Thank God for prayers!

Prayers are not proxy for one's efforts  and your physical mind can't command these divine messages of surrender to fix at will. Neither is this about rituals and how obsessive you get about how this worked for you and that how it 'should' work for others too..because they don't. They are not missiles that can get guided at your will.

The calm and the storm of one's life when viewed the same is the eye of the needle which bursts the lies, the ignorance,and the pride in you through being aware of your breath and an amazing tool called meditation which sharpens your divine mind.

Rising above the pains of the physical with equanimity is just as much effective as a surrender to a power higher above and in total faith. The difference is how far do you go to support yourself with focused clarity instead of blind dependence on spirituality, and I believe prayers provide you with a state of mind to accept what come your way than what you expect and what you want within a given span of time. Because God cannot replace self responsibility as much as prayers don't do proxy for your actions and their consequences.

Evening walk

I went out for an evening walk like most other days and took the usual route starting from the 'back' gate of my apartment. I cannot help but second look at the older couple's duplex house facing the gate that stares right back at me as pictures of murder for money and jewelry (the wife, aged 70 was killed a month ago by their car driver on the 1st floor of the house, as the husband, aged 75 was working in the shed from ground-floor and could not hear her) is written all over their mourning place.

The 'front' gate leads to a congested main road that crawls with honking vehicles and muddy slush and shops of every lawless disorder leading to a longer and frustratingly slow warm up for such 'evening' walkers. Parks for walkers and joggers and people of every size and shape was something to look forward to and the 'back' gate was a sooner option to get to the park.

I took the route that my husband had explained from memory and had reached there to find there was a lot more to this 'name unknown' park than meets the eye. One can smell the whiteness of jasmine and rose garlands as the temple adjacent to the park rings its bell of evening chants and i see many exercised maamis, retired and physically fit maamas and a mixed bunch of people walk out the park. The gate that one takes to enter and exit are the same and a small wait for a narrowed way inside, opens my eyes to a wide and slightly unkempt park, which i had never discovered in my walking history.

The slabbed trail that runs through the circumference of a fairly large and circular park is dotted with wild plants, trees and benches that have friends, families and lovers in their own worlds. The serious walkers and joggers seem to sweat it out and pace faster to finish as dark and moody clouds hover from top.

It was a trial walk for day 1 for me and after walking for a while, I took a seat next to a red head, whose dye was next best to the hibiscus flowers in the park. She was easy to talk to and we seemed to hit off from the word go as she belonged to Hyderabad too, which happens to be my native and we could not get enough of it, even if we have moved to Chennai for our own reasons and have grown to like the latter in choice-less reconciliation.
It was like moving into this safety of knowing that I am still hyderabadi enough to bring back my good old self in the Telugu we spoke and I knew instinctively that i am understood and not judged no matter how broken the Telugu, or how lost I was then.


    

Don't be someone else's idea of perfect

Do not try to be someone else's idea of perfect...be who you are and know for yourself that you are complete being just you. Do not submit yourself in the name of humility to another's egoistic anger beyond reason and logic beyond sense. Stretching yourself to others idiosyncrasies is not adapting well..but just dumbing down lower..
Do not give others the power to decide for you what is right and how to do things right...do not ask others to understand you better but stay clear on your line of understanding...do not bend or shorten this line for others lack of sensitivity and choose to move ahead if it still hurts.
There is nothing like very happy or very sad - it's only your mind taking longer to let go when you cling to them to make you feel situationally feel good or miserable about yourself.

Embracing yourself just as you are is hard. That would mean being able to be brave enough to overlook the flaws in your life and not hold anyone else responsible, or being hard on yourself for the missed opportunities to make life better. Challenges do not define who you are as much as appreciation. Realizing your strengths through others opinions does not weaken or empower you either. It's your focused intention to want to learn, grow wiser, more calm and giving and let go memories that don't serve your life in the now that makes you unique as a human and as an evolving person. 
The blessed life we have and are living is already complete, and so are our personalities. Remember, you can never be someone else's idea of perfect.  

A wake up from the dead

A daze of conscious, a dew of subconscious
Her mind wakes up from deep slumber
As she is aware of the hollow dark of the night

Dreams have become distant
Her world of fantasies in near sight
The settling dust from dusk on every leaf
Her garden of emptiness a dull brown suspension of disbelief

In life there can be lifelessness
As her every feeling begins to freeze
Icicles they remain, hurting from inside
Static and placid, her core being unmoved

The statue of outer courage begins to melt
As her inner world has broken an old mirror
Her heart sees a new her in the golden light of an awakening sun
A battle for freeing her self has painfully begun.



   

The woman of yesterday

Her eyes are a sunken boat of sorrow
she floats across islands leaving life behind
The island echoes her fears
every corner filling her empty space
All seasons look the same
tear dried and beckoning autumn
Shedding life one day at a time
her only remains this wasteland of sorrow
Unearthing her way home
she looks towards the skies
as sun's happiness blinds her and
moon's mystery reveals her
She is the woman of yesterday
in her today and tomorrow
For, history is kept alive
in her wasteland of sorrow.