My Thoughts, Feelings & Experiences

Sitting on the rocks at the shore I watched the sun make its way down the horizon.

The sea wasn’t rough.. it was calm.  I noticed skylarks… quite a few of them in number.

‘Why didn’t I ever come across them before?’ I thought

‘Perhaps I never noticed ‘ I thought

Skylarks are wonderful. They bring back memories.

‘It doesn’t take long for the sun to dip once its near the sea’ I observed..  something to do with refraction. That is what they taught us in physics’

It must have been an hour or so  when I finally came to my senses. It was dark all around; the only brightness was perhaps the froth that the sea left at the shore every now and then…I could hear the rumbling in the distance… a steady one.

‘The anguish of the sea…’ I thought.

Sitting there all alone in that hour I had traveled back into innocence.  I had looked through the kaleidoscope of my mind into those moments that had whizzed past me and when I looked into those smoky frames back in time a lot of things started to make sense. Things that I had considered insignificant once seemed to loom up in totality and rendered themselves in an absolutely breathtaking spatial orientation.

‘I must have been naive’ I muttered under my breath.. ‘I must have been awfully naive..
 
Just that moment I saw someone in a flowing white robe walking towards me with a smile on his face. His face didn’t bear any signs of senility.. he looked so youthful and yet appeared to have marched this land for a hundred decades. He sat down beside me softy. There was no sound of his footsteps. He seemed to be walking the path of a soft breeze. His eyes were dark and kind. He pointed towards the sky.  I looked… a few stars seems to be stealing occasional glances.   It felt good.

‘Ever thought how many of them you truly know out there ?’ he asked

‘How many of them you really care for out there ? And yet they exist.. for you .. for me…selflessly. Some of them take years to reach you  ..a part of them reaches you in quanta. But ever paused to think ?’

  ‘You know something ?’ he asked

  I eagerly looked up at him

  ‘The best things in the world are always with you.  You never get to know some of them but that doesn’t mean that you are deprived of their gifts and at the sunset of life when you have nothing more to ask for you are bathed in their unerring presence every night while you gaze through one of your windows in the songs and silences of the night. You realize but then its too late. You cannot rewind.’

  ‘Why should one live ?’ I asked

  He smiled.

  The sky was illuminated by a flash of lightning.

  ‘Is it going to rain?’ I wondered.

  ‘Look this is some question we never stop asking. There are so many reasons not just one.’

  ‘Firstly we cannot help it.’ he seemed quite amused.
  ..and the next point is that there is some kind of a longing that pins up this canvas of our physical structure against a hard metallic time frame. Stroke after stroke the artist applies and multiple flavors come out.  The frame is rigid… the canvas is not.  Some brushes don’t last long.. others eat up the canvas.  And yet the artist goes on in his search of perfection.  This artist has patience beyond limits. He works hard day and night.. all through the seasons and when the canvas wears out, he picks up another and starts afresh.’

  It was so wonderful to hear him speak that it never occurred to me that he couldn’t be real.  He was all there in blood and flesh telling me things I have always wanted to know. 

  ‘ You know son..’ he said, ‘love has always formed the integral and the most basic part of our existence even  thousands of years before you & me existed. Somehow along the course we have defined and redefined it but never for once did you manage to refine it and render it in its purest of forms. Love takes forms..  multiple forms.  For instance think about air.  Its everywhere but we don’t see it.  And yet we could use it to blow a balloon.. can’t we ?  We can fill the tyres and have our cars running.. isn’t it ?  We use it to burn things too.’

 ‘Manifestations’ he said

‘ Love too is somewhat like that.  In the free form its not seen not understood but  only when blended with a bit of selfishness, doped with a bit of desire and mixed with some amount of possessiveness that it surfaces and then it can be recognized..  Nothing can exist in totality and purity.. a bit of doping helps.  Its the overlapping territory.  Look at the sea…  the waves lapping at the shore…  This is perhaps where the real meets the unreal.  The land can’t move and yet it touches every part of the sea at the shore.. every droplet of the brine is different.. new.. come from far.. and touched other lands too.  Up there in the sky the water reaches there too and when the longing is over comes back to where it all started.’

‘Amazing’ I thought.

‘When you look back into your past.. you would see a lot of vacancies there…lots of things you have always wanted and craved to have but the place where you are right now, if then your prayers wd have been answered you wouldn’t be here now.  Some things never happened cause in that case the other things couldn’t have..  You didn’t have them .. so you have what you wouldn’t have had if you had them.’

I wasn’t confused at all. All he was saying made sense. One hundred percent.

He got me thinking…

A shrill whistle broke the silence and with a jolt I was back into myself.

I saw a constable approaching me. ‘What the hell are you up to in the middle of the night?’ He yelled.

As I walked back to my place I wondered if he was for real or whether imagination got the better of me.