Saturday, February 27, 2010

Four Years

Happy Birthday MT!

Happy Anniversary Nimboo. Happy Anniversary Sugar. :)

It's been a great 4 years with you three, more than words can say, and at this time I'm just taking time enough to simply say this little bit.

MT will always be our Taj Mahal - the symbol of our friendship, and like that wonder of the world, many tourists and visitors shall come to love and admire it, and may take up residences and form new memories with it, but as long as it stands it will forever hold a close place in my heart.

To Nimboo and Sugar especially, because there couldn't have been a more beautiful friendship shared at the time MT was still a dream (meresapne), to watching this baby grow into what it is: Does Lemonade become richer with the years that pass?

In any case, just have enough time to say this much.
(I promise you a fuller blog soon with much more - MT is worth that much more in the 4 years we've shared.=))


Happy Birthday & Happy Anniversary, MTfriends - I love you! :D

-- Paani

Friday, February 26, 2010

Snowy Sojourn



Helloooooo SNOW!





Yes, it's just gotta hit when it ain't expected. Not that it wasn't expected entirely, I mean of course the weather forecasters and all them told us it was coming, but in a abstract way of looking at it, of course NOTTTTT I mean it's just gotta be spring now, at least around the corner. We had enough (in a manner of speaking) of winter, didn't we?


Oh you poor children of this world who cannot experience this phenomenon. Yes, sure, for many of us world weary snow experiencers, it becomes no more than the regular mundane experience, so much that it unbecomes an experience by itself. It becomes a taken for granted commodity, as regular as air to breath, and water to drink. It goes to some points of being a vexation, a pain in the ... areas we no longer are able to feel due to the numbing effects of the cold.

Still a lover of snow. Even if I find it unbearably cold at times (read: forgotten gloves). I expect, or rather, hope, that I will always be a lover of snow. There is just some element of beauty that just can't go unappreciated, even when it means hours waiting for a bus, or yards trudging through sock-drenching sludge. Even when it ruins a great hairstyle, or flies in ones eyes when attempting to cross traffic, and having to hop skip jump over icy pools of water with something akin to olympic skills while beating a flashing "cross" sign that is ticking down its final seconds and warning not to cross. Beyond reproach, I love it! I love having to wake up that tad bit earlier to clean the car, to shovel the driveway, to having to gear up with those extra layers, which not available, have to be sought and found, because in the end, it is just so worth it. Even if it stings my eyes, makes my nose pink, and clings to my eyelashes, I love it.

I don't like taking anything for granted, and this is one of the things that I know I do, sometimes. It becomes a more favoured entry in the daily grind of life, because it is not so daily. Admittedly, the first snow of any year is by far and wide my favourite of snows. Perhaps it goes into that category of 'firsts', like your first best friend, your first love, your first kiss, and your first heartbreak. Firsts are hard to come by, because once they happen, there is no repeat performance. Firsts are firsts, and firsts after that first become only seconds or mere thirds.

So how does a repeating first fit in this? Not exactly sure, but suppose that adds to its charm. If you appreciate a thing enough, I guess its importance does not diminish entirely when admired for its full worth. Like the sun rising every morning. We take that for granted even if we do not admit it. We say we appreciate it, we can say that we love it, and thank the 'forces that be' that it 'is'. But do we really expect that one day we could wake up to no sun at all? We could consider it as a theory, a possibility, but because we have, without fail, gone through so many 100% showings of the sun every day of our life, our faith in it continuing continues.







Which reminds me, I had this amazingly strange dream a few nights ago. Not anything really new for me, as with almost everything else, I'm an avid dreamer. Not just the daydreaming and hoping type, but the night subconscious type. (And of a foreseeing dreamer type as well!)

Aside from the people in it and circumstances around them, was the emotion. Freedom. Not the full extent of freedom that one seeks. But an appreciative type. The world was sleeping and in the hours before dawn, I left the house through the backyard. In reality, my backyard lies on the edge of a big area of fields, and a park borders one edge of it. In the dream, all the trees in the parkland were blossoming into cherry blossoms, beautiful white and pink flowers, and showering themselves down on me. The moon was at its fullest, and shining like newly polished silver, and the stars were at their brightest. Beauty of this sort never fails to take my breath away, and even in dreams, I hadn't yet seen this.

I can't explain how wondrous it felt, and even on an everyday sort of way, there is something about outdoors or nature that instills in me some sense of peace and serenity. Even at some lower points in life, it could just take the clouds waving away from a crescent moon to get me to stop in my tracks and wish to just lay there and watch the sky for hours. There is just some magic pull about the lights above that seem to lighten emotional and physical loads, like the way the moon pulls at tides, ebbing and flowing.

The second part of the dream that gave me this feeling was that despite it being winter, for there were piles of snow all over the fields, was that it was raining, and it was hot. Not just the rain, but the wind, the air, everything was distinctly warm. I don't know why it made me feel good, and left me with a good feeling when I awoke, but it did. That feeling of lifting one's face to the sky and feeling the rain beat down. Especially with those cherry blossoms.

