Tree of Life

1 January 2021

The New Year began quietly at 0001 while I was busy writing in my journal. This has been my habit for the last many years when I have found happiness in journalling about the passing year and the coming one. Unlike childhood, when the New Year began with prayers in the church with the Midnight Mass, the years since my marriage in 2009 have been blessed with midnight musings and nothing else. I have jumped like the proverbial monkey from faith to spirituality to religion to nonbelieving all the time and its hardly news that I don't go to church any longer. 

Writing in a journal often means that you are offering yourself, baring yourself completely without any kind of censure. In some of the diary writing years, I have thought of publishing mine but it never happened that way because I was too busy with many things and my journal writing endeavours mostly fizzled out before the end of January. 

This year I want to write a journal that is worth publishing and want to make consistent positive improvement in the six areas of my life namely physical, spiritual, social, emotional, financial and educational. 

true partner

Merry Christmas

Dedication

You are my other that helped me to grow, to learn more about life and even about my own self. You might be a person, an event or a book that has left an imprint on my soul.

You are my first love, this entanglement with melodies, the way my soul lifts up in the Hosannah or feels happy with the Magnificat or bursts out in a raga with the rains.

You are my ever existing dream of weaving together dreams, words and melodies into a book of poetry worthy enough to be engraved in a beautiful script and to be set before your appreciative eyes.

You could also be my love, the one that never found its way to express itself yet reaches out to you in words, gestures and memories wherever you are.

You are a lesson, a mistake, may be a chapter that I cannot forget, a memory that I cannot erase despite of all the bitter strife of these years.

You have taught me how to be, how to love yet not to lose myself and the lessons are not bad as you can see for yourself.

The Alchemist

Ecological footprint

One fine day

Were there expectations in your eager mind

As how exactly it is going to be like in real,
With you and me meeting each other to find
What the years have not taken away or heal.

Didn't your heart beat as loud as mine today
When walking down the street you saw me.
Not like in the days of beautiful togetherness
But like a pleasant surprise hard to contain.

For me, I saw you only for a few moments
But enough to keep counting even the time,
My face that cannot hide what it feels like
Or my words that might reveal what I want.

One fine day, this might become so unreal
This longing to have you beside me a lifetime.

Siesta

You and I share not just a life in common; 

Love of music, readable books and people, 

Fighting for rights of people in dire need

Of living a life together against all odds.

Dreams of sunrises, siestas and twilight, 

Our limbs entangled in sweet embraces

Your eyes that drink me up like coffee

Shared dreams of a life of togetherness. 

At times fantasies of idyllic happiness, 

That turn erotic at the slightest whim, 

Lips against lips, limbs against limbs

A longing to join heart, body and soul. 

May be a desire to lose myself fully in you

And get back to work after a sip of coffee.

@daydreaming

angel numbers

The Story of My Life

I have never seen the story of my life summarised in more poignant words than the ones on this coffee-mug at home:

 

  

Mary had a little lamb, a little toast, a little jam, a little pizza and some cake,
some French fries, and a chocolate shake, a little burger on a bun.
And that's why Mary weighs a ton. :-)

Bliss

The days of darkness are over finally.
I had waited for the dawn to come for long;
One little wrong word and too much veracity
Had killed this free spirit too early.

Thirst for knowledge and love of life lost,
The soul had shrunk as if pickled in brine
And lost its freedom, its love for life,
Become like an empty vessel thrown in mud.

Now you have brought so many joys and smiles,
You have changed the face of this terrain,
With your dash of luck you sail forward
Taking us both in your pleasant stride.

If I had not known this darkness, my dear,
I'd have never known the value of your smile.

Nostalgia

A flower of basil everyday

Plucked every morning and gifted, 

A gentle surreptitious stroke, 

On the palm of hand, 

A stolen kiss, 

Beneath the staircase, 

A glance across a crowded room, 

Caught and returned. 

A quickly scribbled message, 

And a faded rose, 

Inside a gifted book of poetry, 

Neatly kept, unread, 

Like promises unfulfilled, 

Long forgotten and buried, 

Those days of love, 

That are dead and gone.

The Wanderer

Your memory comes to me at the strangest of moments. I pause in the midst of things and smile as your thought passes my mind. Though it happened a summer long ago and I know that I am a fool to think that I lost you when I never had you in the first place. I cannot croon love-songs liked I used to nor can I waste my life wandering around searching for you in every crowd. But to get back my words, I know that I have to cure my funny little heart that has loved you with all its mighty silences of years.

turning one's back

Summer Tedium

In the midst of this summer tedium, one longs for the rain;
In the orchards, water drizzles are made to battle the heat,
The ripeness of guava fruit permeate the evening air
While heaps of watermelons call your sole attention.

The songs that you play on your guitar in summer time,
The melodies that captivate the audience under a spell,
While you try to figure me out, to fix me somewhere
Within the matrices of your growing understanding.

One sole glance from your sprightly eyes full of laughter
One smile that could restore the energy lost this season
The longing that fills your heart in the summer nights
To be with the one you love and to be his companion.

Part illusion, part dream but this growing understanding
Of an affection brings back life in this summer tedium.

stupidity

A story

diary of a female quixote

Ineffable

Eternal and strong, water-like, your love comes to me,
With the aid of silences and a few gestures of affection.
Where else can you come, when denied a real meeting,
You choose to drape yourself with words in dreams.

Ideal and true, my shy one, you shine bright in words,
When all the others have gathered here around me,
To know the truth with its many facets and versions,
Your memory lights up my soul with more words.

Witty and understanding, you past antics bring laughter
And so many words piled up on pages and pages,
So many lost, so many forgotten, so many yet to be,
All that found shape around an unforgettable you.

The one behind the words is ineffable, magical, eternal,
So apart from all the ones who think they spur words.