By Vijay Phanshikar :
The mirror 
Of the lake ...
Not a ripple ! 
-  Self 
 

 

THE picturesque lake ! Surrounded by silent stillness, it glimmers in the mid-day glow -- like a mirror. No breeze. Not a ripple. Nothing moves. One’s heart beats -- whose beats one can hear in that silence. Each beat has a story to tell -- of grief and gladness, of life’s ups and downs, of bright morns and blightful dark nights, of moving forward and getting dragged backward. Those beats go on -- signs of life, also signs of the tumult within. Yet, outwardly, everything is still, like the mirror of the lake -- still on the surface, without a ripple. Within, a whole world lives on -- pulsating, breathing, moving so silently as not to send a ripple up on the surface.

 

One looks intensely for an occasional splash -- of a fish curving up in the air, with its scaled skin shimmering in sunlight. That does not happen -- for long, too, too long. The stillness is complete. The silence is complete. Nothing moves -- at least outwardly. Is this Nature’s stoicness ! -- one wonders. For, in the vast landscape complete with the lake and the hills, nothing is moving. No breeze. No ripple. Yet, just as one’s heart beats, one knows that Nature, too, breathes and beats -- without punctuating stillness, without pricking silence.

 

Deep within, one gets a sense of completeness -- of the ability to keep the beating within confined to the inner yard of being. In that sanctum of being, there is no need to demonstrate, validate anything -- the inner pulsations, the heart’s beats. This is not complex. This is the simplest expression of living within -- contented, contained. There is no home. There is no journey. There is no destination -- even though life beats on within itself -- in total stillness, in complete silence.