That old lady

An old lady with diamonds in her ears looked forlorn and lost. The sparkle of her diamonds did not reflect the sparkle in her eyes, all they showed was despondency. Until she stepped inside the music library.

“I want to walk through life instead of drag through it”, these words of Alanis Morissette drippled in the background. It was a music store that was replete with sounds from various generations.

She muttered to herself another set of lines, And of course it’s not just life and death that are both miscible and immiscible. The same is true for everything: where does the bee start and the wind end? Where does the tree start and the boring beetle end. 

The music keeper couldn’t smile and recommended her to put that single earpiece that rested on her slender shoulder and weighed over 10 pounds (to her it felt like placing a boombox on her shoulder). Her visage grew softer and gentler. The despair which had contracted it was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness and tenderness. Fresh enthusiasm wafted through the store as the music described her spiritual satori, ‘to move freely you must be deeply rooted like a dancer that enthralls everyone including herself with those movements.’

She walked out of the music library singing loudly Patti Page’s words, “Your voice dries up if you don’t use it.”

Travel, accept certain inalienable truths

Respect your elders, don't expect anyone else to support you

Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse

But you'll never know when either one will run out

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're forty

It will look eighty-five

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it

Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of

Wishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off

Painting over the ugly parts and recycling for more than it's worth

But trust me on the sunscreen

Baz Luhrmann (Everybody’s free to wear sunscreen)

                    

The Raven's flight

One could watch the waves tumble in and tumble out. These waves have no mind, no human mind. However, a human mind receives composure from the churning of the sea. Not aware that the brain is as always frothing within itself a form of bigotry. The nature of a human mind is entirely based on, very simply, 'convenience, suitability and an inherent need for self-preservation.'
Some of those meaningful conversations one may have with is oneself. There could be an imminent danger of being clouded, yet there is a silver lining in knowing that the sun will shine.


A surge of those high tides lashing at the sky; a human mind thinks, "the sea is in a burning rage, the sky is placid". Truth is they are neither. They are as they are. In their movements lie no secrets. 
Mulling over these, the raven takes a flight of life to another existential plane, where there is not a single being from the human community. Gliding over the mountains, covering the immeasurable horizon, floating on the surface of it's summer. It hits a cold cloud like a man's hand at the end of a life. It flies towards the darkness of what is next, towards the dampness of the loss of summer. 
It loves Winter the most of all, between Summer and Winter, everything is water. There is a realm in which there are no names of the dead, or saints or history of any kind. The raven lands there and closes it's eyes.

Peas in a pod

There are psychos in a ward
like the peas in a pod
the ward is a reward
like an award
a ward says,"why are we here"
in this ward lives our demons
like the sharks in the sea
we are as lonely as can be
there is a sea with creatures
not the same as those miniatures
"why are we here"
because we are a part of the unknown
In that we live
knowing the unknown
breathing the air
that we breathe
eating like the piranhas
still living 
in a way that beseeches the breathing

With these incongruent words, the psychos continued their stint in the wards!

Silence

A man in his early seventies, lived aloof, was lost in his darkness. He would hold himself responsible for all the acts he had committed as a father, as a husband, his failings and his thoughts consumed his urge to remain optimistic. The power of thoughts, the sharpness of the created-evil, the stinging bites of what he construed as a failure, worthless, meaningless ended up in an end.

It is never easy to understand what goes on in a mind, as a bystander, one can never know. What goes in one's head only that person is aware of it. The truth that one lives within is known to that person only. The exterior may belie the pain, the humiliation, the sufferings, the travails and the joys. However, the pain within is a pain that intensifies if not checked in time. Nobody can be held responsible, one is responsible for one's own state of being.

Life branches out before us like any tree. From the tip of every twig, every branch, a wonderful now beckons and smiles. The branches wither, the tips of the leaves blacken. Bathing in the light of the moon, it is a face in it's own right. The moon is the mother to that tree, making it believe in tenderness, bending on it with it's mild eyes. The clouds flower, with a mystic blue. The moon sees everything and sees nothing. She is bald and wild. And the message is: blackness and silence.


Awaken from the sorrow, let the heart hear the tone of joy, from every depth of good and ill, the mystery binds me still.

Drizzles and drops!

The sea was being serenaded by those tiny droplets falling from the incandescent sky. In that sight, two fisherfolks were grappling with their nets. Their nets were entangled and free at the same time. Fish in the water were playing a game with the nets. In that sojourn of a play, the fish smiled at the naive' antics of those threads that made the net strong and vulnerable.  
The efforts were daunting, the efforts were continued and the play resumed with an indefatigable spirit.
Slow drops mixing with the huge waves steered their conviction, helping them in their lonely endeavors. 

