A Squirrel Story

 

At the end of that paddy field, below a big banyan tree, between the holes of the roots stood a squirrel with a nut of its head size in his hands.

He wants to break open the shell and eat the kernel inside. His tiny hands were not enough to break the shell, so he threw it up above so that it falls down and crack.

The nut flew in the air and gravity dropped it down to earth.  The nut rolled down into a hole between the roots of the tree.

The squirrel was shocked and rushed behind the nut into the hole before the tree could consume it. He could not see in the dark, but he didn’t want to give up.

He followed the hole in the dark and reached the end and found its nut. He dragged it out of the hole to the light.  It might be not his nut, but he found one for the day.

He looked up to the tree and found a bird with big beak and a big claw. He climbed the tree and, on the way, to middle of the tree he stopped.

“If I asked help to that big-beak, he could break open the nut and eat the kernel and throw me down the tree or throw the nut down and can eat me.” he thought

He looked around and found a leaping tongue with vine body. It was slithering across the branches of the trees.  “This slathering beast looks helpful, should I ask him to help me?”

“The idea sounds great but what if he a carnivorous of an omnivorous that either eats both me and the nut or only me.”  the thought terrified the squirrel.

He moved away from the slithering beast and found a monkey sitting at end of a branch.  The monkey was searching something in the head of another monkey.

“I know this guy, he and his whole family were crazy, but he should help me as I am tiny comparing to him” he thought.  “Oh! Wait.  He is crazy.  He might throw me down just for fun”

The squirrel moved up the tree further and dropped the nut from his hands.  The nut fell down before a tusker walking by the tree. 

The squirrel jumped from branch to branch and ran down the trunk and stood before the elephant to stop the tusker to smash the nut under its big foot.

The tusker stopped and saw the squirrel shouting to stop pointing at the tiny nut the fell before its foot. “Please stop or you are going to smash it and make it useless” squirrel shouted.

The tusker scooped the squirrel with its trunk.  The squirrel was terrified that tusker is going to threw him in the air and before he hit the ground his soul would have reached God.

No.  The tusker lifted him gently with its trunk and placed it above its head.  Squirrel heard the shell breaking under the tusker’s feet.  “Oh no, it is gone forever” he thought

The tusker scoped something from the ground just like it scoped the squirrel.  It was the broken nut.  The trunk slowly reached the squirrel that is over its head.

The trunk delivered the squirrel a full nut instead of the smashed one.  When the squirrel took it in his hand the nut opened exactly into two halves.

“How could such a giant break the nut with such tenderness!!!”  wondered the squirrel.  “Thank you, sir,” said the squirrel to the giant.

The tusker lifted its trunk and triumphed.

                                                                                                                               - SK

 

 

What is the hurry!

 

Sit down there, somewhere in the middle of this vast planet,

Look at something beautiful.  A cat, a street dog, a kid in velvet,

A drop of rain, a teenage kid, a charming girl, chameleon on a tree,

a lady with blue eyes, a woman with gray hair, and a cake with cheery.

 

Sit down there, somewhere in middle of chaos, in middle of people,

Think about that never tired wave that hits the shore, we are its pupil.

The breeze that goes around kissing cheeks after cheeks, but

We are always worried about the hurricane and it freaks.

 

Sit down there, in the corner of your room, with a paper and a pencil,

Write down the words the pours down and you’re following only a stencil.

Word after word jumps from your brain, not all you could write,

 You think and filter with your patience and make it bright.

 

Lie down in the middle of your terrace with no lights, in the dark night,

In the middle of the sky between the stars moves a bright light.

An asteroid that burns itself for the pleasure of getting inside the Earth,

Not all time but wait with the patience for it because it worth.

 

 Sink inside the Gibran’s words or some book you love,

Word by word read it to fall in love as if to the author you owe.

Eschew shallow breathing, the air all over is to take it in,

Inhale the entire cosmos, exhale all ego and then grin.

 

Why so in hurry!

The phase of the Sun, the Moon and the Earth and universe is in sync,

 Feel it is all inside you or live like you are inside of it all. It is a link.

None of it is true because you are everything and everything is you.