Granted, I could put on the shower and emulate the feeling. But it's just not the same.


Maybe it is just because I love everything there is to be found in and of nature. The rain. The snow. The sunshine. The clouds. The rainbows. The storms. The everything. The end.

I guess it could be because so far there isn't an end. Nature is so consistently inconsistent, it's forever a variable element that surprises and pleases. Not everyone, but certainly me.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Love's Lament

This morning walking amid the quiet of the outdoors, I heard the familiar sound that has awakened me every morning in the spring and summers, the familiar keening that tugs the very heartstrings. A whole winter of absence, I heard the reawakening call of my favourite mourning dove, calling out to me as if it were spring again. But alas, the call is mystifying as much as deceptive. Waking to another blanket of winter, just when there was hope of the end of it being in sight, it was not spring that was beckoning, but the yearning of it.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically ... love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.


Why is there so much to write about love? Is it really so much the aspect of it or is it the absence of it? Is it the mystery of it, or rather its mystical element, like the unicorn, the dragon, written of, spoken of, yet remains tangibly unseen? Our emotions evoked, are they yet misty wisps of a greater fire, yet unseen? Or mayhap just tangible evidence of an intangible entity.

Why is it so much the yearning that gives us a greater exhiliration, so to speak, than the possession? For, to possess is to belittle the vast into attempting to put something eternal into a quantity we can control and measure. And to do so only grants us a taste that is soon forgotten, and in the seeking of that little bit more, we grant ourselves only dissatisfaction.

Everytime we attempt to hold onto it tighter, it elludes our grasp, because it is not something that can be held. To call it ours, we soon become less satisfied with it, because it makes it smaller than we thought or still think it to be, for to own it so easily is beyond what it was meant to be. We want love, and yet, we do not want it when we have it, because what we have is not what we seek.

Love in itself is meant to be a perfection beyond words. Yet to find it in another person goes against what love could be, for humans are the semblance of imperfection. So easily we question whether the love we seek in that person is truly what we could 'settle' for.

We all seek our 'soulmate', and yet in this term we hold this person in a light above everyone else in the world, because this is the person made for you, the person who brings out the best in you, who completes you without having to try, who is in essence 'perfect'; not just your 'soul mate' but your 'sole mate', for there could be no other person in comparison. But to search for the person who is above everyone else in the world is harder than could be said possible. Because in a world of millions, billions, all moving about, going about their own lives, can you imagine that out of them you will find that perfect person. And out of those millions, billions, all moving about, going about their own lives, can you imagine how incredibly hard it is just to find that ONE. Just one. How could it be so impossibly hard to accept that one person out of so many?


We do not accept just anyone. We hold ourselves in a higher light than we might choose to admit, for if we did not deem ourselves of such worth, how could it be this hard to agree on just one person out of the million we meet. And in this way, does love manifest itself as its selfishness counterpart? Is this love, or is it simply a sense of survival? And if it were not just love, and indeed a sense of survival, then it is done out of love for ourselves, and thus, selfishness.

But not to say that selfishness is wrong. How could it be wrong, when we cherish our survival, a God given right amid his natural laws. So, where does love start, and where does it end- does it even have a beginning or end?

And our yearnings, when does it start, when does it end? Somewhere down the line, we have this ache for something...more. And we aren't exactly sure what it is, but we want it. We want it almost more than anything else we could ask for, and sometimes we don't realize we do, sometimes we don't accept that we do, and sometimes we outright deny we do. But we do. We wish to dip into that pool of enternity that is love, and experience its magic. To stretch out on the tips of our toes, to almost fly, to touch the stars in doing so, and fall among them without doubting that this is what we were waiting for, without realizing we were waiting.

Love waits.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Mocha Ice

Why is it so hard to begin, when you have been waiting for the chance to start?

I've had so many thoughts that I had wanted to put down into words, and now they fail to be found. Other than that, this is the third time I am attempting to write this blog, after actually writing a lengthy amount, and after my mental struggles - twice!- here I am persisting yet again. Insert scream of frustration here.

Strangely, both times I digressed onto two different trains of thoughts, just from the way my mind drifted. Once again, a realizaton is refound. That feeling, when you put your all into a piece of work, and feel proud of yourself, a moment of pleasure - and it is deleted. No matter how much you try again following that, you know you cannot pour your 100% in the same way, for fear of losing it all again. And, so it is with love.

khoya rahaa hun… saanson mein apne…aahat bhi teri… bhool gaya hoon…
kitna jiyaa hun… tanha raha hun…ishq tera…. bhool gaya hoon


Why do we have to learn from broken hearts in order to grow up? Why do we have to fall once in order to learn how better to ride a bike? Why do we have to burn our hands on fire, to know that it can burn? Why do we love with everything we thought we could posess, only to learn that we were mistaken?

uljha raha main… iss zindagi mein… dil ki duhaai… dil ki duhaai….

