When you are into healing (whether the planet, people, yourself or other sentient beings), there comes a time in your life when the concept of having a great time out with friends bears not much of a sense to you anymore. It is not that you don’t like your friends anymore or don’t want to be with them, it is just that the concept of “hanging out” as perceived by your friends bears no kinship with the meaning of having a good time as you envision it.
This is not something that I have always been experiencing as there was a time when I would not mind “hanging out” with friends (both male and female) and being silly and having fun. I still don’t mind having fun but the awkwardness that has crept into this having fun where people find it necessary to plaster their facebook, Instagram, tiktok or other more physical walls with stills or videos of them screaming, gesticulating or performing other wild actions and voice streams just does not appeal to me anymore – if it ever had really appealed to me. I also tire of some whose narcissistic display goes beyond conveying just a photo of them feeling happy but includes several videos of face and increasingly naked body shots of themselves with different kinds of music. Result is unfollow, unfollow, unfollow…
Beyond that slight growing distaste of the splashing of these sometimes crude moments (I have seen some displaying the main character throw up repeatedly to the chorus of her friends laughing) for others to see as if they would not be satisfactory in and of themselves but would only take on meaning if others were to look at them and enjoy them, endorsing this enjoyment by a like applied to this display, I realised that I was growing tired of this whole type of exterior itself. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind people sharing nice moments when they are happy or landscapes of where they have been and I too take photos that I post on Instagram or facebook but they don’t go beyond conveying this positive message. The almost fake screaming and going wild to compete with other streams where people seem wild has just become too much of drama to bear, especially when I compared it to the seemingly endless suffering of other human beings in distress whether because of war, hunger, both or other reasons.
I started slowly realising that I not only don’t enjoy these crude or sad messages anymore but I simply feel the need to withdraw from these manifestations of an overwhelming desire to appear to have fun – for the sake of the camera – and forget the fun itself. Unfollow.. unfollow… The resulting stream on facebook and Instagram is mainly of my extended family, some good friends and some meaningful videos put together by organisations that want to convey a message.
Nowadays, I mostly enjoy actual artsy moments with people singing, dancing or drawing/painting and most of all, I enjoy watching children having fun on and off camera. The view of nature (whether landscapes, birds or animals) also appeals to me far more than the forced enjoyment of human beings. I find that in my life as well, I interact more and more with children and nature and my only interactions with older human beings are for my daily work, the times when I go to the gym and of course when I walk outside or heal people.
My healing of people would have become all-encompassing if I did not have a daily job. I feel compelled to do it and am so much happier when I can dedicate my time to healing others, myself and Mother Earth. It is sometimes so strong that when I merely think of healing somebody else and have not yet started the healing, that person would send me a message saying they feel so much better. I wonder whether it is the placebo effect or the fact that with the strong intention being outside of time, the effect was already manifesting itself before I had begun (a quantum level of healing).
Plunging into this healing world and my inner thoughts, meditation and awareness has made me distance myself more and more from the outer world. It is as if that world were disappearing into a great void, a black hole yet at the same time it burns as bright as an enormous flame. I sometimes wonder whether I would open my eyes and see that there was nothing around anymore, just emptiness and a new world rebuilding, much better than it was. Then I open my eyes and see more killing, more pain, more fear and again gear myself towards healing, inward, outward, all-encompassing. I heal and I keep my faith in human beings because before some wound or a cumulative array of wounds forced them into a warped sense of adulthood that lost the inner child, they were children too.
The drum rolls preceded the fight sound of thunder within the night fireworks infusing the dark light ignition of dome that caves in
Two allies join in Middle Earth ravaging lands unto the firth seeking to establish new hearth perhaps but violence is heard
Kill for kill is set on repeat Some wage wars in pregnant deceit neither faction accepts defeat eye for eye and we all are blind
Alliances lead to new norms society acquires other forms new stances of people in swarms freedom pierces through the black veils
Reading of the poem:
Written in the context of Ronovan Writes Ovi poetry challenge using the word “defeat” as inspiration. For information on the rules and to read more poems please visit this link
Azam Ali & Loga Ramin Torkian- BARAYE ft. Hamed Nikpay, Mamak Khadem, Arash Avin, Mahsa Ghassemi
Glory of new-found mystery
The rhythm of the feet now changed
Embracing magic once estranged
Bodies melted in ecstasy;
Like long lost pagan symphony
The moon the clouds in night did chase
Fervent dancers in trembling daze
They locked their arms in restless link
Skies defined them in magic ink
Of lucid embrace transient phase
Reading of the poem:
Lonely – Cosmic Balance
Based on challenge by Ronovan Writes using the word “Chase” in line C of the decima.
