Wilderness

Wilderness. How wild the word sounds. The dauntless, daring course of a tramp. A wild, wild tramp. Ah, how blissful, how free. I have always associated wilderness with freedom.

Freedom that is the true essence of the spirit. Freedom from restlessness. Freedom from the fret and fever of life. Freedom from droning routines, damasked friends,  boring relationships and typecasted jobs. Freedom from people with chartered thinking, definitive opinions and black-or-white-no-gray perceptions. Freedom from cushioned living (a life that topples the moment the cushion is punctured). Freedom from growing disgust, nauseating anger, dagger-like pain and destabilizing stress.  Freedom from the intellect that confines sanity to a series of accepted-agreed behavior and insanity to everything strange/unheard of/not-normal. Freedom from concepts, theories and ideas. Freedom from conformity. Freedom from ‘freedom’ that is defined, delineated and ‘achieved’. Freedom that the spirit has longed for centuries. Freedom that is akin to pristine, untamed wilderness.

Is not a wilderness waiting to be happen in every artist? A wilderness not of nature, but of the spirit. Not willing to be tamed,  to submit or conform. But, ready to rise, conquer and rule. Never ordinary, but always out of it. Never ready to follow, but always upstart to lead.

Yet, yet, is not conformity inseparable from non-conformity? For when you say, you do not conform, do you not actually conform to your ‘do not conform’ dictum? Mystery.

Solitude

How sweet is solitude. Serene. Immaculate. Like wild snow on a wilder rock. The noiseless noise among leaves. The silence inbetween bird calls. The trickling streamlet that runs. Flooding the neighborhood ants’ and little insects’ plains.  They run amock. In fear, for life. A delicate-finicky hand-wash in the kitchen. A life-killing tsunami for them.

And then, the birds. Chirping all morning. Restless. Brimming with life. Then, lulling to a drone in the afternoon. Only to make amends for lost time in twilight.

The sky. The seer of all this. Pink. Red. Yellow. Brazen. Bland. Yellow. Russet. Pink. Like the ebb-flow, ebb-flow of passion in a relationship. The copper sky whistling at everything. The copper blushing into twilight with many a clamor.

Blue-bleak embers

“… and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves and gash gold-vermilion.”
Hopkins’ The Windhover

I love embers. They are one of the wildest mysteries in the world.

The flames they hide behind them. The fiery red-orange that comes out of the bleak blue ember. That fire lying within. Passionate. Waiting-to-show its face. That rage. Many embers do lie dormant in us. Waiting to be stoked. Waiting for air. A hearing.