Oye. Sorrow, what are you here to show me? Oye!
First, that you are alive.
Second, your capacity for joy.
- Inspired by the one and only, Khalil Gibran.
wonder
Raintree
This is not a monastery, a hermitage or a cave.
It is our one-bedroom house. No bellringing to tell me it’s time to go to the church hall to pray.
No fixed routines. No group meditations. No tedious chores.
This is my home. I have been here by myself for 6 weeks. Mostly silent. Listening. Being.
The wind, whispers and then howls, bashing the banana plantation outside my window, pushing all the birds back into their nests, felling trees and forcing me to stay indoors.
The monsoon makes a dramatic entry, takes over the skies.
The morning ritual of making ginger tea. I sit by the big window, drinking it, present to the light of the day. Grateful for it, I smile.
The luxury of silence and solitude!
I drive to the farm. Today is the day to plant a raintree. Early monsoon is a good time for it. The three feet tall sapling has travelled on an overnight train all the way from a friend’s garden in Goa. Known for its fifteen-meter-wide umbrella shaped canopy, it needs a lot of space. We mark the spot on a clearing, dig a hole, put the root ball into the moist soil, add some compost and cover it up. Two sticks support the young tree and it’s on its own. Good luck, Buddy.
My brother calls in the evening to inform me about the air-crash in Gujarat.
I light a candle and sit with my eyes closed. Tears streaming down my face, my chest bursting with pain. God bless their souls and their families. God bless them all.
Night arrives. Si calls up. He asks if I was aware that yet another war had begun in the middle east. I didn’t.
Why? Isn’t there enough suffering in the world already?
I think about the raintree. I wonder if it will survive this sharp heavy monsoon. Who can say? No one.
Silence. Solitude. Surrender.
Every day a good day?
After one year of near-perfect climatic conditions, when it rains non-stop for three whole days and nights, one starts to notice the changing inner weather-system.
Isn’t everything pristine as is? A day is a day. Clouds are nothing but clouds. Trees are simply trees. Nothing good or bad about them. They are what they are. When seen through a clean lens, things can be seen as they are. The smudges come from our judgements. It is one thing to notice how they make us feel and another to blame them for being there.
He shouldn’t have made that horrible remark.
The car was seriously misbehaving.
That fire-door nearly broke my arm.
What a noisy bunch!
Mango good. Jack-fruit bad.
Sun good. Rain bad.
Birth good. Death bad.
Untimely. Preventable. Tragic. Etc. Etc. Blah…blah…blah…
It is absolute. So is the mango, the rain, the love. Absolute.
One day I will die. I live, remembering that each moment that I am alive is a miracle. I am way beyond my preferences, opinions and thoughts. I am not them. They are not me. That every day is a good day, I am beginning to see.
Stories are us.
Why are they here? These random strange-looking foreigners? One is white and the other we’re told is from the north of India. Wonder which is worse. At least one of them is easy to steel from. Surely the other is obnoxious. But she teaches English at the Primary school for free. Wonder what’s in it for her. Oh yes. She’s using our kids to learn Kannada for free. That must be it.
The minds of the villagers are desperately trying to make sense of what we’re doing here, in this remote village. The nearest airport is 5 hours’ drive away and the closest decent hospital, at least an hour from our village. We don’t speak the local language and hardly anyone speaks Hindi or English.
The first story of us was that I am a film director and Si, an actor. We’re scouting a suitable location to shoot a period drama. But then no camera or crew showed up. So, that was discarded.
The next tale was that we are here to set up a petrol station. That’s how people with connections in high places syphon off their black money. That fits, they believed, knowing nothing about us. But then no signs of construction appeared for months.
The next guess was that we want to open a bar and restaurant. As we are close to the highway, it’s a great place to open-up something for the travellers to rest and refresh. That didn’t seem to be happening either.
What can it be? Oh. They both have seriously grey hair. All their friends must be old. They must deeply empathise with old people. They must be planning an old people’s home. Well, no signs of that yet.
What are they about after all? The dogs and kids seem to love them. They seem like nice enough people. Maybe they’re planning to start an orphanage? Don’t know. We’ll have to wait and watch.
Well, all they seem to be doing is planting more trees and making more compost and playing music to their plants, setting up irrigation systems and so on. Maybe they’re doing all the groundwork to ultimately grow cannabis.
Oh! How we need stories!
The older I grow, the lesser I know.
A book with frayed edges sat tucked inside the pocket behind the driver’s seat. After an overnight train journey from Sakleshpur to Goa, we were going home in a taxi. No coffee yet. I was not quite switched on. Bleary eyed, I pulled the book out of the elasticated edge. It was Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Some poor tourist had mistakenly left it behind while traveling to the airport to fly back home.
Thoreau wrote this book while he lived in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, hundred and eighty years ago. He was testing the idea that divinity was present in nature and the human soul. He stripped his life down to the barest of essentials and secluded himself as much as he could, living off the land as much as possible. He wanted to find out just what in life is necessary and what is superfluous.
(Picture, courtesy Maria Popova )
Having chosen to live in a place where, for hundreds of miles very few people speak our language, with no cinema halls, restaurants, therapists or book shops, where the food is of one particular kind, but nature is abundant, that question has arisen for me too.
A few weeks back, a quote by Thoreau had whistled right into my heart:
“Life! who knows what it is, what it does?”
Such a beautiful sentiment. I had wished for more of his writings. After learning some more about him and his love of birds, streams, woodlands and meadows, I got busy with other things.
When I brought this question to CORe, it generated a rich discussion.
“What is our relationship with not knowing? What feelings does it provoke?”
Some excerpts from our conversations:
- It is a real test of oneself, dropping how things should be and taking each day as it comes. It took me a long time to realise how much my mind was tied to certainty. In Africa, the relationship with death is very different. They have many ways to remember a loved one. They believe they’re still here and it gives them great joy.
- Anxiety of the need to know at work. I have to change my mind set to curiosity. Some things we’re not meant to know, such as, where is he? It would spoil it. I must accept that I’m not meant to know.
- When he went, I didn’t want to be here. Now I do. I have a life that I want to have. I have lots of godchildren who have promised to take care of me. I have a vision of him and his dad, which I hope will come through in my own death. Maybe when it’s my time they’ll be there, and their peace will be shattered.
Yes. The older I grow, the lesser I know. There is a freedom in that, to be with whatever is happening. It allows for the mystery of life to unfold as it will and it allows me to witness it without conditions, with an open heart. The smallest things. The book that I had wished for a month ago, appears right in front of me after I had forgotten all about it.
Life. Who knows what it is, what it does?
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