Everything and everybody you see is YOU, be if a friend or foe.

                                                                                                SK

Stitches or Scars!!!

 

This mirage of image from the past triggered by a similar acoustic is putting me down in the neural ravine to drown in to the abyss of memories.  And when I close my eyes with that retrospection, all I hear is the sound of a flute in the deep dark forest.  It is scary.  It is painful. I considered it has the reconciliation of all the sins from this life, past life and the life that I don’t even know if I lived. It was scary.  The acoustic was the same sound of the oozing blood from the torn soul that was thrown in the street to bleed.  I fear that sound. I fear that scent of oozing blood.  I fear that the stitches in my soul could cut open to bleed again.  I though only the scars from the past remined.  Those were only scar of the blade that ran through the soul and healed.  No, those were still only the stiches holding the soul not to bleed.  There was a tiny hole made today or one of the stiches gave up leaking blood.

The nausea the oozing blood creates was from the old life.  I could manage the tears, the cut and even the pain but what was unbearable is the same old acoustic.  It scares me to hell.  It sends shudder to my spine.  My hands shiver, my eyes fill tears, my mouth shutters, throat congests, legs go weak and my soul go haywire.  It feels some time that it is better to be deaf than to hear that same spine-chilling noise that kills the soul. Every human has that one trigger, for me it is that noise, that scream, that acoustic of the devil.  Every human has that fear of their mirage from the past.  Though it does exist no more, the sediment of pain and suffering is still in the conscience burning the soul slow and steady to ashes.  The fire sometimes stays dormant until that trigger kindles it to burn.  It will be ashes all over, it will be scorching all over.  Above the scorches and ashes, it is that fear that was in slumber in brain wakes up and shows its evil face.

It requires consoling. The soul, the body, the mind and the subconsciousness need consoling, like a hug from a mother to the crying child.  The hug from just anybody does not suffice, It should be from a human that really cares, a mother or like a mother.  The hug from caring human sometimes doesn’t suffice.  It should be from a soft and pure soul, may be a baby.  The hug from that pure soul too sometime would not console or put the fume out from the soul that started burning.  The divine intervention, an invisible hand, the hand from up above, the one we have not seen physically because He doesn’t have one, the hand of the one we believe might put the flame off.  The hands of the supreme being that we felt when we were praying during the time the mirage was real, the devil was near, the evil was sitting next to us and frightening.  That same hands we felt, the same blissful hands that I felt and to which I begged to save me, is all we want.  The same hands are all I want now to hug me and take me into His palms and console.  After all we are just humans that knows all are mirage, even the reality is a real mirage but we stick to that image and gets scared.  I am hailing that divine hand again.

 

