Life – Page 16 – Nourish-n-Cherish

The Cave of Quietude

In Quietness the Soul Expands

I sat watching the water flow, feeling the sweet caress of the gentle breeze at night, and had this strange urge to just sit there and enjoy time flowing by. It had been an exceptionally hot and dry day filled with activities and emotions.

“These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.”

– Kent

As we grow older, I find we need to fight for those moments in life. Find those quiet moments in which to let the soul expand. My mind wandered to what I had read about Keats and his Cave of Quietude as he calls the quiet and expansive moments of our lives.

They say of books, that each book appears at a particular moment in your life. I was reading the book, The Great Work of our Lives – By Stephen Cope, recommended to me by a good friend. I shall be ever grateful – it was marvelous and precisely the sort of book I required to read.

The Great Work of Our Lives – Our Dharma

I see this is the sort of book that I shall be giving to people who find themselves at the cross-roads. I have always thought that concepts like Dharma have a certain weighty interpretation. But to have them handled in the skillful hands of a writer like Stephen Cope makes all the difference. In a lucid style, he talks about the important concepts of the Gita and compares and contrasts them against the life of well-known poets, naturalists, and writers. He also draws parallels of the teachings against real-life people (with their names changed of course)

Excerpt:

“ Keats, in a brilliant intuitive move, now attempted to work out the problem of grasping through the protagonist of the poem he was writing.”

“How does Endymoin work it out? He enters what Keats called “The Cave of Quietude’, a retreat into the depths of consciousness. In quiet retreat and contemplation, Endymion realizes that success and failure are not the measure of life. He sees the way in which both light and shade, success and failure, and praise and blame, are all parts of life.”

When you wonder which pieces to highlight in the book, and think you shall have to re-read multiple sections because it resonates with you, it is a good book, wouldn’t you agree?

May we all find our Caves of Quietude and find moments of calm and peace in which nothing happens, and the soul expands.

Vibrance of Variety

Flight journeys to exotic lands across the planet are tedious. Grateful as I am for flights, and the miracle of hot food, good air, and the view from above. It can get to be a trifle monotonous after the first 10 hours, By 12 hours, it is painful, by 14 excruciating. You get the picture.

This time, we got to chase the sun rising over the Arctic Tundra. I peeked out into the orange horizon, and gasped. The sun rising over the clouds and us watching from above can give us quite the divine feeling. A feeling that only travelers in the past hundred years have had the blessing to experience. Sailors may have experienced this divinity while out in the oceans, hikers and mountaineers have been trying to experience this phenomenon from up above.

I did not get good pictures from up above this time, but some older pictures are always worth seeing again.

I was trying my best to stretch, glide and keep the body supple as I walked up and down the flight, waving my little hellos to the babies who had all decided that sleeping was not something to do when surrounded by this many people. What an adventure this was! Why would anyone waste it sleeping?

I looked at the poor parents, and they stood bleary eyed, teary eyed, weary all rolled into one. I remembered with a shudder the travels and travails of traveling with babies.

Never awaken a sleeping tiger cub…

One baby was friendly and smiled. He grinned and was the highlight of my flight. He reminded me of the daughter all those years ago when I haunted the flight corridors with her.

“You have a bassinet, my dear! Why would you not sleep? Lie down – stretch those little arms and legs and just sleep!” I coo-ed and he giggled.

“I wish we had bassinets!” I said to the frazzled mother, and she agreed heartily.

Walking up and down the flight and out in the airports, I couldn’t help noticing the number of different personalities in the world. Were there really infinite possibilities of personalities in this world? The combinatorial explosion is hard enough to contend with. Then, over and above, nature, is nurture. Each one, whose circumstances helped shaped them in drastic or subtle ways.

I had been reading a rather large family saga over the past few days, and realized that no matter how many personalities we encounter in this world, we will still be surprised by humankind.

The baby cooed and asked to be shown the panel wall behind me, and I obliged. We smiled yet again and took a peek at the sun rise, then a few hours later, we left the blazing day behind and kept flying into the night. The babies cooed and cried, laughed, and danced. Each personality budding and developing into their own personalities to add to the vibrant variety we already have on this planet.

