“Anything that can blow your candles out!”

“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life- the way of nature, and the way of grace- we have to choose which one you will follow- grace doesn’t try to please itself, it accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked- accepts insults and injuries- nature only wants to please itself- get others to please it too…”.

The light was consistently flickering on the walls. Like my thoughts making huge heaves and convulsions, but as quietly as “drops on disc of snow”. The sun shines through almost all the frames of The Tree Of Life. I watch it and watch it and the rays of beauty absorbed in those scenes, the whispers, the divinity, the sublimity and the quest- all have made me so insatiable- the more I watch the more I want to watch. Again and again. The ripples on my soul turn into whirls of rapture- everything in it is graceful and blissful, enlivening like the sun beams showering its trance all over us. Nature- “It finds reasons to be unhappy- when all the world is shining around it-when love is smiling through all things- it taught us that no one who loves the way of grace comes to a bad end.”  Am I in favour of grace or nature? What resides in me? Grace or nature? What do I want to reside? Grace or nature?  Don’t I constantly want to please myself and get others to please me too? Don’t I find reasons to be unhappy when the world is shining and love is smiling through all things? Precariously in an edge my melancholy soils everything that is fair.  Aren’t I nature?  And why did I often search for “grace” in “nature”?

  “When you become old, with grey hair and shrunken skin, when you become dreadfully alone, will you come to me?....If not now!” I called it a vicious wish to make my friend.  Pernicious was your desire to see me alone all the time. Unless you deceive me I cannot come to you. But there lies the true horror. Deception is unknown to you. Learn it. Try it. Be it. There is only place for “images” in this world. “Whatever comes I will be true to you!” What a dreadful plan! I lie down in the dark and lie about my own lies. Where is the tree I have been looking forward to be blossomed in the spring? I lied to you that it was fallen in the last rain. You have never asked me for the truth. Ever crossed me for the lies. What is left to be rusted long ago cannot regain its grace if the abandonment was for comfort and survival. 

The thoughts get departed as withered flowers. Words like tiny souls inside me spread their wings like cute cherubs with mischievous eyes hiding behind their palms. Words, words, words, rhyming, praising, loving, paining, blooming my withering flowers. My gentle antique heart, yellowed and distant, gazes at the rarity of your sustained fairness and silence. I searched for “anything that can blow your candles out”.  

Unknot me from you

You gracious with your silence in between

Is too distinct from mine.

Yours is grace

Mine nature.

Unknot me from your eyes. Its contentment has made my barrenness “raven black”. You have eclipsed my silver sense. I am tired of convincing myself of my seeming zest and substance, which in actuality decayed and cankered when I am alone. It’s as if I am ingeniously crafted to be frozen and numb when I am bereft of you. My liberty is no longer my liberty. My pain no longer mine. It’s merged with you, words slippery and tentative. My frowns have more curves and twists when there is the slightest fatigue from your part. It’s as if I live only in words. Your heaviness lightens my heart. Purges my soul.  Saturates my weary days. What am I without you? I want to get disappeared in you. “Thaw and resolve” in you. What if I be a word? Or a string of it, poetry from a most “comprehensive organic soul”, or a slice of sublime prose from a monologue, a soliloquy. Or a shocking metaphor.  Or a rhyming couplet. Or a sonnet. My ambiguity then to be dissected, reread, misinterpreted and reinterpreted, for centuries. For me your end is “Truth and beauty’s doom and date”. For me you are the grace that heats my nature enough to melt it.

PS: It took such a long time to resume my scribbles. Words flickered and frosted within me. Some bouncing on the surface with a buoyancy I never felt before. All I could see was the purples blurring my sight. Purple wings, purple petals, purple walls, purple lights. I rubbed my eyes. The purple memories smeared on my lashes, mixed with tears, purple beads trickled down my cheeks. And there was purple birds fluttering on my throat. There is no breath. Only the whoosh of flights and the surmounting letters dismembering my scruples. And what it left is a fist of sting with a feeble gasp, to be rasped at my next resumption:)