In brief, for a Décima, there are 10 lines of poetry that rhyme and there must be 8 syllables per line.
There is a Set Rhyming Pattern we must stick to: ABBAACCDDC or ABBA/ACCDDC.
For more information or to view other contributions, please follow the link hereRonovan Writes Décima Poetry Challenge Prompt No. 53: (CHASE) in the C rhyme line. | ronovanwrites
She had seen it in a dream as vividly as she was now seeing the sun shining outside. It was time for the Mother to come fully into this Earth and accomplish her work from the inside. It was time for her to purge the Earth so that balance may be restored on a higher plane than what could be achieved in the present state of affairs. Mother had always been a patron of the innocent and the weak and although she presented a terrifying face to her adversaries, she reverted back to her more gentle nature when the battle was over and she was faced only with the innocent. She was a force of destruction as far as evil was concerned but maintained her motherly attributes as far as the innocent were concerned and so far too many innocent had been suffering.
The Mother needed a vessel to carry her consciousness and she had carefully prepared for this for several years now. The vessel needed to have a segmented mind where part of the consciousness of the Mother could be downloaded while the rest of the mind could house the consciousness of the vessel itself. She was willing to be that vessel and had meditated using the kundalini technique in order to split her own mind. Although this had been painful and not without its consequences, she reflected that it would all be worth it once the Mother was there. The Mother’s consciousness, even though in part, could only be stored in nine fragmented parts of the vessel’s mind with the vessel’s own mind dwelling in the tenth part, which is why it had taken her years to reach that level of fragmentation and dissociation without totally losing her sanity.
The tools used for the ceremony to invoke the Mother to complete the downloading of her consciousness into her were not unlike those used to invoke the Marid except that there was no need for a protective circle and the candles used were red and black. The red represented the blood or primordial life form and the black represented the void from which all consciousness derived. There was already a fragment of the Mother inside a part of her consciousness and this guided her in disposing the red and black candles around the circles of aging blood also known as menstrual blood and those of fresh blood from her pricked finger. She sat naked amid the circles with the trident marked in blood on her forehead and the same marked in blood around the area of her navel and started the chanting. Soon the Mother would appear and all the evil on the Earth would slowly start to disintegrate. It might take its time and would probably take its toll on her but at the end it would all be worth it.
Most powerful Shri Kali Sahasranama Stotram | 1008 names of Kali Maa | श्री काली सहस्त्रनाम स्तोत्रम
The sun was gone and the wind howled through the trees as she walked in the woods. She started wondering whether she should go back home or continue with her walk. She was concerned that it might start raining and she was not well prepared for it as she had gone out in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. Suddenly it started to rain just as if the weather wanted to enact her fears and she could feel the large drops of rain pelt on her skull and bare arms. In no time the rain had become a downpour and the already mossy path became muddy and slippery.
She looked hesitantly back at the path where she had come from. The shrubs seemed to have closed in on it and all she could see was green behind her. The slope she had come up was quite steep and it seemed a better option to just walk on until she reached the end of the walk rather than taking the chance of slipping down the slope. She drudged on, braving the falling rain and the howling wind which tugged at wisps of her hair and the bottom of her shorts sending them here and there. With the sun gone it was quite cold now and she started feeling her hands numbing by her sides as she continued to walk.
For some reason, the icy rain and the gloomy wind got to her nerves and she started wondering what would happen if she fell on the path as nobody else seemed to have ventured out on it. She started taking great care in her steps so as not to fall. The last thing she needed right now was a broken leg or worse still a broken hip. She wondered again if she should just slide down on her posterior the slope back to where she had started from. It would not be very elegant but even if there were someone to see her at this point, she felt like she could not care less. Yet at the same time something drove her to carry on her path.
