#freespirited

~

Beauty, at this scale, behaves like a force; it grips, it insists. It does not ask to be admired.

You arrive thinking you have come to see it, but very quickly you understand that you have been called here to be seen.

It does not comfort; it confronts.

It takes away your sense of scale. Mountains rise not to inspire but to correct. To make you understand, how little of you is required for the world to continue.

And in that confrontation, every ordinary thing becomes unbearably precious, and alongside that walks its shadow: the steady, undeniable knowledge that all of it is temporary.

How ruthless that the longing for life and awareness of death rise in the same breath.

~

There is a certain kind of silence that lives in a studio. The kind of silence that listens. Walk into it, and the air itself feels thicker, perhaps, with the dust of dried charcoal and the scent of coffee drunk at three in the morning from a glass that has not yet been washed.

Here, no medium outranks another. Paint is not superior to ink. Ink is not superior to thread. Leather is not superior to clay. They mingle without hierarchy, gossiping across tables and shelves. A photograph borrows a mood from a poem. A poem steals a rhythm from a song. Ideas migrate freely, crossing borders as though borders never existed at all.

And sometimes, someone else steps into the room, the rarest gift: they see it not just with their eyes, but with their whole self. They stand before what you have made, and something shifts in their face and tilts their head, the way people do when they’re trying to recognise a feeling they didn’t expect to meet. They fall silent. Something passes between the work and the observer. Something that lived inside you now lives, however briefly, inside another human being.

The room expands in that moment.

Yet the deepest truth of the space is this: the studio would still matter if no one ever entered it. Because the real alchemy is not in the viewing, it was always in the doing. In the simple, stubborn act of giving form to something that did not previously exist.

~

ಹಂಬಲಿಸಿದರೆ ಹಂಬಲಿಸಿದಷ್ಟು, ದೂರಸರಿಯೇ ಮುಕ್ತಿ!

ಒಲಿದರೆ ಒಲಿದಷ್ಟು ಬಿಗಿಯುತ್ತದೆ ಬಂಧನದ ಕುತ್ತಿ!

ಆಡುವವನು ಬೇರೆ, ಆಟ ಬೇರೆ ಅಲ್ಲ.

ಹಾಡುವವನು ಬೇರೆ, ಗೀತೆ ಬೇರೆ ಅಲ್ಲ.

ಕರ್ತೃ (doer) ವೇ ಕೃತ್ಯ (action) [. . .]

ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂಧನವೂ ಇಲ್ಲ, ಮುಕ್ತಿಯೂ ಇಲ್ಲ.

The day you start chasing freedom, you declare yourself a prisoner. [. . .]

Bondage and release grow from the same sleep.

Dream a cage, and the mind invents a door.

Freedom is not arrived at.

It is recalled, like a word known before language, like a body that never forgot.

Out here, a thing is only what it is. The cold is simply cold; the fire, simply warmth. There is no subtext, only text. It makes thinking a cleaner act.

I remember looking down from a high-rise once, at the endless circuitry of city lights.

The great project of Civilisation, which was nothing but a refusal. We refused to adapt ourselves to our environment. Instead, we made the environment to suit us. So we built cities, roads, vehicles, and machinery; a magnificent act of will. But then, like a bored king, we forgot when to stop. The more we improve our surroundings to make our lives easier, the more complicated we’ve made it.

And so our children are born into this Rube Goldberg contraption of our own making. Their sentence? Ten to fifteen years of formal instruction, just to learn how to navigate this complex and hazardous habitat.

The great irony is this: We refused to bend to the rhythms of the earth. So we built a new world, a clockwork world, and now we are forced to bend to its rhythms instead.

And so a life is chopped into little, digestible pieces. You adapt from sleeper to commuter to worker to consumer to commuter to sleeper again.

Out here, my only task is to be a creature within the true natural world, whole and un-divided. The simplicity is staggering.

In my longing for an exit. I’ve realised that the exit is not a gate in a wall, because the wall is partly made of me. Its clock ticks in my veins. Its hunger for more is a ghost in my own desires.

When you’ve felt too much to keep feeling, and so you grow still, where the grandeur of the world humbles you into silence.

You no longer react; you receive. This is not numbness, but the distilled afterglow of emotions. The mountain doesn’t stir the heart; it steadies it. What awakens is beyond emotion —something eternal.

~

The skies hang low, heavy with unshed rain, and from the distant grasslands, a faint call of the peacock travels across fields - loud and insistent, their cries echoing.

For me their voices had become part of the background - familiar sometimes even tiresome. But a stranger, from elsewhere, stopped by, as though the sound had split open his heart; his face lit up with the kind of wonder as if trying to catch the shape of the call in the wind, his eyes wide, his breath caught in the simple wild music.

“Ah,” I thought, watching him, if only I could hear the peacock as he did.