And once it has been forsaken, how can we trust ourselves again to love the same way, for fear of losing it all, again? And this fear of loving, of losing ourselves again, is it just a selfish sense of survival? Or is it just love that is the selfishness.

tere bina dil mera…laage kahin na…tere bin jaan meri..jaaye kahin nakitne zamaane… baad o rabbaa…yaad tu aaya… yaad tu aaya…

Sometimes I feel that growing up is just another euphemism for becoming more confused. They say you grow wiser with every day that passes. But sometimes it becomes a tangle of confusion, because those same convictions you possessed when young, albeit naive, seem to wither when faced with circumstances that put those same convictions to test.

kithhe… main jaavan…haal sunaavan…ve duss rabba…. rabba ve….

Love once used to be the fire of life, the electricity that makes the world go round, the power that takes you to the stars and beyond, that give you the power to fly, to experience exhiliration, to live. When did love stop being Love?

har bebasi mein… iss zindagi ne…tujhko hi chaha.. tujhko hi maanga…
jin raaston se… guzraa ye dil tha…manzil mili na… pyaar ne paaya…


I never stopped believing in You. I have just realized that you are more than I thought you were. I have realized that you are less that I thought you were. I believe in you, only because I realize that you are what I made you. You are my selfish desire of Paradise. You are the epitome of every desire I have ever breathed. You are not only in every heartbeat of mine, you are every heartbreak as well. You are not just in the joys of companionship, you are in the sorrows of loneliness. You are the very quintessence of selflessness, but you are the highest degree of selfishness. For to love is to give me the greatest power of life. You are everything I dream about, and to possess you is to make my every dream come true. You are not just a person, but an essence that trancends from my belief in you, to the soul of another persons belief in you.

khud ko chhuppa ke… raahon se guzre…dil ko sambhaalein… khud ko sambhaalein…


Love. I believe in you, I know you for what you are, and I know you are infinitely more than what I know. I know that I know nothing of you, and yet you are everything I wished to know. Don't break my heart. Because I believe in you. And yet, I doubt you, because that is what you ask of me. Please, break my heart. Because either way, I have no choice. That is the power that is you.

tere bina dil mera…laage kahin na…tere bin jaan meri..jaaye kahin na…
kitne zamaane… baad o rabbaa…yaad tu aaya… yaad tu aaya…


Love is love for me, and to share it with another person, that is another branch of love. Love can be One Love. Love can be True Love. Love can be many loves in one lifetime. Love can be waiting. Love can be waiting for something, that becomes nothing. Love can be loneliness.

chaar dino ka… pyaar o rabba…lambi judai… lambi judai….

Another day, and another moment of confusion. Give me the power to trust you like no other. To believe I can close my eyes, and fall backwards from the highest plane, and have faith enough to never have a doubt, to fall freely, with a smile in my heart, to know that though I fall, I rise.

rabba…ho rabba…

Image

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Just A Feeling

A friend once told me "Hunger is just a feeling. Drink a glass of water, and it goes away." Of course, that's a bit simplifying things to its barest essentials. Forget about nourishment, and hormones, and all the galores of our body's workings. Forget all that. It's true, hunger dissipates when quenched, even if temporarily, by a glass of water. Hey, that's been my lifesavor and surefeit solution from years immemorial. But in its essence, how simple it seems. If it were only a feeling, can one then substitute others into its place and still remedy it by similar means?

Love is just a feeling. Drink a glass of water and it goes away.

If only it were that easy? Or rather, if it were, then is the feeling all its shouted up to be?

In and out of love - what exactly is this phenomenon. A ruse of fools? A pandoras box of possibilities? A dreamers illusion? An escapist's detour?

One night, you're overcome by all those thoughts that bely you the little sleep you crave to crash over you. Thought upon thought, realization upon resolution, self puzzlements to self promises, and sleep fails to be found. Emotions surge to the fore and take you towards new shores of feeling.

And finally, in the dusky lights pervading towards dawn, sleep slips over lightly like a blanket.

Then you awaken, and everything, all those profound thoughts, all those awe inspiring emotions, all those mountains you climbed over night, all those tidal waves you overcame, has eluded you once again, everything, all of it, is gone with awakening. You've slipped back down to the foots of the mountains, and you've floated back towards the shores you've started from.

What was it, if nothing?


Sometimes you find pain. Or does it find you? When you meet it, does it even matter which reached out to the other? Because once found, it numbs everything else out of oblivion; nothing else even matters except that pain itself.

And last night I cried. After a long time, I cried for someone who wasn't worth my tears.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Reminiscent





I miss you when something really good happens, because you are the one I want to share it with....

I miss you when something is troubling me, because you are the one who understands me so well....

I miss you when I laugh and cry because I know that you are the one that makes my laughter grow and my tears disappear....

I miss you all the time, but I miss you most when I lay awake at night and think of all the wonderful times we spent with each other; for those were some of the best times of my life....