“So, how old are your children now?” the mother asked with a yearning look as I tried to shake sleep. I assured her that time would fly past and she can soon dream of sleep on long flights!

Wind💨, Rain 🌧️ & Boats ⛵️

In what was a beautiful wind-whipped whirl one morning, the on-a-spring-break son and I went on a walk. Power & Internet were down, which meant we could both twirl off on our adventures while these things were being restored.

A few minutes in, we were confronted with a huge water pipe that gushed out in great spades. The county’s water department was already there looking into the problem, while we stood watching in awe as the water spooled off into the drain. Clean water.

“Hmm…everything decided to go nuts huh?!” the son said, as we stopped to marvel at the swift waters.

“Do you think we’ll have time to head back and bring back papers to make boats?” he asked, after a few seconds of awed water watching. I saw the determined faces of the county workers’ faces gleam with triumph – they had fixed the problem no doubt, which meant our time was short. Luckily, it was also garbage day, and the windy day had scattered a couple of pamphlets in the wind as the garbage truck tipped the contents over. So, off we went chasing after these pamphlets to make into paper boats.

If the maestros of productivity were to observe us that morning, there would be a lot of tutting, and note-taking on ways-to-improve, but we felt amazing.

Our boats, Mitillandimus Tittilandumas, and Mixter Baxter Junior fared the best. The remaining capsized before starting. For those interested, our boat christening was inspired by Gerald Durrell’s boat, Bootle Bumtrinket, in the book, My Family and Other Animals.

There does not seem to be a word to capture the sense of adventure, contentment and joy watching your paper boats take off on adventures, but we both highly recommend the experience.

What kind of life is it always to plan

and do, to promise and finish, to wish

for the near and the safe? Yes, by the

heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want

a boat I couldn’t steer.

~ Mary Oliver, Book: Blue Horses

Just as the last of our boats disappeared with the rivulets, the wind picked up, and we tried keeping ourselves upright as we continued on. It was no use. Within minutes, the winds were accompanied by plump raindrops, and we scuttled back home.

It had been a useful outing, and we came back refreshed and grateful that the rains started lashing down a few minutes after we reached. Back home, the power gods had restored electricity but not the internet. So, we settled ourselves down to a cup of tea and cocoa. We sipped in silence while the rain pattered all around us.

“Wonder what happened to our boats!” the son said finishing his hot cocoa, and we smiled together. They were not in safe harbor, and it was an exhilarating thought.

🌸🌸🌸 Oubaitori in Spring Time 🌸🌸🌸

Spring is here, and with it, the delightful uncertainties of the weather.

Would it be a cold, bright, cloudless day, or a cold, cloudy day, or a warm sunny day? The possibilities are endless. Sometimes, I feel like a lamb in spring-time ready for a spot of prancing and rollicking in the hills, other times, like a caterpillar not yet ready to shed the cocoon.

Springtime is a fantastic excuse to wear a silly hat and chase after unicorns, wouldn’t you agree?

– Uncle Fred in the Spring Time – By P G Wodehouse

With the increasing length of our days, it is a beautiful feeling to step out into the sunset at the end of the day, The golden hour seems more radiant, and seems to even linger more, though that just may be due to the fact that the body has had the time to sip a cup of tea at the end of the day before sunset.

One evening, I stopped to savor a fat plop of a raindrop on my face, and saw that the cherry trees had leaves on them. The flowers had all but gone. They were there two days ago. I peered at another tree not far away, still resplendent in its floral beauty, and another one that had a good smattering of brown leaves along with their pinkish blossoms. Once again, that longing to capture the blooming and blossoming in slow-motion came over me. How lovely it would be to sit and watch for the leaves to come in?

Ah! What little things give us pause?!

I read about a beautiful Japanese concept, Oubaitori

The ancient Japanese idiom, Oubaitori, comes from the kanji for the four trees that bloom in spring: cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot. Each flower blooms in its own time, and the meaning behind the idiom is that we all grow and bloom at our own pace.