His Old Typewriter

He enjoys the sound of his old typewriter, the click and tik which makes the letter appear on the paper and a mirror image of the letter sculpted behind the paper.  Every letter he types sounds like the ‘cling’ of the coin when spindled in towards the sky and the minuscule gap where air pass is like the swish of the coin rotation in the air.  Why does it keeps growing, the sentences have to be broken down to lines and full stops and the machine has to be moved to right to roll the paper up ready for the next blank line to type the next line.  Though sometimes it is irritating, the sound of the swoosh of moving the lever to right gives immense pressure like the first few drops of rain that doesn’t pulls you out to get wet but triggers the petrichor.  The deodorant of the earth. He likes not commas, no apostrophes, no exclamation but just pure lines that give joys in typing.  He doesn’t write for typing but types for writing.  It is like the travel the gives pleasure along with the driving pleasure, like a dream inside a dream.  It breaks his heart to break his writing to paragraphs for his words are para-sponsored like sun shine from the sky, though it takes a night break but it is always a pure bless. He forgets his coffee and it becomes cold coffee when he drinks but he continues to ignore his dementia while writing.  It pains sometimes in the wrist and the forearms and hand’s knees then he shifts his speed to a slower one but his mind runs wild to stop him from stopping.  He doesn’t stop. He does not like to take his words back neither cuts the sentences with dashes or a pencil line.  He does not take back his words.  He believes it was supposed to be put on paper for some eyes to catch those words just like a message from up above.  A writer is a God’s own messenger.  The message may be for somebody near of sometimes for the writer itself.  His typewriter continues to run wild until he gets exhausted of typing otherwise the dawn, the forenoon, the mid-day sun, afternoon drowsiness, the twilight, the dusk, the night, the moon and the stars and galaxies will be recorded, portrayed, painted with love and care, sometimes with melancholy, in the paper.  He bleeds words and stiches his wounds with words.  His words are his knives and blades also his shield and scabbard.  His words are the pommel for his swords and also the guard for his knives.  He holds the rope of the guillotine; his words decide whose heads need to be cut off.  He writes his malevolence between the lines and sins in the metaphors.  He camouflages himself to expose his sins but those words sounds like it is all fiction and mirage in the mid-day road in the sun.  He creates no words for all that he writes are all mere repetition of hundreds of years what writes and story tellers have poured inside out. He does not mind when the topic gets diverted from typewriter to somewhere else.  He just types for the sake of typing.   It is like running, the run matters less than the intention behind the run.  It makes him stronger, strengthens his mind for the longer run.   The typewriter is like a drug to him for he does not like to stop earing the sound that every key makes.  He, by now might have understood the different sounds of different keys though it belongs to the same typewriter and the same hands that hits the buttons for hours and weeks together!  At some point in time, he stops and retrospect what he had done with his words.  He goes wild and on and on writing, imprinting the letters on the paper with every stroke of the keyboard. It was like a piano with different sounds in different keys and ends in making a good piece of music on the paper.  The love for the words and writing just not be seen in the sentences he wrote but the meaning which does not appears straight forward but hiding between the lines too revels that love. The love of impetuous words written just for the sake of writing.  He becomes venerable while writing when he talks to the creation to bring those words from the supramental force from the other dimension.  The malevolence becomes benevolence and the sins becomes deeds of reactions.  The ugly truths and thoughts are no more a fact but the imagination of the past, a delusion in which he lived. His writing is fast when his stomach is empty, his brain is empty, his thoughts are slower and when everything is filled then the paper remains empty.  Everybody things it is the thoughts that the writers turn it into writings but the truth is different totally.  As the thoughts are overflowing it blocks the words, it stops the truth.  The writing gets stuck between the walls of mind and brain, crazy manufacture.  When watching a movie, listening to a song, seeing a baby walk, looking at a beautiful woman, crossing a good smelling men, walking past a temple, a bookshop, or a dress shop triggers the idea of writing and even pulls up the words and metaphors to write as the beauty fills in the mind and vocabulary kicks-in in the brain, but when he wants to put that on in to paper those words and vocabularies gets scattered in air and merges with the quantum objects for only the eyes of the brain to sea and not the naked human physical eyes.  He sometimes goes to lucid dreams; half sleep and half awake and keeps typing those words in the paper for after few mins found that those words are beyond his control and those that were falling from the sky as to be dropped on the paper with no interpretation and no interruption.  Trance takes over the writing and sleep sometimes hijacks the writing, never mind, the writing continues until a human stop interrupting the stream of thoughts like a dam stopping the river to be used later but gets evaporated by the sun.  Also, the other problem is they never gets used in real time and stays stagnant as is and becomes unused and one with the sky from where it came from.  

I stopped here days back and picked a Fante’s book today morning and somehow, he brought me back to writing.  Before I started to key in the letters, I posted this writing into some Artificial Intelligence chat bot to check it I am on the right track of writing that suites the printer to publish.  When I asked for suggestion to improve, it listed out many suggestions to break my confidence but then when I asked for good things about this piece of writing it said the same thing which it suggested to change.   So basically, you will find what you look for in this virtual world of intelligence hacked to death. And another stupid thing I did was to ask that chatbot to compare my style with already famous writers and it compared my style with Viginia Woolfe which I have never read.  I know it is a wrong thing to compare one’s style with other for every letter typed, may be same, comes from a different experience, from different soul and different consciousness.  For me I know only one writer who stands tall amongst the world full of writers and it is Kahlil Gibran, the only one who had the guts to say “you may not understand half of what I say…” as if he writes for others but also cares less if it didn’t reach to their level of understanding.  Gibran, a beautiful, melancholic soul sleeping in beautiful, melancholic Lebanon. The only one who writes his soul out, put his melancholy in words and imbibes the same into the readers soul.  The one who introduced Ishtar to me, the one who made me fall for Selma Karamy, the one who made me cry for with his book “Broken Wings”.  I wish I could raise my standard of writings like my Gibran. 