She gritted her teeth and decided to brave her way to the top of the hill. The trees swayed under the effect of the wind and some of their branches whipped at her. Instead of dissuading her this somehow increased her resolve to reach the top and head bent she carried her resisting limbs forward. The rain poured down the back of her neck and her bra clung to her making her T-shirt twist uncomfortably around, but she just untangled it and carried on. She thought about how anyone who should cross her path would see her: a crazed middle-aged woman with her twisted T-shirt and skimpy shorts battling the weather and it made her laugh.
She lowered her head and toiled on again. Soon she could see the flattening of the path beyond and knew she was reaching the top of the hill. She found herself shortly in a clearing on the top and as she reached there, the rain stopped and slowly but surely the sun made a timid appearance. She raised her hands like a warrior above her head and she did feel rather like that, a totally victorious warrior. She filled her lungs with air and howled at the wind that had not stopped yet. The wind howled back at her as she laughed, filling her lungs again with the fresh, crisp air and offering her body to the sun that slowly dried it.
It used to be one of her favourite moments in childhood. They would sneak out of the house and run across the fields to the point where the mango groves began. They would hide at the extremity of the fields waiting to see if the guardian was there and if he wasn’t they would step into the grove and steal some ripe mangoes. It was usually a boy they called Thengai who used to climb the trees as he was used to climbing coconut trees and had a good foothold. His name Thengai which meant coconut came from not only because he climbed coconut trees but also because his hair combed down in a shell shape manner made the top of his head resemble a broken coconut shell.
Thengai would climb like a daredevil any tree in the mangrove and if the guardian was spotted he would be able to clamber down in no time often surpassing them as he ran towards the fields. Little did they know that the guardian always made a show of chasing them but slowed down if he got too close because he never actually meant to catch them. There would be no use indeed of catching them as the mangrove belonged to their family although they did not know it. In fact, almost all the lands around the houses up to the neighbouring city belonged to her family. Unaware of this, the children including her used to run like their life depended upon it, holding on tightly to the mangoes packed in their shirts or dresses, when the guardian chased them.
Later on, they would stop in the fields and put the mangoes together. They would then divide the ripest mangoes amongst them for eating on the spot and leave the greener ones for later. It was usually she who got the greener ones as her grandmother was very skilled at making mango chutney with the green mangoes. Once the bottles of chutney were ready, her grandmother would give her a basket of these to distribute around the neighbourhood. The neighbours respected and loved her grandmother not only because of this type of small kindness but also because she gave the lands to plough to the neighbours and only asked for a small share of the crops as compensation. People considered the grandmother as the main village benefactor.
She used to love going to the village and spending a part of the summer there during the summer break when her father did not yet have his holidays. It was all wonderful until that fated summer when everything had changed. She had not witnessed it herself but she often had nightmares about it and would wake up in the night trembling. For a long time after the incident, nobody had gone to steal mangoes from the mangrove. The villagers would talk about it in hushed tones when they thought the children were not around. Thengai had been riding the tractor of his father next to his older brother when he had slipped, and the tractor had mauled him before his brother could stop the giant wheels.
Some children had started going back to steal mangoes the next summer and one of the children had volunteered to take Thengai’s place as the picker. When they passed by her grandmother’s house she kept the door tightly shut and did not respond to their stage whispers calling her out. She could not bring herself to accompany them like she could not bring herself to eat ripe mangoes anymore. It was as if the mangoes’ ripe insides were like Thengai’s and for a long time the idea of eating them seemed repulsing. She also could not bring herself to distribute the mango chutney among the neighbours anymore and had grown sullener by the day. At the end of that following summer, her father decided to make her spend less time at her grandmother’s house.
Long after she had grown older and found out that the mangrove was theirs, she still would not accompany the children to the mangrove during the short breaks she was at her grandmother’s. She had started eating her grandmother’s chutney again, but nobody had offered her anymore ripe mangoes given her clear revulsion to these. One day, as she was walking through the fields, she found herself in front of the mangrove. The guardian was there and he seemed now a wizened old man. He looked at her and made as if he were going to chase her, but she laughed so he laughed too. He went towards a mango tree and reaching out pulled a ripe mango off the tree which he then offered her, slicing it in the middle. His face was wise and kind and she wondered how they could have ever felt afraid of him. She took the mango almost in a second state and bit into it. The taste of the ripe mango was heavenly as it mingled with her salty tears. She smiled up at the old guardian.
You must be logged in to post a comment.