You awake at first light. On a bay in the midst of giants. Giant boulders that emerge from the sea like prayers.
At the top of the deck is a group of tai-chi practitioners. Air seems to move through their limbs, guiding every turn; gentle, graceful, even.
In front of them, the sun rises to greet the prayers. The sky becomes sun. Prayers find their music.
Pic: Halong Bay, Vietnam.
The sun bids goodbye to 2023 on this side of the world. But the sun doesn’t know it’s 2023, and probably doesn’t even care. For the great orb, it’s just another rotation of one of its satellites, another moment in its own trajectory around the great galaxy in the sky.
We label time for convenience, to manage appointments and events, and then turn time into a pressure cooker in which we measure our lives and our progress. What if we didn’t know what year this is, which month, which day? Would our measure of ourselves be different?
Would there be disappointments of not having achieved enough in a specific period of time? Would there be pride in having achieved so much in so short a time? We already spend so much effort comparing ourselves to others. Do we need to also add time into the mix?
Well, make sure you know the time, the day, month and year today to celebrate and enjoy! Time to end 2023 for the world but not the year for many ancient cultures and many countries who align the cultural and tax year end based on the sun, the moon, and the seasons.
So, a happy new year to some, a happy 2024 to all.
We all carry a little whimsy somewhere
In our tiny cells
the sun frolicking between leaves
roses that wait and wait
before they open
a wind meant for a forest
blows a ship down
I knew such a wind
I’ve known such roses
We all carry a little whimsy in us
The earth’s play runs in its veins
Rivers and brooks off to a marathon
Volcanoes that pretend to be quiet
And then laugh without warning
Mountains inching towards the sky
Clouds vainly trying to keep them down
I’ve known such a volcano
I’ve known such rivers
The earth carries a little whimsy somewhere
In its tiny cells.
So do we, earth’s little tiny cells.
It’s evening at the Uluwatu temple in the southern part of Bali. The sun sets, setting the stage for Kecak, a dance drama of the Ramayana set to the chant for Hanuman, the simian hero of the Ramayana; “chak-ke chak-ke chak-ke….”
Dozens of performers, chanting almost primordially, form a circle around the stage. It creates a spot, a spotlight without light. There is only the light of the setting sun.
We see Rama, Sita, the abduction of Sita by Ravana.
From nowhere, an extremely athletic Hanuman suddenly appears, jumping, climbing, leaping. He leaps to Lanka, meets Sita, allows himself to be captured, thus preparing the play for the most dramatic scene – the burning of his tail and the burning of Lanka.
By the time we get to the burning of his tail, the sun has set. The stage is on fire against the black background of the ocean. In the distance, a fire lit sky rises. The end of evil is drawing near.
Evening falls.
The sun descends.
The earth rises with peals
of mist to greet the king.
Birds begin to sing.
An elephant swishes its tail dry.
The river clatters on
across countries.
Magic can be orange. Sometimes.
Evening falls early in the north east in winter. A slight fog descends as the sun falls back into the earth. An elephant quickly finishes its bath in the river, looking to make it back into the forest before dark.
On its left is India and on its right, Bhutan. To you and me.
To the elephant, it will just go back to where it came from.
This was a question I received recently. How can we remain motivated in a world where we are surrounded by death and suffering thanks to Covid? This is a question relevant for all times, and not just Covid times.
The first and most important step is gratitude. Stop for a moment and examine your life. There is so much to be grateful for. To be able to eat 3 meals a day, to be able to read and write and earn a living, to have gotten an education, to have access to so much literature online, to have the company of loved ones in your family or circle of friends, to have mentors and other teachers. At any given moment, you will find that there is far more to be grateful for than not. Cultivating that remembrance of gratitude regularly goes a long way towards motivation.
The second step — Let us learn from nature, from the earth. Everyday, the earth suffers in some place or the other. There are storms destroying trees, meteors attacking, volcanoes erupting. Yet, the earth grows its trees, flows its rivers, blooms its flowers, nourishes all living beings that depend on it.