Drunken Dreams!!!

This drink of sadness, the exhaustion, the solitude, and the feel of unworthy about everything around is dipping him into a deep trance, in the deep intoxication.  The dogmas he carried, the knowledge from the learnings from the texts, the literature, the feel that he is wise and the discipline to be disciplined all seemed delusional.  It was all mirage that the cognisance he gathered had given him.  There is no mirage and there is no reality or delusion, it is all the reflection of the consciousness.  He knows but the drunkenness that the exhaustion gave urged him to cross the border and throw all the illusion of heavy dogmas he carried into the deep sea and fish a whale, kill the fish and eat.

He was that water in the pond that never climbed the lotus petals but now the pond was filled with the wine and the water went high and intoxicated.  The water wants to climb the stem of the sun lit lotus and sneak upon the curve of the lotus to climb the soft petals and explore the bloomed old flower.  The water wants to reach the edge of the curved petals and stand there to see the Sun and laugh at it.  And with no harm, with no hurry, and taking all time in this world to claim down the ups and down of the inside, of the petals, challenging the sun to evaporate the water before it reach the pores.  He then wanted to stay there surfing around inside the core of the flower waiting for the sun to go down and the petals to close, one after the other, slowly as the night darkness the world and it becomes the night inside the flower.   No light, no air, only water underneath and the water itself inside the heart and soul of the flower. He then wishes to get absorbed by the flower itself and become one with it and run inside its every biological nerve and become unplugged from the lotus.  The next day when the sun wakes the flower up, he wishes to smile at the sun to find him and scorch him if he can.

The Sun know that before or after he is never different from the water and the lotus.  He is the lotus, he is the water, he is the wine and also, he is the Sun.  This reality is a delusion of the imagination, nothing is true and everything is true at the same time.  This universe is a dream that dreams about the universe.

He is truly drunk! 

He drank the drunkenness and the trance had engulfed him into the uncertain reality and revealed the reality of the uncertainty!  Does he know that there is no uncertainty and there is only one truth that he is an imagination of the dreaming universe.   

And This universe is a dream that dreams about the universe.

                                                                                                                                                [SK]

Swamiyee Saranam – 5

I was standing in the queue for a long time in the famous Kamatchi Amman Temple in Kanchipuram. The queue didn’t move as the doors were closed for some special poojas. It was a crowded queue with multiple lines moving towards one door destination and to my left was the open space which is the walking path and the other side of the path was the temple garden with steps like larger seating place for the devotees to sit.  Everyone was busy walking, talking, chatting and few climbed those seating place to sit and talk and few sat down to eat the Prasadham (food offered in temple).  When the entire environment was noisy there was one soul who was sitting in lotus position before a hibiscus plant under the shadow of big willow tree.  She looked serene, undisturbed, effulgent and meditative.   She should be in her early twenties, lean and fair with her hair untied wearing peach color salwar which made her look like a venerated one with her sitting position.  Her phone was on her left lap and she it checked once in a while.  It seemed like she was chanting some mantra looking at her phone.  After a certain time, I guess it should be almost thirty minutes, she went into utter silence, didn’t cared about her phone or the surrounding.  Generally, during penance and wearing thulasi mala, we are told to look at any women as Mother and should call them “Maligaipuram” (the name of the deity in Sabari mala) and treat them with utter respect.  And this young woman looked to me as if the deity of the temple in which I was in, the Kanchi Kamatchi Amman, itself came out and sitting in the garden.  The queue started moving after forty-five minutes and she got up from that place and came down to the pathway. 

Once she was in the pathway, she looked normal as everybody else around, nothing had changed but she suddenly she looked normal to me. And she walked away and vanished in crowd.  ‘The doors are opened and the deity is back to her place’, I thought. 

