#writewritewrite

TW: gore-ish? (In writing I mean)

~

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.

~

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.

~

What is more generous than a window?

It holds the sunset like a sacred painting, then gives it back to the sky.

It frames the weather—a silent, moving portrait— and asks no opinion on the art.

It lends its shoulder to the rain for weeping, and to the sunlight for its golden nap.

It listens to the wind rehearse its old stories, lets shadows pass without question, and cradles the night until dawn knocks gently.

A window never keeps what it has seen.