The war within

 

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, optimism gently tugging at your soul. Remember rolling on undisturbed pastures on a balmy noon away from the icy shrieks of windstorms? Do you recall the grassy softness assuaging all the 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? Of course a sadly pining, sweet nostalgia tugs at our sleeves.

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 todo away with the stormy sea inside.

Most of us carry a choppy sea inside, tossing the boat of our existence. The wind howls and the 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 up 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 smoothly 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 and 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 the 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.

The women that are no more

 

Those were the buxom old ladies who still lumbered around quite seriously, still pulling the cart of domesticity, till the last decade of the century gone. They had seen much of the last century. They carried manly strength, a thick-skinned temperament and rough farming hands. They had much to give and almost limitless strength to bear. Further, they were broad shouldered and possessed huge breasts which hang down to reach their navels in the old age. These had breastfed many children, not limited to the ones born of their own wombs. In the extended big joint families there was a kind of communal breastfeeding for the dozens of children. There would be many lactating mothers at any point of time to fulfill the children’s needs. The children too took liberty to suckle as per their choice or availability of a feeder when the pangs of hunger struck.

These women were full of motherhood and offered their breasts to even the unfortunate ones in the neighborhood whose mother was either dead or was too sick to feed them. They would roll up their kurta and pop out the nipple. The hungry child would suckle and draw the nourishing drops of life. They also won’t bear the sight of the child crying of hunger in the buses and trains or at the stations. With a quick assertion of motherly guts, they would pop out the full-of-milk nipple, get the infant suckling at it, cover the area with their chunri while keeping their head still covered.

When they grew old, and their breasts hung down to their navels, they would tell the weaker young ladies of the modern age with their smaller breasts, ‘We can still squirt out more drops of milk from our old boobs than you the weak ones of the modern age!’

As the world of we humans gets more and more complex both within and without, the drops of milk are vanishing as the human physiognomy is changing under the onslaught of pollutants and modern lifestyle. A few decades down the line, maybe we will have all the babies produced in artificial wombs in the labs. The human body will hardly have the strength and capability to bear children naturally. But well that’s change. Isn’t it? 

The last day of January

 

The last day of January, a gloomy cold overcast windy day. And weather-beaten leaves drizzle like profuse leaf showers. It gives a sad autumnal feeling. A smaller water channel branches off to the north from one of the canals. It was a few feet of wilderness with its reed grass, bunch-grass and other wild weeds and shrubs. A kind of tiny refuge for rodents, reptiles and little birds among the well-managed cropped fields, where not even a single blade of unwanted grass is allowed to grow. The land is forever falling short in meeting the mankind’s needs. And the farmers need to have a more efficient water channel. It was clogged and hemmed by the wild bushes on both sides along the embankments. So it’s swiped clean. The bushes burnt and the small trees cut. Now it’s a clean path to agricultural progress. But so many little homes and worlds gone in a stroke.

A pilgrimage

 

There is an open large sewage drain, the mother drain of all the smaller sewage drains and nullahs in the town. It flows with its black, stinking sludge. An eliminatory canal taking away the waste and refuge emanating from the overworked urban bowels. People grimace and cover their noses as they pass by it. But this impurity is what defines the purity of holy waters. There are little temples nearby. Here the people enter, open their souls while breathing in the incense smoke in front of the idols.

I walked for a considerable length by the big open sewage nullah. It’s a strong smell: the smell of stress, pain and struggles of the overburdened humanity. It’s the heady stench of the mass transformation of life into mere struggle. I love walking by holy rivers. But this also is an avatar of the mother stream. The all-accepting avatar of primordial mother who is happy to accept all the dump Her children put on her. A mother unbothered about the urine and shit dumped on her by the infant child. My head spins due to the strong odor after fifteen minutes. But this also is a little pilgrimage for Maa’s blackened avatar. She is smiling even with all her filth because she is after all the very same mother whose divinity flows in crystal clear mountain streams. As I move away it seems as if I have performed a little pilgrimage.

The fun of fluidity

 

There is hardly any qualitative difference between what goes in the sky above and what happens on the ground below. The sky shifts. It moves, it sings, it moans, it sighs. Sometimes it's relaxing and pristine blue. The other time it’s gloomy, dark and dreary. Sometimes it cries and sheds tears in a torrential rain. The other time it sheds gentle tears of joy by drizzling over desert sands. Sometimes it floods with a fury. There is light, darkness, shifting shades over clouds, clouds drifting and reshaping, clouds melting, clouds forming, clouds vanishing, winds, breeze. It’s a flow. There is something of everything in it.

The same happens below, as if it’s merely a reflection of the sky in the pools of earth below. There is sadness, joy, victory, failure, meetings, partings, smiles, tears, making, unmaking, falling in love, falling out of it, birth, death—an endless shifting. The sky leaves a deep imprint of its ever-shifting shades on the earth below. See the clouds melting in the sky, watch them daily. It’s such a big message written on the massive billboard for us to read and remember. But usually, we are seeking needles in the hayrack and hardly lift our eyes to read and remember the message.

Don’t the clouds bloom, get colors, travel and melt? They shower earth with their melted self, become flowers, perish and again become vapors. This bubble has to burst anyway to take another form. But before that it has to be in fullness. It has to live. It has to be tossed around by chance winds. It has to seek its way, its course. It has to do justice to its existence. And then it has to happily and lovingly give way to new shapes. But it can always remind itself that it was, is and will forever be in the shifting shades and shapes.