We had a good dharshan and came out with Vermilion and flowers in hand.  The young woman in her lotus posture was totally out of my mind once I entered into the Garbhagriha, the Womb Chamber of the temple, but once we came out to circumambulate and when I crossed the very place where she was sitting, now there was another person, a man in his mid-thirties, was sitting in lotus posture with is eyes closed and meditative hand mudra.   He looked to be in deep meditation searching something deep inside himself.  And what made me wonder is the place he was sitting.  The same tree’s shadow and the same Hibiscus tree was behind him. It was a garden of around hundred meter and nobody other than this man was meditating or no other place made anybody as serene as this particular spot.

Some places really connect us to the internal God within us.  Those places differs with intensity and radius of the aura.  You end up inside that radius either accidentally or lead by a Guru who had experienced it already.  I think that answers why ‘Sabari Mala’,  why ‘Swami Ayyappan’ and ‘What Thathwamasi is’.

Swamiyee Saranam Ayyappa!!! Guruve Saranam!!! Swamiyee Saranam!!!

    

                                                                                                                                    SK

Swamiyee Saranam – 4

                         I was sitting in the last row of a cramped and crowded room next to a small kid and her father.  It was an Ayyappa Swami Bhajan session and group prayer in the house of a Ayyapa Swami comrade.  I especially went to see him sing and listen to his devotional voice.  The kid next to me was sitting on her father’s lap keenly observing everything happening around her.  I could feel the uncomfortableness her father was feeling sitting there and when asked he said he had an injury in his leg and could not sit comfortably and seating his kid on his lap for a longer time was giving is inducing pain.  I asked the kid to sit on my lap for sometimes so that her father can relax. She refused.  She didn’t move from her father’s lap. As the pain increased it induced anger in him and he showed that on his kid, but she didn’t react to his anger.  The prayer started and the singing was loud.  I asked her again to come to me.  For a second she looked at me and then she looked at the Swami Ayyappan pendent in my thulasi mala.  She held the my swami’s pendent it in her hand as we sit without shirt in the prayers and said ‘Ayyappa’.  ‘Yes’, I replied.  ‘Ayyappa looks beautiful’ she said.  I don’t know what to respond.  I took her from her father’s lap and comforted in my lap.  She turned the pendent and looked in to the image of Swami in both the sides of the pendent and she said the same phrase.  All I could say was ‘Yes’. 

                       The beauty She saw in Him, the peaceful, pure, and childish beauty she saw in Him is only kids could see, I guess.  The bajan was louder with drums, when I though she could fear the sound, she was enjoying the songs and ambience.  The environment was devotional and calm amidst loud singing.   All I saw in her was undisturbed calmness.  When the Guru Swami asked a Kanni swami to lite the lamp set below the feet of Swami Ayyappan, the Jothi, the flame glow bright and iridescent. 

                      Sitting on my right lamp she bent to her left and was observing something while I was busy singing along with fellow comrades.   Slowly she pinged my chin to ask something.   I bent down and her mouth so that I could here her in that loud ambiance.  

‘Why is that shaking’ she said.  I didn’t understand what she was talking about.  I looked at the direction she was showing.  All I could see was Ayyappan in Harivarasana posture and a lamp below His feet. 

                    As if understanding my perplexity, she said ‘why is that flame in that light shaking?’  I looked at the lamp and could see the flame waving right and left and I thought it was wind’s work. I told her the same but she was not convinced.  She said ‘then why all other lamps are not shaking?’ and she was right it was only that lamp below His feet was shaking, very different from other lamps.  I don’t know what to answer again.  Kids could see what the so called well learnt, all known, grown-up, and cognitive adult eyes could not; never. She pulled her father’s neck and asked the same question.  Her father thought for a second and said ‘it is Ayyappa and He is dancing’ that answer satisfied her and she was happy.   She didn’t wait for another second and immediately said ‘I want to touch Ayyappa’.  Now her father too was stunned and didn’t know what to answer her. 

‘Wait for the pooja to finish and you can touch him’ I said and she turned to her father to affirm the same. 

I didn’t see her and her father once the prayer was over also, I didn’t know weather she had touch Him but I, for sure, know that Swami had touched her.

                                                                                                                                                SK