A few days later, I went on another walk, this time peering up at a clear blue sky, and no jacket, only to notice the young gingko trees in the neighborhood beginning to sprout their light green leaves of beauty. I remembered the large gingko tree we’d long admired. That large tree, over a century old, fell in the winter storms this year, and I felt a pang. The patch on which it stood was overgrown with fresh grass, and a meadow full of yellow flowers. Nature’s lessons and epiphanies are rarely novel, but always welcome.

Making a mental note to go for a short hike in the beautiful green hills nearby, I reluctantly headed home.

Spring time is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s Party’!

– Uncle Fred in the Spring Time – By P G Wodehouse

Maybe it is time for a spot of springtime laughter with the maestro, P G Wodehouse himself.

War & Peace, Love & Power

“You need to have either love or war; those are the only ones that can sustain a long running saga!” the daughter said as an off-hand comment one day when we were discussing the art and craft of world building, and she was convincing me to read another series – one with a female protagonist. I was hesitant to start reading a series that not only had 7 books but all seemed to be progressively bigger in size too. She guffawed at this and said, “You’ll enjoy it, so what’s the problem?”

The problem with wars is that nothing makes sense as time goes on. Even if there is justification in the original act of going to war, the long-running losses and frustrations often eclipse the original intent. It becomes a cascading pile of losses that fuel more losses.

I was reading Haruki Murakami’s book, Novelist as a Vocation. There was one particular section when with the book still open in my hand, the mind started to meander, trying to make sense of what was said, and trying to piece things together as they might have been.

He writes about the time he witnessed civil unrest as a student in college long before he decided to become a writer. Coming from a stable family, and not having endured any significant challenges or wars in his lifetime, he writes about the period in his life when he witnessed strife. He confesses that he felt drawn to the cause originally, but gradually could see cracks beginning to appear. Slowly, he saw how words lost their integrity, and he felt he could not identify with any of it anymore.

“As time passed,.., and internecine warfare between the student factions grew more and more violent and senseless – an apolitical student was murdered in the classroom we often used, for example-many of us became disenchanted. Something criminally wrong had wormed its way into the movement. The positive power of imagination had been lost. I felt this strongly. ….Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they were not accompanied by moral power they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words…..Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice.”

I felt a heavy sadness settle over me as I finished reading that section of the passage again. Thus it has always been. With war, with power, with long-running angst. It sometimes seems to me that human beings are remarkable for still allowing light to seep through – to be hopeful, happy, joyous, friendly, loyal, trusting, loving and giving. But I am glad of this tug-of-war too, for without one, we may never learn to fully appreciate the other.

News of war and conflict have always plagued humanity, and exactly a century ago, the whole world reeled from wars back to back that sent the world careening into madness. The insanity of it, the dreariness of it, we hoped would be deterrent enough for at least a few centuries – but I doubt it. For just as ubiquitous as love seems to be conflict.

In centuries of warfare, there have been gains and losses. All things fragile to begin with (egos, lives, trust, careers), they all seem to shatter in the eternal quest for what? Seldom in war do people win. Maybe countries do, armies do, but never the individual. And yet without collective action, where would we be?

In our very contradictions lies our greatness.

I eyed the book series on war & love the daughter had given me, and wondered whether to start another saga.

It seems so simple to say: All we need to do is figure out a way to value Peace over War, and Love over Power. Oh well! That is the saga of the human life, isn’t it?

Time as a Map of Reality?

Time in our Universe

I was reading about time, its paradoxes, black holes and white holes while awaiting our turn at the salon. It was a busy day, and luckily, the son and I had the foresight to take our books along to pass the time.

Every time I looked up, I saw hairdressers concentrating on their craft, while making small talk and easing their customers to relax into their chairs. It is a gift, I realized, to get their customers to trust a stranger with scissors nipping at their heads. It is hair, and it does grow back. But it also does change your immediate appearance and the perception of yourself and those around you, even if only momentarily. For a species that is vain, visually conscious, it is a fine balance to get the right look.

Time as a Map of Reality?

Back in my book on White Holes by Carlo Rovelli, the paradox of time was being explained:

white_holes

I can’t say I understood it all, but it was lovely to try:

“The reason we remember the past and not the future is entirely due to the fact that the universe was further from equilibrium at one point in the past than it is now.”

Whatever did that mean?

