“We come, we do, we go, and I think we should not take ourselves more seriously than that……the doing can be a rather grand voyage if you don’t panic and if you believe, as I believe in magic and imagination and wizards who live along quiet country rivers.”
(- Robert James Waller, in “Old Songs in New Café”)
From the middle of an endless blue I look up at the deep dark purple above…of high seas and storm clouds… dreams of that grand voyage… But somewhere dreams will end, realities will intrude and wizards will vanish into river mists.
Or so I thought.
Once I was a cynic, or so I liked to call myself. And love was hopelessly lost and given up, that deceptive veneer of cynicism cushioning the mind and heart from all true realizations. But the supposed wisdom of age is leading me back….all the way back to those voices and old memories that come riding along the winds which speak of other worlds and other realities. For this life of mine may not be one that began when I was born. They say we have no memory of being born. I believe now that this is an old life caught in a new world. Birth may not be a memory then, but living is and always will be…..and the mind now willfully wanders along random lines, revisiting old streets and secret corners of lived worlds even while seeking out the pleasures of new places. The romance of living begins.
This attempted return to romance was and is not easy, for I was bound by the ideas of clichéd romance between two lovers….walks along the beach or roses or slow waltz under moonlight…..So then life was to be that sparse and stark experience of living for others? Was there to be no romance of the individual? Can romance not be a perspective? Can it not be a suspension of realities on one hand and the appreciation of the very same realities on the other? Romance is essential to love affairs. But what of an affair with romance itself? And that is what it comes down to, for romance is not outside us. If I choose to think of it as one of those old voices inside then I can think of this affair or this re-association with romance. In my earlier attempts to understand it I took to categorizations and definitions and naturally we parted ways. Now that I have returned I have no intention of pushing romance away. And with this I feel that my years of long wandering start.
It is not only the present which changes or the visions of future which now look different. From a black and white past I move to sepia-toned remembrances. I remember distant Sunday mornings of small delightful adventures...plucking sweet pink lilies…the first caterpillar…the tree with that swing of a branch…that first peek into the cinnamon spiced secret world of women…of that encounter with innocent adorations and naïve love…
And my father was ever my hero for bringing me that one yellow flower from the edge of a cliff drop that I silently eyed and that was long years ago.
As for the now….the mundane has taken on rather fascinating and altered appearances. The driving urge now is to look differently at that which was and has been a constant. The old will never be old if perspectives are constantly challenged and left open to changes. Every morning on my way to work now I meet the proud soldiers of a forest king. They stand tall and straight, stopping just short of the skies….their dark bodies seem to literally glisten after the night’s fall of rain and their robes of rich green wrap up a thousand stories of living. And as the wind sings along, I can all but hear the sounds of the forest creatures stirring back into life…a new day. And as one tree ages and falls, so does a new one thrust out. The cycle of life….
Living is no longer a singular human experience. It has now become a richly layered woven fabric of such intricate designs that it would take one life and more to see through it all, if ever that does happen. We don’t live alone in this world and as a matter of co-existence with myriad forms of life and ancient elements; our life itself is an interaction with everything. I like to believe then, that with every instance of association with the wind, I hear it whisper yet another story from yore. For old secrets come again and again in the worlds of mortals through threads of the infinite.
I saw a seagull some time back. A white flight of beauty and pride against blue skies….an unlimited freeness in movement ridiculing the limits of our perceptions. It was a simple enough sight….a bird flying high up in the sky as so many birds have flown and soared before. But logical understandings fail at certain points. There is no apparent reason for me to remember this moment. But I do and I will for years to come. And I no longer seek any explanation for this or for the implications of the memory. The Beatles did sing “Let it Be” didn’t they?
Even as I write the gardener is cutting the monsoon wilderness of grass just outside my window. Again, something I have seen a hundred times before today and again something I never really noticed. Yet today there seems to be something different about him. He swings the scythe back and forth, again and again in a loose arc. The fluidity of his actions somehow made sense….telling me of a simple appreciation of the fact of living and perhaps a temporary rejection or suspension of the economic realities of his life? Perhaps in the numbing sensation of that swinging scythe, he found the space to travel where he pleased?
A far off evening comes to mind now. I was traveling in a train, the destination I do not recall. Life in all its color, smells and sensations went flying by my window. I became increasingly aware of this huge phenomenon of life and time flowing in continuity and eternally. I saw women carrying huge bundles of grass on their heads return home. Fields stood empty as men trudges back after a day’s work. Smoke curled up in thin wisps from homes faintly visible in the distance. A kid waved frantically at my train. Perhaps day after day he saw trains cutting through this countryside and perhaps he longed to be inside one everyday. Perhaps he wished too speed off and away to some other place, to fulfill some fantasy. Or perhaps he just shrugged it off as one more intrusion into his life? I crossed a hundred small towns and villages with strange unheard of names. Blurred images made them more dead than alive. Yet they all had rich lives. But some roads and some histories escape from our grasps forever.
A mango tree stood alone by the edge of a small rivulet….heavy with flower and promised a full fruit in the months to come. It would have been a delight then. And some children of the village would have climbed up its branches and snuck out as many mangoes as they could….somewhere in time I have seen them do it, as I did it myself in what seems to have been long ago.
That was life…
And this too is life……
