Reading the book of life

 

Aha the book of life! Every day a new chapter. Each incident, happening or phenomenon a fresh sentence with profound meanings.

The new sun rising on a misty morning arriving with the message that there is always light after dark to help us see and realize the illusions and unwarranted fears that we imposed on us in the dark.

The setting sun saying ‘a smiling bye’ with a message that one has to accept and willingly dive into oblivion after a dazzling day, after touching the peak of brilliance, after a full-hearted bear hug with life, after completing an innings in career or a relationship. That a ripe fruit has to drop, that even very dear people will go out of life, that smiles will be followed by tears as well. Acceptand recognize that we have to welcome this play of existence in totality and that includes smiles-tears, win-loss, falling in love, partings, birth-death. Everything.

The shifting shades and reshaping clouds in the sky brimming with the message of change and impermanence, of new forms overtaking the old ones, of a smooth transition, of the old changing into the new without any drama, without any hassles.

Mother earth holding this portion of existence on her maternal palm with unconditional love and the undying spirit of just giving all that Her children need. The message of giving! How much more satisfying it seems in comparison to taking! That we evolve by a great margin just by giving a smile. And ‘taking’ also is highly undervalued. If we ‘take’ with a smile and gratitude, doesn’t it create a ‘giver’ who became joyful for the act? Mother existence prefers a graceful and full of gratitude ‘taker’ than a cranky ‘giver’. Give with a smile of kindness and empathy; take with a smile of gratitude. To mother existence these are simply two facets of the same coin.

The chirping of birds conveying the spirit of keeping songs alive on one’s lips even while engaged in the day-to-day commitments and routine practicalities of life. Their free flights spreading the fragrance of freedom, the urge to fly on one’s own path.

The trees with the message of growth irrespective of the changing environment and the divine instinct of giving fresh air, shade to the weary traveller, inspiration to artists, nests to the birds, fruits for the hungry. A new shoot sprouting from the cut on their bark:the message that we too can get fresh colors and shoots to our personality at the points of cuts, wounds and adversities.

The flowers with the message that smiles carry the touch of divinity, that fragrant petals and nectar fuel the colorful sorties of many butterflies, that we too touch many lives positively with our gentle manners, smiles and sweetness of temperament. That our rainbowed touch can make many people joyful like nectar-satiated butterflies. We smile, say soft words, treat them gently and they soar high and become joyful.

Beautiful relationships with the message that our travel-weary heart, mind and body need a soft touch, a cool brace, a healing bonhomie; that friends, family, relatives, partners, lovers are all there to help us cross a milestone on our eternal journey and then melt and get reshaped like clouds in the sky. But we carry the invisible imprint of their persona on our individual selves. It’s firmer than a line on stone. People might have tears on account of you, once the pathways have parted, but ensure that the tears are accompanied by a smile as well so that the dry tears don’t singe someone’s soul.

A river in the hills, furiously cutting big boulders, passing the message that we have to raise a blizzard of karma to later enjoy a peaceful flow in the planes and still later merge into the bigger serenity of the sea. That we have to cut karmic stones to come out of the stones, walk joyfully on the plane of relationships, kindness, care, share and finally sleep in the lap of mother sea.

The silence in a forest loaded with the message that this is what all the words and languages point to, the language of silence, the mother of all sermons and preaching.

The exotic chaos and cluttering noise in a city heavily pregnant with the message that all of us are destined to wade through inner conflicts, puzzles, trauma and tension like the common people beautifully engaged in the sweet-sour poignancy of the cities.

Falling in love loaded with joy, pleasure, care and share. It tells how important these feelings are for our wellbeing. Just recall the feeling of bliss while freshly in love! Isn’t that wonderful?

Falling out of love, tears, pain and suffering passing the message that we always could have been better lovers. In any case, it’s always for the best in future. We just become better lovers after partings.

Everything around us is full of messages. The book of life! Observe it, feel it, understand it. It opens the experiential dimension in life. With experiential knowing, the phantoms of intellect and mind take a backseat. They always bow down to the confident sovereign, the soul, the observer now fully aware of its kingdom, its colors, shapes, hues, everything.

The beauty of carefully reading the book of life is that we learn to touch our own self, our own body, mind, thoughts and emotions with more empathy and self-love. We fall in love with the life overall. We simply come out of the definition of life within this particular body and feel related to the life overall. Then we touch many lives very-very positively. We become healers without trying to do it intentionally. It’s just a natural state of being in that dimension. Happy reading the book of life!

Enjoy what is still left there

 

We have to deal with mother nature’s slingshots. Just a week back it was extremely cold, and through the gloomy, cold, wet last week of January one could all but pray for the savior sun. Now in the first week of February, the sky is bright and clean and the sun so hot that you feel its heat too much to sit under it even in the morning. So I would say that we have the spring already. But it would be better to call it the spring of the nights, mornings and evenings when there is cool breeze, dew and light mist. The days have all that that makes them entitled for early summer. Beyond all these travails, the beauty would have its moments of sojourns.

As I walk on the thin ribbon of wilderness between the canals cutting across the well-manicured agricultural fields of wheat and mustard, the bright red disk of the sun hovers over the silvery sea of the mist over the horizon. It’s assuring that we still have beautiful moments of sundown. Also, even the crazily intensified farmsteads are better than bladeless concrete jungles. These scatterings of the trees over the channel bunds, embankments and dust paths are better than complete deserts. These sparse clumps of grasses and bushes are still better than lifeless, floored and tiled boulevards.

As the little groups of birds return to their host trees, it again strikes me that we ought to feel gratitude for what is still there. As the sun is downing, the moon is already visible high on the horizon—an almost perfect moon, just a day short of fullness, having a little blur at its lower rim. The two celestial beauties ogle at each other.

A dog barks and I recall three little puppies that have grown very possessive about the tiny village square. It’s their territory and they mean to defend it. I have seen big outsider dogs walking off the scene under their shrill assault.

It was a sad balloon seller who came with a few balloons on his rickety cycle. He walked dejectedly and the canine lads howled to give a suitable gloomy music. The bigger ones howled too. Then a young one almost hitched a ride on their mother. But it had to retreat under their shrill protest. ‘Don’t do it dog! We aren’t yet ready to share our milk with new puppies!’ they seemed to say, bark rather.  

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.