I read on about equilibrium, till I found something that I liked.

“The flow of reality is always more fluid than any of our frantic attempts to capture it might lead us to believe. Time is not a map of reality: it is a kind of memory storage device …”

I liked that. Time as a map of reality, or not?

No Trace Will Remain

I looked up trying to fix the concepts and the reality of my physical space at the same time. I noticed the many small ways in which we trust ourselves to those around us. It should all be organic, safe, slow, and yet in our quest for productivity everything has sped up. Watching barbers and hairdressers doing it all with confidence and aplomb in such a short span of time, was fascinating.

Watching the people in the salon getting their hair cut with those cutting the n-th customers’ hair, while trying to understand the concepts of equilibrium and time is a strangely meditative experience. The son and I watched and read in turns. The annoyance of the long wait mitigated by the philosophies of being.

“Sooner or later, every memory vanishes, canceled through the wear and tear of time. Sooner or later, of our proud civilizations, of everything that we have understood, of the words in books such as this one, of our controversies and of our desperate passions and loves…no trace will remain.”

“Would you come please?” It was our turn.

“Soon of our long locks of hair, no trace would remain!” I smirked to the son, and chin up, we made our way in.

At that moment where we are not in a black hole, or not reversing into white a hole, there is only the experience of time, and the trimming of hair.

127e22d1d2494032867770d78ef0335f_ComfyUI_20682_

Chance Encounters For a Magical Journey

🐕‍🦺🪷🦌🍀🐺❄️🐀🍁 The Deer Families 🐕‍🦺🪷🦌🍀🐺❄️🐀🍁

“Think we’ll see James and Lily today?”

“I don’t know! Hopefully. It has been raining, so the poor things may have moved away, ” I said. We’ve christened the deer family near our homes. The mother and father are called Lily & James (I know!). Sometimes, there are several families – we call them all James & Lily.

We caught sight of them – much closer than they usually are, that evening, and exchanged a look so close up, it was … revealing, deep? (hard to pin down in one word). It isn’t often one gets the chance to exchange a deep searching look with a deer. It is a marvelous experience – and one we wouldn’t forget soon. Those brown eyes seem endless, and so full, it somehow fills up your being too. When poets write of moments feeling like eternity etc, I suppose this is what they meant. It could not have been more than a few seconds, and yet, the eyes spoke a language of eyes.

Whenever writers talk about pools of emotion showing in the eyes, and the shapes of their ghosts flitting through their characters’ eyes and all of that, I am never sure what to think of it. Sure, it sounds brilliant and poetic, but can we really show all of that in one glance? Looking into the deer’s eyes was oddly satiating, and it was definitely more than words can try.

Clearly the son was moved too, for he said, as soon as it left, “Do you want to talk to animals sometimes?”

I nodded. “That would be nice.”, I said

“What do you think they’d talk about?”

🐕‍🦺🪷🦌🍀🐺❄️🐀🍁 Understanding Animals 🐕‍🦺🪷🦌🍀🐺❄️🐀🍁

“I suppose it depends on the animals. Elephants have different concerns than pangolins. Bees, squirrels and ants – being more community animals may have similar concerns. But I think I’d like to know the range of emotions they have. Do squirrels have greed? Do ants have jealousy? Pelicans have been known to sacrifice themselves for their pod. “

Are there some emotions or behaviors that are completely unknown to man that our creatures possess? We know many animals feel love, despair etc.

If a wolf is kicked out of its pack, it never howls again.

– From the book, Sad Animal Facts – by Brooke Barker

“For instance, and we all know whales have complex legends in song format that they pass down. With all the skills of navigation, survival, and protecting required, I am sure they all have different topics.”

“I think I’d also like to see what kinds of things they keep in long term memory. I mean we know elephants have long-term memories, but what does that constitute? Just routes to water during times of drought or also towards betrayals etc. They must have some extraordinary lives and stories to tell then, isn’t it?”

He was nodding along. We talked about the size of their brains in proportion to their sizes. Brain ratio requires a separate post in itself, but there are so many fascinating things once you start looking into it.