We humans are piling on damage to the earth with our polluting ways, our incessant cutting of trees, hunting down species for sport, destroying habitats and ecosystems. Yet, we get fresh air to breathe, sunshine, cool breeze in the evenings. We still wake up in the morning to beautiful birdsong. Our summers are cooled down with rain. The earth gives us fruit. The trees shade us from the summer heat and lose their leaves in the winter to give us unfiltered sun.
We are the earth. We are the universe. All the 5 elements that make up the universe are in us. We are 70% water. We have fire in our bellies. Our bodies maintain a certain temperature, our inner fluids have certain temperature due to the fire within us. We have air. Our lungs, our. stomach and bowels have air. Our blood has oxygen. Without air, we would not survive. We have space. There is space between cells, between parts of the body. If you break us down to atomic levels, then every atom is filled with space. We are made up of earth. Our bodies are bio-degradable. From dust to dust, as the saying goes.
If the earth and our universe can keep giving; can remain cheerful even as calamities and destruction abound, then so can we.
It is as simple as that.
The daily Speaking Tree in Times of India is filled with opinions, advice, and commentaries on life by spiritual leaders of various denominations. Some of them get quite dense, verbose, and abstract. Occasionally, one gets a simple, gentle article that touches the heart in a way that only Ruskin Bond can.
To have got to this point in life without the solace of religion says something for all the things that have brought me joy and a degree of contentment. Books, of course; I couldn’t have survived without books and stories. And companionship – which is sometimes friendship, sometimes love and sometimes, if we are lucky, both. And a little light laughter, a sense of humour. And, above all, my relationship with the natural world – up here in the hills; in the dusty plains; in a treeless mohalla choked with concrete flats, where I once found a marigold growing out of a crack in a balcony. I removed the plaster from the base of the plant, and filled in a little earth which I watered every morning. The plant grew, and sometimes it produced a little orange flower which I plucked and gave away before it died. This much I can tell you: for all its hardships and complications, life is simple. And a nature that doesn’t sue for happiness often receives it in large measure.
Herein lies the question – what more great spiritual achievements does one need if one lives in harmony and in love with Nature?
http://m.speakingtree.in/spiritual-articles/new-age/it-s-all-right-not-to-climb-every-mountain
A poem to start 2014
Some truly uplifting news for a change.
In 1990, 43% of the world lived in extreme poverty (then defined at $1 subsistence a day). By 2010, extreme poverty came down by a half to 21% (defined now at $1.25 subsistence a day). Can poverty be reduced to 1% by 2030?
For all the issues it has caused such as growing inequality and cultural degradation,the economic liberalization of the 90s in India lifted a vast number of Indians out of poverty. But the real driver of change has been the staggering reduction in poverty in China from 84% in 1980 to 10% by 2010 through economic growth.
IN SEPTEMBER 2000 the heads of 147 governments pledged that they would halve the proportion of people on the Earth living in the direst poverty by 2015, using the poverty rate in 1990 as a baseline.
It was the first of a litany of worthy aims enshrined in the United Nations “millennium development goals” (MDGs).
Many of these aims—such as cutting maternal mortality by three quarters and child mortality by two thirds—have not been met.
But the goal of halving poverty has been. Indeed, it was achieved five years early.
Read more here.
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-billion-people-out-of-poverty-by-2030-2013-5
Abandoned 40 years ago, US techie reunites with family in India
I read an amazing story today in the Times of India about an Assamese NRI who was abandoned as a child in India, and lived to tell an incredible success story.
In the summer of ’69, a four-year-old boy inGuwahati was asked by his mother one day to go into the kitchen and eat an orange she had left for him there. By the time he was done, his mother had bolted out of the house and abandoned him. She never returned. The boy and his eight-year-old sister had barely coped with the loss when their father, who was then posted in the Assam capital with the 4thAssamPolice Battalion, sent them to a relative in Kathmandu. They confused their way and found themselves instead on the streets of Nepal, alone and inching towards certain death.
That little, lost boy, Kisan Upadhaya, is today a top notch IT specialist who provides tech support to four institutes within Duke University, North Carolina — Social Science Research Institute, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS), DIBS Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. But in all these years, as he scripted a phenomenal success story for himself, there was always something that ate him up from inside – the thoughts of his family and the sister who tried hard to feed and protect him. He had to find them.
The Rope Before The Snake 