Will it be netted?
Will they be set free?
Will the fisherfolks get by?

The ache of the characters felt an ache, experienced a joy, a truth: intense and depthless.

The designs or memories!

Each moment has the potential to either fade away into an unfathomable oblivion or turn into a lingering memory.

In the sub-conscience, pieces of time, events and people conjoin and form a pattern. These patterns play repeatedly and lend itself to a design. This design that is etched in the sub-conscience is not so difficult to shake if it is repulsive. Yet it may play out viciously, as the unpleasant design is steeped in a power that seems un-erasable for a brief while. Now if the design is  acutely strong in a superlative wondrous way then it is inescapable. Designs become memories or fade aways.

Stories, patterns, designs and shapes are all part of the same Design in a way only the Design maker understands...

  

Butterfly's song

The wings of the butterfly flutter and move rapidly. She becomes a poetess at the mere sight of those beautiful flowers. The carmine red, the lilac, the shade of pink laced with a stark white. A song with a heart. A song that the leaves dance to and the cuckoo hums rhapsodies of ecstatic praise. There is no trace of melancholy only sweet consonance.

Immersed in the depthless melody, squirrel feels hoity-toity and muses that if I pass into senescence, the rivers of this garden will be in capable hands. The butterfly while casting a constative look to the squirrel, continues to sing along. The garden was clothed in sackcloth. Time stood still and in this grand hogen-mogen, everything came alive.

A presence that disturbs me with the joy,
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And in the blue sky, and in the mind of a man
- Wordsworth

Sheath of words

Lying on a bus stop, with sparkling white hair glistening in the champagne rays of the dusk. He looked desolate and wore sadness and poignancy to cover his ragged being along with a robe of words. His orphic figure lent him a poet's disposition. Muttering away to people passing by; his words.
"Why are you looking at me, rather staring, I am not a raving mad person."
"You..you...you... look straight and wipe that smirk off your face."
"The sky is turning from a blue to a grey to a semi-black, the colours are changing. From the wardrobe of nature, Time chooses what to wear, during the day, it wears a bright shade and as the night approaches, it likes to slip into a darkness, a darkness that befits the moon."
"I may look dishevelled and dirty, my soul is not."
"Joy is the best makeup."
"I am speaking so fast because I want to see how the story turns out."
"Who wants to face a calvary before dying, you...you or you..."

Desultory he did sound, perhaps because he hears a different drummer. He maybe trying to step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Using words as a shield, one likes to hide behind them. The thoughts in one's head may be diabolic, however, words spinning out dresses up the devil.

Oh words, you are a release,
Oh words, you are a conundrum,
Oh words, you are a potent concoction,
Oh words, you are my ivory tower and hell....

A Sparrow's life

It is a delight to watch the sparrows chirp away their melodious selves and find joy. Their gay abandon, their bliss in who they are and the act of pure living. There is so much to learn from them. As human beings, we are confided in our melancholy and one has to imbibe and inculcate from their disposition. To be alive and to be able to change our lives is an act in self. One can only help oneself and then be in a state one wants to be in!

Sparrows probably have their own existential angst yet they are able to chirp, fly away and find their happiness. In the end, what remains is not in their control, but that does not desist them from being who they are. It is time to live, live like the sparrows, fly like them and also fly solo. In their solitariness they experience life.

Time to hold life in a deference and be alive. The truth is that when one is alive then only one can witness. Those who are not there in this realm must be alive in some other realm. From this realm to the other. From this life to the next. From a gripping truth to the other. Time is on the move.

To Time, I salute and pay respect.

Finding meditative bliss

The emotions within are rearing their ugly selves into a lugubrious melody.
To listen with an attention to the throb of the sensations is an exercise in meditation, the sensations swell up, swim wildly, flushing vicariously and forming an atonement!

The sea within is ever changing it's state, the range it traverses can only be experienced, it's indescribable. A pilgrim doesn't react, only morphs into a silent witness and in that he finds a bliss, a bliss of a meta-physical kind.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before:
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word of a different kind...

- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Brutality of time and lost words

Words are really not immortal, are they? With these thoughts, a child wakes up from a slumber. A slumber that took him to the end of a crevice, a crevice lost in time, a crevice dissipated in an agony. The agony was never understood by that child, probably, it was never to be understood. There are these experiences that one can never understand because they are beyond that. One may lavish adjectives after adjectives, use words, be clever with them, yet, the illusion of it all melts away!

Time with it's innate quality of being shatteringly brutal withstands any onslaught.
The child goes back to his land, a land where it's only him and his make-believe world which envelopes him with a bliss, a bliss meant only for him, that which an adult can only be wishful for!