For instance:

“An alligator’s brain weighs less than an oreo. “

– Quote from the book, Sad Animal Facts – By Brooke Barker

The alligator literally has the smallest brain to body ratio. Only 0.2 % of its body mass is the brain.

🐘 🐊 ⌘ Gajendra Moksha & Vishnu Sahasranamam 🐘 🐊 ⌘

This led to research on a few things about body to brain ratios, and curiously, the myth of the crocodile vs the elephant in Hindu mythology, Gajendra Moksha. It is curious how the myth pitted the lowest brain ratio animal against one of the wild animals with the highest ratios (the elephant). It is supposed to be a reminder to keep our egos in check. Gajendra finally relinquished his ego, and required the great god, Vishnu, to come in avatar form and save the elephant.

Gajendra’s plea to Lord Vishnu is called the Gajendra Stuti and is the first stanza of the Vishnu Sahasranamam (the 1000 names of Vishnu)

Please read: Post by Krishna2 on the Vishnu Sahasranamam – this post helps us comprehend us the depths of Vishnu Sahasranamam

शुक्लांबरधरं विष्णुं शशि वर्णं चतुर्भुजं ।
प्रसन्न वदनं ध्यायेत् सर्व विघ्नोपशान्तये॥

śuklāṃbaradharaṃ viṣṇuṃ śaśi varṇaṃ caturbhujaṃ |
prasanna vadanaṃ dhyāyēt sarva vighnōpaśāntayē ||

We came home fascinated by all the different things we usually do not pay attention to – filled with wonder, and awe. Many of us have forgotten what it is like to have encounters with our fellow beings – sometimes, exchanging a glance with a deer is all it takes to take on this incredible journey.

The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.

–Good Morning – By Mary Oliver, Book: Blue Horses

References:

Zinniga-Zanniga Tree – The Cure-It-All Tree

Dr Seuss Magic

“Isn’t it marvelous to leave such a legacy behind?” I asked sleepily. It was Dr Seuss’s birthday and typically marked as Read Across America week. I miss the fuss of the week in elementary schools. The middle schoolers and high schoolers get to have their fun, but we just get to hear about it a lot less, I guess.

Lazily, I picked up a book written by Dr Seuss, that has been lying around for ages in the children’s bookshelves and had never read before. The Bippolo Seed and Other Stories.

bippolo

The stories, some of them at least, had predictable plot lines, but oh! How he presented them! I feel justified in the use of as many exclamation marks as necessary when writing about Dr Seuss. For instance, there is a story of a bear ready to pounce on a rabbit. The rabbit, doing some quick thinking, stalls the bear with an intriguing thought.

The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga

“I sure hate to tell you It isn’t too good.
I was counting the eyelashes 'round your eyes,
Your left eye…your right eye…and, to my surprise,
They weren’t the same number!
…
“I’m sorry…SO sorry.
But, sir, it is true.
Poor Bear! This is dreadful!
One eyelash too few!”

In typical Dr Seuss fashion, the rabbit takes it to ridiculous extremes. Could the bear’s spine be cracking, could his brain be lopsided, all those aches and pains, oh it all makes sense. By the end of the tale, the bear is sitting atop a zinniga-zanniga tree with a flower pressed to his eye so that the extra eyelash can grow and make him feel whole again, while the rabbit skips on his way, free from the bear’s claws.

Oh!

I laughed so hard, I sputtered and sprayed my coffee, I put my phone in the refrigerator and looked for it all morning, and I almost walked straight into a zinniga-zanniga tree myself.

What a marvelous tale to encapsulate how our worries sometimes run away with our imagination, the hypochondriacs hidden in every one of us to a certain degree poking fun at itself, and the societal pressures on perfect eyelashes playing into the bear’s psyche?

Sometimes, we need entire tomes to discuss these themes, other times, a lost story of Dr Seuss would do.

The Leap Wish

If you see me just for a day, with my nose transformed into a beautiful horn, and roaming the skies or plumbing the depths of the ocean, I can explain:

A Leap Wish?

“So, what do you wish can exist for one day only on Feb 29th? “ the son asks one evening.

“Hmm?” I am taken aback from the question, though I really shouldn’t be. The skies know I have had my fair share of them. But it still surprises me.

