in it, saying, ‘You never know even this mix of flea and tea might do some good to the system elderly people like me’. Well, he usually has a solid point to back his wisdom, so I usually avoid falling in arguments with him.

Now me being me, full of books in the mind, I have a tendency to start giving lectures on various topics. God knows how come this topic of cars arrived during the talk. I am soon lecturing him about the costliest cars whose prices go into crores of rupees. His eyes are literally popping out. To him money came in pennies at the cost of loads of sweat in the farms. So the talk of so much money leaves him slightly perturbed. ‘What do they call them?’ he asks me, his eyes wide after I have talked about Rolls Royces, Hummers, Jaguars, Volvo, Mercedes and more. ‘Cars, cars with different names,’ I expound. ‘Then what is yours?’ he asks, pointing at my little old car. ‘It also is a car,’ I’m slightly embarrassed. ‘Yours should be called something else,’ he is so wise.

Then he is asking what is different about those big cars. I am trying my level best to expound their specialties, which fall out of the zone of his understanding. ‘What happens if there is a traffic jam? How is this big car different from the ones like yours, which you also call as a car?’ he interrogates. ‘Well, it has to wait on the road like any other car,’ I reply. ‘Then what is the use of throwing away so much of money if it cannot even fly in air for some time and take you out of the jam?’ he asks. I hardly have any answer. My books haven’t equipped me with those facts. If I try to explain that these are the things in the mind, to stand out higher than the others. He won’t take this logic. Because as a hardworking farmer he cannot relate to the bugs of mind like most of us do in a consumerist society. So Tau takes leave but not before reminding again, ‘Why are you wasting your life? Leave home and hearth and become a sanyasi and turn Mahrashi Dayanad and change the society,’ he advises the course of action. He basically means that I should turn a hardworking ploughman in the field of religion and spirituality.

Well, I understand from where the grouse originated. Tau was at the forefront of canvassing the rival army in fighting against my little battle of saving myself from matrimony. He did his best to get me yoked into the lurching countryside cart of matrimony. He approached with many arranged marriage proposals out of whom I slipped out like a cunning, slippery eel. To him it’s foolish to stay unmarried and still stay in human society. Such people must go to the forests. That’s why he wants me out and join the league of wandering mendicants of India.