My way of prayer is to write for Him, about Him. I’m not good with Hymns or Bajans, I’m neither
a trained singer to melt in the song and pour on Him the music but I can
write. I can reach out to those who read,
walk into their ears and slip into their heart and seed little of my experience
about Sri Swami Ayyappan.
The urge to see Him, to read that one word –
Thathwamasi – written at the entrance of the shrine, to breath that fresh air of
the century old woods intensifies as the days go on. I want to visit him with
the heart of a toddler but I feel the impurity and maleficent cognizance I gathered
all through out this life like a pond that consumed a big rock; ripples of
past sins and splash of wrong decisions and muddy remembrance of the losses.
This penance of Forty-eight days, I believe, is
a wait for those ripples to stop and mud to settle down in the bottom so that
the purity of the water is reveled and the shine of the Sun enters the water to
make the life inside to bloom. And the learning is that only when a rock is
thrown it cleanses the water and makes it pure.
When scrolling the Instagram reels, I saw a
video of toddler who is back from his Sabarimala pilgrimage with his father and has to take
out the sacred Thulasi Mala off his neck and save it for next year. The moment his mother touched his mala the
toddler started crying hugging his father. I could hear him like many of the
devotees who know that feeling or may be the pain to take that sacred mala off
the neck. The toddler begged not to take
it off. After hard efforts his mother took
it from him and he broke down and cried.
What made him cry, I didn’t understand that moment that brings tears even
though I have undergone similar situation in the past years. Why does the soul urges for that penance
which is not so easy though divine. It does
not end there, from that moment you take that sacred mala off from your neck,
the timer inside you starts to count the days for the next Karthigai month to come.
The purity I wanted is that toddler’s tears, he
doesn’t want that sacredness to get off him, he doesn’t want that life close to
Swami Ayyappan to end. That is purity, that
is the heart we are all born with but somehow we accumulate impurities from
the dark souls and store it in our grey cells.
Like Osho says, enlightenment is not something which you attain, you're born enlightened, it is already
inside you like a strained mirror, wipe the dust and you will find yourself,
the real divine power, Swami Ayyappan, Sri Dharma Sastha, the Allah, the Jesus
and whatever the name you give. It is
all within us, just allow the mud to settle down. Thathwamasi.