“It can’t be a person, but it can be a magical power, a creature that is long extinct etc. Like a leap year wish – a leap wish!” he says.

That was an intriguing thought. Something to wish for that only exists on Feb 29th. I thought, and thought about it shamefully for so long. Why was this so hard?

What would each of us like?

🐋“Hmm..maybe a chance to see our world from different perspectives? Like being a unicorn filled with magic and a narwhal who can dive deep and long?” I said. “Let me think about this a bit more. What would you want?” I asked him.

Screenshot 2024-02-28 at 8.40.47 PM

🦕Unsurprisingly, he came up with so many different things and versions, but finally settled on, “ I’d want dinosaurs to roam the Earth as they used to just for that one day, so we can see, how it all was for them.”

The husband said he would play the world to his advantage and ask to be able to teleport himself everywhere so he could experience a sampling of the world and make the most of 24 hours to make it 36 with the time differences.

“You and your can-do attitude. Can’t just take the 24 hours given to you – you have to optimize it to 36!” I chided him gently, though I admired him all the more for it, especially hearing what he had in mind.

🪸The coral reefs of the coast of Australia to the beaches in Brazil, a cold desert stop in the Gobi desert on the way to a hot one in the Thar desert or the Arabian one.

birthday

By the end of my conversation with him, I found myself thinking of longing and gratitude to live out our lives on this wondrous planet.

What would you like?

What about you? What would you like to experience that one day? Remember, it only lasts a day. For all you financial magnates, if you want a billion dollars to experience life as a billionaire, remember you get to be yourself with your old bank account the next day. That may make the remaining days that much more normal – be warned!

I spent the walk back pondering on how our life would be if we each got our wishes. Would the leap day every four years be wondrous, exciting, nerve-wracking, frightful, beautiful, scary?

We’ve all heard of the gypsy’s curse: May you get what you wish for! In this case, would it be too much for us to handle?

Time just slips away!

“So this is how it is,” I thought. “Time just slips away.”

― Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

I can well understand this. He writes about how everyone has it in them to write a single piece of work – a book even, but to consistently get back to the paper and do this over and over again – that is the making of a writer. I found myself nodding and smiling at that.

While writing sagas, and series isn’t the same as writing a novel, and writing a novel isn’t the same as a novella or short story, and a short story isn’t the same as writing an article, and all of this is different from writing short bursts of poetry, or a truly honest sentence, there is one thing binding it all together. It is the search for the right words, the right phrasing, the right emotions, the right concepts, and the right flow, that is everything.

That is where the time goes. It slips away in building a life with memories worth writing about. It slips while thinking about writing. And it goes in the process of writing.

Why do you write?

Many friends ask me why I write, and my answer has been – Because I want to, have to even sometimes – an idea lodges itself and rattles itself inside till it is released onto the paper, and once done, other ideas are able to take root.

🦌 Sometimes writing is a catharsis, other times a pleasure.

🦅 Sometimes it is inexplicably hard, and other times easy.

🐿️ Sometimes it is creative and wild, other times banal and plodding.

🐦‍ Sometimes it is a thankless pursuit, other times it is rewarding.

🦢 But in its very paradoxes lies its appeal, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Writing through Time

There is also a strange comfort in knowing that writing has been all of these things for centuries – from the humans who inscribed their thoughts into clay tablets, scrolls, to those who could do the same on paper, to those of us who take to pages on the internet. Scribes, quills, pens, typewriters, and keyboards all helping the human mind make sense of their limited time on this planet in wondrous ways.

I am constantly in awe of storytellers – the kind of writing that requires not just a fount of wisdom and ideas, but also an unrelenting combination of imagination and discipline.

The Three Selves

How people write series, overarching stories, sagas spanning multiple threads, years and characters is stupendously inspiring. The ability to imagine, craft and execute is nothing short of miraculous. There are thousands of books being published every year, and that only means that many people are choosing to expand their energies in these constructive ways. How can there not be hope for humankind?

The time that slips away building all these fantastical works – is it not time savored by the writer, and then by the readers if they are able to immerse themselves in it? Is there a measure for that sort of time slipping by?

Close-up fountain pen writing notebook

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